My Memories Of My Brother

I asked my mom “what’s wrong,” she replied with a sorrowful “your Aunt Lisa is in trouble, we must leave now.” The worst part of all of this was my Aunt Lisa’s son was with us, Matthew. He did not know what to think or believe. No one knew the world would slowly start shattering beneath all of us that morning. We drove to her house, we saw ambulances and police cars driving by, that did not help our nerves at all. We finally arrived at her apartment, we never thought all of those emergency vehicles would be going there. My brother and I stay in the car since I was only eight and he was only eleven. My mom and cousin run into the apartment hoping to only find my Aunt had fallen and is unconscious, or she is passed out drunk, just let it be something that is not permanent. What they come to find is that my Aunt is laying on the floor, unconscious, but cold as ice. It was not from someone killing her, or us getting there too late. She had died twenty-four minutes before that phone

You could tell my brother was screaming as much as he could with his small little lungs. I quickly ran over to our tiny bathroom wondering what was going on. There you could see my little brother using all his force to hold up my mom who had fainted on our cement floor. Even with the two of us repeatedly yelling at her to wake up, her eyes stayed closed. I began to really worry. I ran over to her bedroom and scurried through my blanket looking for my phone. As my sister dialed 9-1-1, I ran back into the bathroom where my brother was sobbing. My sister had already called my aunts and cousins over. They were all trying to help wake her up. They called out her name multiple times. They also hovered rubbing alcohol under her nose, in hopes of her waking up. I let my brother know that everything was going to be fine and that the ambulance would be here in no time to help my mom. I was shaking as I sat next to my brother helping him hold up my mom. My older cousin took our spots and helped sit my mom up.

I went to my living room to ask my mom a question, to see she wasn’t there. I asked my brother “where’s mom?” and he replied with “shes at the hospital, grandpa got burnt.” I would never have expected “grandpa got burnt” to be as severe as it was. I remember my mom coming home around two in the morning. I got up and out of bed to ask some questions. She said “I don’t wanna talk about it right now. Pack some stuff up, we’re going to Waterloo tomorrow.” So I listened and packed up a bag.

An ambulance came and carried out my mom. I didn’t know what was going on, so many questions running through my mind, what was wrong with her, was she going to be ok. I was scared, more scared then I had ever been. My sister Sheridan who was 8 asked me “what’s happening?” through tears. On that day a little piece of me began to change because if I let her see my fear that would not help anyone, and so even though I didn’t know what was happening I responded “everything is going to be ok” even though I did not trust my own words.

When I was 7 years old I attended a funeral for my great grandfather. He was 105, and had lived a full life. I wasn’t very close to him but seeing him in the casket was so odd and he looked like an alien. I was a curious child so I stood in front of the casket just observing the body and glancing around at the sadness that this room was filled with. My uncle joined me and asked me if I had said spoken to my great grandfather. I just looked up at him and said “No, he is dead”, since I was pretty certain dead people didn’t talk anymore. Well, he proceeded to tell me that if I asked him a question, my great grandfather would indeed respond. I didn’t ask since I was already scared at this point. My uncle did for me, he asked, “Grandpa, if you

After several weeks of my Grandmother passing, I came to realize she wasn’t coming back. The feeling of shock had left and now I felt intense amount of emotional suffering. The continuous feeling of pain and unanswered questions lingered about in my mind. I began to wonder how it could have happened and what people could have done differently. At this time, my whole family was grieving over the loss as well.

My dad was what you’d call a “big, tough guy”. He never cried, and very seldom did he show much emotion at all. He took a minute to compose himself and got straight to the point. He told us that my cousin Mackenzie, my best friend ever since I was a baby, had been killed. She was at a different campground in Spooner, Wisconsin, when the storm broke off the top of a tree. Mackenzie was playing on a playground, just a little girl on the swings on what started out as just a normal Friday, when she heard the crack of that tree and started running. It fell on top of her and killed her on impact. The doctors said the hit cracked her skull and she died

Five days had passed this time since anyone had heard from my mother. I remember praying to God to protect her from harm and for me to find her. The next day she showed up, but not in the way we had hoped. One morning as I was getting ready for school my sophomore year in high school, my phone rang to the voice of my stepfather. My stepfather had told me he heard a call come over the dispatch scanner at his work and my mother’s name was mentioned. The sheriff had informed my stepfather that my mother had been involved in an accident. My stepfather asked me to go to the emergency room and see what condition my mother was in because he lived a half hour away from the hospital. When I arrived at the hospital I found my mother cut out of her clothes, covered in her own urine, massive amounts of blood all over her body, and lying lifeless on life support on the table. At this point, no one knew whether my mother would be okay. My mother had bleeding on the brain as well as a tear in her shoulder, a shattered face, and a chest tube draining fluid from her lung which had collapsed. All I could do was pray! My mother’s life was in God’s hands now. Three days later she woke

