Mid Term Break

In the next few minutes my whole world fell apart. In as gentle a way as possible, he broke the terrible, devastating news that my younger, much loved brother had died in tragic circumstances. Oh! No it can't be true! They've made a mistake surely! I cried. I couldn't believe that I would never see my brother again. Never kick a ball about with him again. Never share a joke again. No rough and tumble any more and nobody to share life's ups and downs with through the years. The head, trying to be as sympathetic as possible offered to drive me the journey home. A journey which I usually look forward to excitedly at the end of term, not mid term as we did that day. I didn't speak a word on the way home, questions were running through my head, how? where? why? All questions that were soon to be answered as we got closer to home.

We pulled up in the drive my stomach churning. My father standing lonely in the porch. Usually he would greet me with happiness and laughter but this time it was different as the rest of our lives would be different. I ran to the porch only to witness something I had never seen before. My father was crying, he looked as though he had lost everything.

I walked into the house in a daze looking for my mother. Everyone staring at me and Big Jim Evans was uncomfortably trying to console me. My baby sister was too young to understand, she seemed confused and bewildered but still laughed and giggled in her pram. I felt honored but embarrassed as grown men stood to shake my hand. They told me that they were 'sorry for my trouble' although I found it hard to quite hard to understand why they were so sorry it wasn't their fault after all. People I had never met before were being informed in whispers that I was the older brother, home from boarding school. I didn't care what they thought. My mother took my hand in hers, protectively. She didn't seem able to cry but her sighs were heavy and unhappy.

She didn't quite know how to cope with his death, my dad would cope by crying, I coped by keeping my feelings inside and my mum, well she was just angry and bitter. At ten 'o clock the body arrived. To me it all seemed so informal as it arrived in a shabby ambulance. The corpse was taken out, bandaged up like my old teddy when we played hospitals. I realized now that at the time I was in denial not wanting to believe that this dead body could be my kid brother.

That night I didn't sleep. I stayed awake thinking, crying over the happy memories we had shared. The next thing I knew it was morning I plucked up courage to climb the stairs to the room where he lay. My hand trembled as it touched the doorknob. I turned it nervously and crept in. Someone, probably mother, had placed flowers and candles around the cot-sized coffin, softening the starkness. We had been apart six weeks and he looked paler but only ill not dead. There were no horrible, gruesome scars, just the signs of a fresh bruise on his temple where the car bumper had struck him. I expected him to wake up and laugh as though it was a joke, but he didn't. He just lay there still, silent, alone and too young to die. As tears fell from my eyes I walked slowly out of the room.