My Brother's Gift

How does one write a story in which the beginning is unknown and the end has yet to occur? That is what I’ve been asking myself for several months now, or at least that’s my excuse. The truth may be that I feel completely inadequate to tell this story about the gift my brother gave me, and frankly, I don’t know if anyone will believe me anyway

Everyone has those moments in life that are crystallized in minute detail in memory. For some, it may be a monumental event, while for others it may be a flash of remembrance of what seemed at the time to be insignificant. I measure the span of my life by those crystallized memories. 

Many of those memories, especially from my younger years, seem to be comprised mostly of insignificant moments. For example, the smell of Dairy Queen hamburgers in the bag I’m holding on my lap while my brother, Duane, rides me in his bicycle basket back from the restaurant. I don’t know if that event was a single event that I remember or an amalgam of several trips to DQ for a sack of little hamburgers, but it resides in my memory in detail. The smell of those wonderful little hamburgers (like Krystal only before Krystal), the bounce of the bike as we rolled over the manholes in the sidewalk, the sharp dig of the metal bike basket in the back of my knees as my feet hung down in front.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that most of my childhood memories of the crystal kind are good ones and usually involve my brother, my best friend, Laura, or my family at a holiday. As the years progress forward to the present, most of the ones that have solidified in my brain seem to be sad or traumatic, as if an invisible dividing line was crossed somewhere in my teens.

After my teenage years, there were some good memories – I don’t want to mislead you into thinking life has been a downer for me. My wedding day, the day my husband returned from Desert Storm, and the birth of our son – all are good crystal memories for me. But there was a watershed event in my life that seems to divide my time here on earth into “before and after.”

It was 6:30 am on a Friday morning (Friday the 13^th no less) in Bedfordshire, England when the phone in our military base house began to ring. My husband, who was already up and getting ready for work, went downstairs to answer it while I listened to see if the sound had awakened our son Ross. After a few moments of that intense listening all new parents do when they are desperate for a little more sleep time, I began to relax and settle back to sleep for a few more precious minutes of sleep.

It was then my husband came into the room and turned on the light. One look at his face and I knew something terrible was wrong. He was as white as a sheet and crying. It takes something monumental to get my 6’3”, 220 lb. soldier of a husband to cry so I knew the phone call had not been good.

“That was your brother. Your father killed himself.”

Those words and that moment was the watershed moment of my life, emotionally and spiritually. True reality of the world we live in hit me full force in the face and my soul cried out in anguish. How could this have happened? My dad was the steadiest, least mentally ill person on the planet. Later that morning, I sat on the couch as my husband hustled around trying to arrange a last-minute international flight from London-Heathrow to Nashville, Tennessee. As I sat there in stunned grief, I asked God “Lord, what do you want me to learn from this? There is no way I’m going through this for no reason so whatever it is that I’m supposed to understand, please show it to me.”

From that point forward, God walked with me. His Spirit began speaking into my soul and into my life. No, I didn’t become a Bible-thumper, grow my hair, and wear only denim skirts and tennis shoes. I didn’t swear off wine or red meat or R-rated movies. But something inside began to change. And as the inside began to move toward God’s direction, the world around me deteriorated. My marriage hit rough ground. I was faced with some very difficult decisions about where to live and where to work. Family members got seriously ill or injured. It was like I discovered a compass inside me directing me to true north, but the world itself began spinning on its axis.

For the next several years after my dad’s suicide, we tried to come up with an answer to the question “Why?” We had some good theories. First, we asked the doctors and mortician if they had seen any evidence of cancer when they were trying to save his life and then afterward when they were preparing him for burial. No one could report seeing anything unusual. We asked for blood tests to be run on the blood samples taken at the hospital but there was no sign of anything unusual in those results. No answers came from that direction.

We asked his friends and coworkers if they had witnessed any unusual behavior or depression, but no one had seen anything strange that would seem to be an early warning sign. I started reading everything I could find about suicide and joined a survivors’ support group online. I discovered, for instance, dad was in a high-risk category for suicide; he was elderly, nearing retirement, living alone, and beginning to have some health issues (although minor). I discovered there are more suicides among the elderly than among teenagers, especially among the elderly with health problems.

