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Today I woke to NPR as they memorialized the occasion of the Oklahoma City bombing, and tomorrow will be the anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre. Horrible tragedies, impossible for a sane and ordinary person to fully grasp the why of either. Both grown out of intolerance.

These tragedies rekindle my own feelings of grief and loss as I remember a much closer personal tragedy which also occurred around this same time in April of 1997. 

We were out of town on business in St. Paul, Minnesota. The news came in email from friends in Honolulu. It read, “I’m afraid we've lost him...” Lost him? What the heck were they talking about?

It took one second for me, as I read the next sentence, to realize that they meant they'd lost him permanently!

“We tried calling and calling and when he didn't answer for three days....”   

I uttered a deep, guttural, painful sound which caused my spouse to leap up instantly. “What is it? What's wrong,” he asked, “what do you mean, they lost him?” He looked puzzled.

“He's...he's d..dead!” The words stumbled out of my mouth. 

It couldn't be so. We just spoken to him a couple of days before. He had just been out on a boat looking at the comet Hale-Bopp, and had called to tell me about it.

But it was so. 

Found dead at 48, in his apartment on April 9, 1997. Dead for probably two or three days. Wrapped cocoon like in blankets. What happened? No one knew. It would be left up to the coroner to resolve.

I couldn't leave right away, and the next three days were filled with horrible grief, phone calls between family and friends, sleeplessness, logistics of making arrangments to get from Chicago to Honolulu; and more horrible grief and confusion. 

As the reality of yet another painful death asserted itself, (my mother had also died suddenly a couple of years prior), I tried everything to keep from thinking of it. For some unknown reason I found myself singing the inane "Beverly Hillbillies" theme song over and over in my head to blot out all semblance of reality and drown out my thoughts. Absurdity helped me to avoid reality. 

~~~~~

In our family, with it’s sometimes strained relationships, my brother and I had been close.

When you are an Army brat, few people are constant in your life and other than your siblings, no one really knows and understand the ins and outs of your family dynamics. He was the youngest and my mother's favorite, and although things may have looked a little different to him than to me, the basic details of our upbringing were the same. My only other brother, though living, is really lost to me for various reasons, so it was an especially horrible blow to loose the only person in the family with whom I could share things in the ways I had with him.

Though he officially worked for the Navy, his real love was pottery. He spent just about every free moment of his life taking pottery classes and workshops and learning about the art of the craft. I have been a jewelry designer/artist for years, and we both shared often about what was in our heads, what we were doing re: our respective crafts, and also about our family and the impact it had on us. And he’d shared some deeply personal issues with me which he did not share with others.

Allen had lived in Honolulu for more than 20 years. He had some very good friends who were like family to him, but he did live alone and there was lot to deal with and to sort out. I stayed in Honolulu with his good friends, and with their help my Dad and I sorted through everything and tied up his estate, a situation also filled with it's own absurdities. It was also very disconcerting to be in “paradise” and have to deal only with the leavings of death.

My brother was cremated. The coroner said he most likely died of a massive coronary "...best we can do...it’s not TV, you know, and we don't spend weeks and weeks on the mystery, unless it looks like foul play."

We held the memorial service for him on April 19, 1997. He was peripherally into Zen Buddhism so the service took place in a non-denominational chapel. His ashes were placed in one of his pottery containers, and surrounded by photos, arrangements of tropical flowers and many, many beautiful and exotic leis.

So many of his friends came to the service. He had succeeded so well in compartmentalizing his life, that he had kept his life as a Naval employee and as a potter completely separate. It was interesting to hear some people say they had no idea of the other side of him. Some people spoke and had wonderful testimonials to the fullness of his being. Each person who spoke to me had good memories to share. This part was a wonderful experience, and probably the most healing thing we could have done. I am so grateful that I was able to be there.

His best friends took his ashes home and he resides in his pot on their shelf for now, to eventually be placed under a jacaranda tree on their family property on Kauai.

I still miss my brother very much! No more calls to ask how he is and for him to answer, “Oh...sameo...sameo.” No more dumb jokes about "Soylent green is people." 

No more hearing him say, “It's a crazy woild, eh?”