Have you ever walked down that white tile floor that reeked of bleach, with a bouquet of roses and daisies, all tied into one? Well, I have. My brother was in a small hospital room for a little over a week, trying to recover from a car accident with a minor concussion. I remember standing close by my dad as we went into the huge elevator filled with people. I slowly made my way to the far right corner and waited till our stop. As the elevator ringed, we snuck out of the crowd of people and turned the corner. I knocked on the door. The door slowly squeaked opened with a nurse on the other end. I look over to the bed; my brother had needles and wires stuck into him like a pincushion. But yet, he still managed to get some sleep. I set the box of chocolates on the table beside him, and then set my own self onto the small, unpleasing couch. Trying to get comfortable, I

It happened when I was young. I was outside at my friend’s house sledding. We were taking a break when I got that phone call from my mom; she was crying. My sister was on her way to the emergency room. I started sprinting through the neighborhood towards my house. My dad was waiting with my brother in the car. My mom went with my sister in the ambulance. I was so scared that I was going to lose my sister. We got to the hospital and we were in the waiting room. It felt like days before we heard about her condition. My sister had pneumonia and mixed with her asthma she was having a hard time breathing. She had a severe attack and couldn’t breathe. If the crew from the ambulance didn’t show up the doctor said she wouldn’t have made it. I know

Then came my brother’s illness. Within the span of less than a week, I was hurled into the real world: a world of uncertainty, adults, and death. Death had finally reached my front door. For four months, he waited there, but would not come in. This time, he was expected. After about three months, and for the first time in my life, I truly feared Death and its power. Unlike with the first three boys, death was more expected. My brother was not eating, not walking, and was showing no signs of improvement. Looking back on it now, I realize that to the adults, it probably seemed like only a matter of time. With my childlike faith, however, this did not seem like a possibility, or at least I told myself that. My brother could not die, he was not like those other boys. Yet he was, to Death’s cold, indiscriminate eye, my brother was exactly the same. However, as I have learned, Death does not care. Death did not care that my brother had been bedridden in a hospital for the past few months or that another boy was just trying to enjoy a pool-party, because he eventually decided to leave my brother alone. He left our home’s doorway with only the smudge of his fingerprints on the

The most traumatic event in my life was when my father passed away in 2005, when I was only seven. At first, I hadn’t understood his death. I knew what death was, and that it was permanent, but I hadn’t accepted the fact that he was gone until long after his death. My mother was a mess, and I was a confused second grader who could do nothing to help her. We began to go to counselors and psychologists, who all made me feel very uncomfortable. All they wanted was to talk about what had happened to my dad, when it was the last thing I wanted to say anything about. I laid in bed crying for a few weeks, knowing it was because of his death, but I felt emptiness rather than sadness or anger. My mother began to take medication for depression, and still continues to do so. At only seven, I believed her sadness was my fault. To be honest, I still feel hurt when I see her taking the depression medication. I know that I had nothing to do with his death, but it granted me with an unwelcoming sense of guilt. I had just been with him the night before his death, and now he had been cremated into a bag of ashes. All of my teachers were very precautious about mentioning him, and I didn’t know how to process all the new attention I had received at school. I was definitely depressed, but I found a way out of my slump. I distracted myself from his death and did all of my school work from my absences as quickly as I could, and

My mom kept saying "I have got to go see Fran. I need to see with my brother" My mom ran down stairs to get ready to go, I followed her and just stood there, still paralyzed. She hugged me and said that she loved me. I had never seen my mom so panicked. She went into the bathroom to take a shower and I could still hear her sobbing through the door. I was all by myself, now. I was standing in the middle of the family room as the words "He is dead" pierced my heart like daggers of ice. I was screaming OH, GOD NO, and started to cry uncontrollably. The realization that I would never see my uncle again struck me. After I got myself under control I went and packed my things to leave with my mother. As soon as we were done we were on the next flight to New Jersey.

Losing my mother was very traumatising. She was the only parent I knew since the age of three and the one person I knew I could depend on one hundred percent. I was in school when one of my cousin came to inform me that I was to return home immediately. In my gut I knew something serious must have happened to my mother. I do not remember how I got home. When I saw several people crying at my home and nobody was really make eye contact with me, I just started to cry too and that is when someone told me how sorry they were for my loss. I was in shock for more than three days. I did not sleep nor eat and I did not shade single tears after the initial outburst. Basically I just wanted to crawl in a corner and never wake up from the nightmare. However, I had to become an adult and I

It was a bone chilling January night; my mom received a call at about 11:15 PM, a call that changed my life forever. My Aunt June was on the other line. She was crying so hard my mother could barely understand her. Through the sobbing my mom finally understood that Brian, my cousin, had been in a horrible accident and she didn’t know how bad it was. My mother jumped out of the bed after she hung up the phone. She screamed up the stairs at my sister and me; it was a nerve shrilling scream. I could hear fear in her voice. My mom was always yelling at us growing up if we forgot to do something. She would even get us out of bed to finish something that wasn’t done completely. This particular