Another theory was that he had a bad reaction to some new medication he had started. He had been seeing a neurologist for what he told us was “a form of Tourette’s Syndrome”. For years, he had had lots of little funny tics and made funny noises. His driving was getting worse and he was having trouble with fine motor skills. He had been to a neurologist and she had started him on some medication to help alleviate symptoms but it didn’t seem to make much difference. Then two weeks before his suicide, she changed his medication regimen and one of the new drugs included a powerful antipsychotic drug. We had a theory that he had had a bad reaction to that drug which had driven him to take his own life.

Honestly, though, we just didn’t know what had caused it. Dad had not given a reason, although he had let us know his intention at the last minute. He didn’t want to lie there in a house alone so he called my brother right before and told him what he was going to do. And before the help my brother called arrived and were able to intervene, he shot himself in the chest and left this world.

The Holy Spirit was working on me in the years after my dad’s death. I finally got baptized at the ripe age of 31 even though I had believed in Jesus since childhood. In fact, it was my brother who first modeled what salvation looked like when he was in high school and I was just in kindergarten. He and his friends were in an active youth group and I watched them, listened to their conversations, and began to understand there was more to this God thing than Bible stories, felt boards, and singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

I began seeking God and reading my Bible after getting baptized. For the first time in my life, I began to “hear” God speaking to me through his Word. Before, I found the Bible convoluted and difficult to understand, especially the King James Version with all those “thee’s” and “thou’s”. It had some cool stories, but that’s what it seemed to me – just cool stories. Now suddenly, it was like a new book I had never read before and I couldn’t get enough. I would read something I had read many times before and suddenly think “Oh, THAT’S what you mean!” Pieces started falling in place and I began to see what God was saying between the lines. The Bible was like an onion – every time I thought I had it peeled, I would discover another layer and go digging again. To this day, I still have not run out of layers or gotten to the center.

Often, when we go through terrible trials, the “why” of God’s purpose is hidden. For a long time, I was not able to grasp what it was God wanted me to learn from my dad’s suicide. I knew something had changed when I asked Him to show me what He wanted to learn, but He had some preparation to do with me before I could start to understand. I had to learn to walk before I could run.

In 2001, my brother’s twenty-year marriage fell apart and he found himself alone. His stress levels were high as he tried to meet child support payments, support himself, and keep on going. My brother had not handled our dad’s death very well and looking back now, we think he had a “walking emotional breakdown.” He kept functioning in work, but pretty much everything else fell apart in terms of his relationship with his wife and children. He became involved in church and his walk with the Lord was strengthened but he wasn’t able to pull out of the disaster zone left by our dad’s suicide.

In 2005, he lost his job. He was unable to keep up with production in a distribution center and was fired after 17 years with the company. He quickly found similar work with another company but lost his job there for pretty much the same reason. He couldn’t keep up with the production rates required. It was a wake-up call for me and I stopped and took a good hard look at my brother. I realized he had the same tics, funny twitches, trouble driving, etc. that our dad had displayed. He became very obsessive-compulsive over whether his car windows were rolled up or not – a very unusual behavior for my fairly laid-back brother. There was something wrong here.

So I turned to Google to do some research and what I found was devastating. My brother and my dad demonstrated the classic signs of Huntington’s Disease (HD). The neurological disease is genetic, usually does not start manifesting symptoms until late in life, and is fatal. Once diagnosed, the average lifespan was ten years, but it was ten years of horrible wasting, uncontrolled muscle movements, and advancing madness. I got my brother to go to his family physician right away who ran an MRI on my brother’s brain. My Google diagnosis was confirmed by the tell-tale butterfly shape of the deterioration of the central part of my brother’s brain that showed on the MRI.

People who have HD received the defective gene from one of their parents. Children of HD victims have a 50/50 chance of inheriting the defective gene. If they inherit it, they will get the disease. If they do not inherit it, they won’t get the disease and they can’t pass it on to their children. The odds had not been in either my brother’s or my father’s favor.

So the care for my brother began as his condition declined, but his faith and mine were still strong. He loved the Lord and stayed active in church as long as he could. His son, now a college student, and I along with his ex-wife teamed together to see that he had a place to live, food to eat, and medical care. He declined steadily, although more rapidly at times than at others.

The year 2012 began with a bang for me. My son was a senior in high school and enlisted in the Air Force in January of his senior year. April saw him going on a mission trip to Costa Rica with his senior class, then all the year-end rush events and requirements swamped us. He graduated in May and left for basic military training for the Air Force in June. As my only child, he had been the center of my universe for 18 years and suddenly he was just…gone. Summer was rough as I worried about him and began to notice problems in my marriage. What I had hoped to enjoy as a new “couple time” was not turning out that way.

