I often forget what he looks like. The copper-ginger-toned yet blonde-ish hair that runs in their family, the blue eyes (rare for red-heads if you didn’t know), the six-foot-five friendly giant that ran practically every family event as the center of attention for the thirteen years I knew him, the worst mentor I’ve ever had, and the most sensitive person you could ever meet. Despite his deceitful tendencies, his heart was always ten times larger than his head, and six times out of ten his intentions were good, not pure, but good.
I don’t know why I chose him as my role model but I did. I thought the mental illnesses gave us something the rest of them didn’t have. Years later I see how wrong that idea was but maybe he had already known that – maybe that’s what drove him crazy. The rules and structure of the house, the hatred between his parents, the lies and faking that occurred – and still occurs – within every goddamn member of the family is simply excruciating. And he understood that.
He always spoke to me as though I were an accepted member of the family, not simply a child of his uncle’s girlfriend, then later wife. I didn’t have to hide my childhood, my awkward teenage angst and anxieties, or my frustrations because he saw me. While I saw him as a complicated college kid with a competitive manner, I wasn’t old enough to see the mania occurring or the effects of improper medication or the abuse of the opiates that started the tornado of events. I didn’t see his absence at holiday as an indication that he was sick again, he was in college – until it continued after college. I didn’t notice the fluctuations of weight as anything other than college weight, until he’d been out of college for a year. I didn’t know a recovering addict usually gains weight while a relapsing addict usually looses weight. I didn’t know the difference because I didn’t have to.
Two days before he died, he seemed healthy. The weight he’d put on made him my father’s twin, both with bushy copper-ginger beards (though, my father’s flicked with grey and white), teddy bear cheeks and pudgy bellies. We went ice-skating, the new Christmas tradition, and he suddenly stopped. Complaining about being terrible and of a pain in his ankles (his laces weren’t tight enough so his ankles were made of rubber in the boots) he tucked away the skates and moped until we were done. It was the first Christmas we’d felt happy with him around, it was also the first one that I avoided him at. He plopped himself beside me on the couch after dinner and asked me if I’d decided on a college, ‘yes UWM,’ ‘you know I went there for a semester’ (he was taking a semester away from Lacrosse to sober up), ‘yeah I know,’ ‘I’m really proud of you, you’re going to like it. I love you’
The lyrics screamed at me at Thanksgiving and I ignored the sign. If anyone were to ask me about the incident, I would argue that it wasn’t an accident. The lyrics cried, “I know you might be gone / And the world may not know / Still, I see your celestial.”
Wherever you are, E, I see your celestial.
Happee Lee 