My love would always start to drift away when things got too hard. I’m not sure why that was. He just couldn’t handle the emotion of things would be my guess. It would happen very suddenly…him to “him” and “poof,” he’d be gone…

~

My family was preparing for my little brother’s wedding. It had been a long time coming and we were all looking forward to it. Some family came to stay at my dad’s house for the occasion.

A few nights before the wedding, I had a dream of a younger man, but I could only see the back of him. He was wearing a flannel shirt and he had blond hair. He lifted his shirt to show me his bare back. Initially when I looked, everything looked normal…but then I started to see his blood vessels rising towards the surface of his skin and turning black…they created a dark webbed pattern…it was disturbing, and I didn’t know what to make of it…

I had just gotten to work the next morning and was sitting in my cubicle when I noticed I had a missed call from my father. I knew something must’ve happened because he wouldn’t call me that early on a weekday otherwise. I told my boss that I had to step outside for a minute.

My dad told me that my little cousin had died that morning. They found him in their bathroom with a needle close to his body…

Nnooo…

Eleven months prior, my cousin overdosed and was brought back. It was right around Christmastime and some of the family was gathered together. My aunt who is a nurse was there, and she was saying that once he was released from treatment, he would be moving in with her and her family. My brother pulled me aside and told me that he should be with me, not them. I agreed, but I needed to be sure that he was serious about his sobriety before moving him into my home with my daughter. I made sure that my aunt knew how important it was going to be for him to go to meetings every day and not have any alcohol or other drugs whatsoever.

I reached out to him a few times to make sure he was ok and doing what he was supposed to be doing. He said that he was. Everyone else agreed. When he had around 6 months sober, my aunt’s family decided to move to Florida and were going to bring him with them. I had a bad feeling about it and reached out one last time. I offered him a place to live and told him that I knew lots of really good, sober guys I could introduce him to. He declined.

I later found out that “sober” to them only meant that he wasn’t doing heroin anymore. He was still drinking in their house and smoking weed. He wasn’t going to meetings at all…

His family was who we lived with when we first moved away from our mother. His father, the drummer, my uncle, was also one of my favorite people ever…

He was a tall, good looking, funny man! On one hand, he was very masculine…he was in a band, and he was a woodworker and a biker. He seemed to have the dream life with 2 healthy kids and a beautiful wife. In the early days, there seemed to be a lot of love between them.

On the other hand, he embodied a softness that reminded me of my grandfather…he was kind and loving and domestic. I have a distinct memory of him cooking pancakes for all of us kids. The radio was on, and he was singing along…“Aaamieeee, what you wanna do?”

I remember my little cousin as a person who had this gift of bringing light to others…like a bright, little lightning bug. He was always the smallest growing up and he had the lightest blond hair. He could usually be found under the wing of his older sister who also gave her all to protect her little brother.

I don’t know where it went bad. Or if I just romanticized the memories as a child and they stayed that way. Or if it happened gradually…I just know that alcoholism is a very sad disease…

When we got our own place, it wasn’t far from them, and we stayed very close growing up. When I started getting into drugs and alcohol, my cousin didn’t like it. I even remember him saying that he was going to kick someone’s ass on my behalf…for introducing drugs to me, even though I was the one to introduce the drugs to that particular person. I never did tell him the truth about that.

Things had gotten bad in that house. I remember going over and just about every time, my uncle would be drunk. There would be beer cans everywhere…my aunt was hardly ever there anymore. My cousin was furious at his father. His sister…just crushed…she had taken over the role of caretaker to all of them…many, many tears were shed. That I remember.

My uncle and I developed this unspoken bond through the years…through our addictions. My cousin later told me that he told them to always answer the phone in case it was me needing help. And if I ever called collect, to make sure they accepted…

(Why some people get sobriety, and others don’t, I’ll never understand…)

I was visiting my dad on my eighteenth birthday, and we were having a barbecue and cake. I asked if it would be okay to invite my uncle. My dad said that it would be.

I called him. He sounded surprised and humbly accepted…he wasn’t welcome many places anymore…

When he got there, he didn’t look well. He looked exhausted and the color of his skin was tinted yellow. His belly was distended. We hugged.

The others greeted him. He seemed relieved to see his parents, but also, I sensed shame…

We sat together on a bench outside on that warm August day. I didn’t know that would be the last time I would ever see him, but I get now that he did. He told me that he prayed every day that I didn’t end up like him. I couldn’t understand at the time…I thought he had the perfect life…he could drink as much and whenever he wanted…no one bothered him anymore. That was my dream. He said, “Please Samantha…please…don’t end up like me.” A little over a month later, he was gone…

We went to clean his house for a party we were having there in his memory. Amongst the cans and needles and other paraphernalia were tons of little pieces of paper with his handwriting…asking God for forgiveness and apologizing to his children…

When I arrived at the party after his funeral, my cousin was in his room. I went to check on him. We got high together, and I tried talking to him about his dad. He told me how much he hated him and that he would never end up like him. I knew that he didn’t actually hate him. His seeming great hate was the actual great love masked. I did know that he meant to never end up like him.

Yet here we were…about to bury him too…

I will never forget the scream of my cousin learning that her little brother was gone and not coming back this time…

On his last day on earth, he went back to his childhood home to visit his mother and saw a Bald Eagle soaring above…

“We need to open our minds and hearts to see past old, restricting beliefs that are holding us back. Eagle teaches us to courageously face our fear of the unknown, so we are then able to fly as high as our heart’s joy can take us…”