In October 2012, the Lord gave me a very clear direction to “Abide in Me.” I had to look that one up to find out what he meant “abide.” It’s such an old-fashioned word and the message was so ringing clear that He got my attention. I began studying every instance I could find in the Bible of the word “abide” even pulling out Strong’s Concordance to look up the origin of the word in Hebrew or Greek. I realized Jesus was telling me to get into His Word and stay there. The Holy Spirit gave me an irresistible compulsion to read the Bible. I literally couldn’t read anything else. I tried to pick up a fiction novel I was reading and would put it down after reading the same paragraph three times and not remembering it. I got the message.

As I began to immerse myself in the Word, God led me to another verse. In fact, he kind of let me stumble on it. I was reading in Mark about Jesus entering Jerusalem and I discovered this strange story about a fig tree. I say strange because it didn’t fit with the rest of the narrative and it was divided in the middle by the story of Jesus clearing the temple. Mark 11:12-14 begins the fig tree story and then it picks up again in verse 20 and goes through verse 25.

The story was, well, just weird! The whole withering thing and then the interruption of the other story and then coming back to the fig tree – it didn’t make a lot of sense. But then I got to verse 24: “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” This is a companion verse to Matthew 21:22, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” That verse is one that God had given to me years before during another terribly difficult season. So God was giving me a reminder – abide in Him. Remain in Him. Wait. Bear fruit. Pray without ceasing.

Those verses were very much in my mind when, on the way home from some time away at the beach, I received a phone call. It was the hospice nurse at the facility where my brother was staying. I needed to come.

After discovering my brother’s diagnosis, he lived with me for a time as he started to deteriorate. It came to the point that he needed to be in a facility where he could have close care and a secure environment so I found a great assisted living facility for him. As his disease progressed, he was transferred to a skilled-care nursing facility and finally to a hospice facility.

When I arrived at the facility, his son was with him. My brother was asleep but resting easy. As evening drew near, my nephew had to leave because he had to be at work early the following morning. I made myself comfortable in a recliner beside my brother’s bed and settled in for a long night.

How many times had I come running to his room when I was little and had had a nightmare only for him to let me crawl in beside him and go back to sleep? How many times had we sat together in our family den and watched black-and-white movies on a Saturday night? Twice we had sat beside each other at memorial services as we buried our parents. I was going to be beside him as he made this incredible journey. We had done life together and he was truly the only person in the world I trusted with my whole heart. The only person who had never betrayed me.

I read to him some from the Psalms and I prayed. I thanked him for being the most wonderful Bubba ever. I apologized for getting him in trouble for spraying me with scrubbing bubbles that time. I reminisced aloud about our fishing trips and sledding days and going to see Buddy Rich in concert.

And as I sat there in the room with the light dimmed, a strange thing began to happen. The lights seemed to flicker softly. When the nurse came in, I said something about new bulbs. She smiled at me and said, “It happens.”

Around midnight, exhausted from a long car ride and the emotions of the day, I could not stay awake any longer. I prayed, “God, wake me up when it’s time.” Three hours later, I heard my brother say clearly, “Tracy”. I awoke with a start and looked at him. There was a smile on his face but no breath. “Oh!” My own breath caught in my throat at what I saw in my mind’s eye. There was a door open with the most brilliant light coming from it. Through the door, I could see a bridge across a deep chasm and a powerful sense of gratitude and thankfulness filled my heart. I knew that bridge was constructed from the beams of a cross and that my brother was getting to travel through that door.

I called out to God, “Please – let me go with him. I don’t want to be left here.” A most intense feeling of joy washed over me. Instantly, I knew it was not for me to go this time so I whispered to my brother, “Save me a seat. I won’t be long.” Tears washed down my face, but they weren’t tears of grief but of absolute, incredible peace and joy. It was so profound that words fail to describe it. What a gift my brother had given me – he had held the door open long enough for me to see the splendor of heaven!

At that moment, the flickering lights in the room showed shadows on the walls in the shape of millions of feathers. The angels had been there the whole time and their wings had brushed the light into shimmers and shadows. Then they were gone and the light showed steady once again. All was quiet in the room and it was just me left.

I had prayed for this, unashamedly prayed. I had prayed that God would take my brother home so he would no longer suffer. For many months, I had been pushing him with my prayers toward that door and that bridge with confidence that it would be alright. I had asked. I had believed. And I had received.