A Wonderful Kind of Sorrow

By Brian Elroy McKinley

When I was seventeen my eighteen-year-old brother killed himself. It was Thanksgiving day, 1975. That afternoon I left for a church camp in Mexico. That night my brother Steve left all of us and whatever was the source of his pain. His last step off the limb of a tree found him dead at the end of a rope. I didn't find out for three days, when the church buses rolled back into the parking lot and my dad was waiting at the door of the bus. We walked from the crowd of hugging and laughing families and into the dark.
"We lost Steve," said my dad, his hand on my shoulder.
I didn't know what he meant. How can you lose someone? I kept looking at my dad, not knowing what was going on, but beginning to realize something was very wrong.
"Steve is gone; he killed himself," said Dad.
It still wasn't hitting me.
"You're kidding," I said, more as an involuntary reaction than a thought.
"I wouldn't kid about something like this," he said.
How could there be no Steve? He has always been there as long as I could remember. That's when it hit me. A feeling I've never lost. A feeling as deep as my soul. A feeling that's as much a part of me today as on that day. Sorrow. My life was suddenly dissected, and a large piece of it was gone.
When we arrived at home my relatives were already there. They hugged me and kissed me and asked how I was, but the illusion of normality they created was stripped to the bones of reality when I walked into the room I had shared with Steve and found everything of his gone. The upper part of the bunk bed where Steve had slept was gone. All his clothes and rock climbing equipment and personal items were gone. It felt as if he had never existed, but seventeen years of reality screamed for an end to the charade, for the continuation of my life as it had been.
During the next few days, before the funeral, I would sit for hours on my bed, staring out the bedroom door, waiting -- and really believing -- that at any moment Steve would walk around the corner. He would walk around the corner, and life would go on. But he never came. Before the funeral we visited the body. After everyone else left I stood by Steve and whispered over and over for him to wake up. He looked like he was sleeping. "Wake up," I would say. "Please, dear God, make him wake up." But he went on sleeping. At the funeral my friends kept saying it would be okay. It would be okay. It would be okay. But how could it be okay when the person I'd spent more time with than any other, the person who knew me better than any other was being laid in the ground forever? We learned to walk together. We learned to speak together. We slept in the same bed and bathed in the same tub. We learned to backpack together and to rock climb together. We use to go hiking, just the two of us. We learned piano together, played in the same marching band together. We shared the same friends. He was Big Mac and I was Little Mac. We were brothers, but more than that, we were best friends. How in the hell could it ever be okay again? Instead of answers I was left only with sorrow.
A month after Steve died, Rhonda Reicker, a girl I'd know from our church youth group, was killed in a car wreck. More sorrow. In the spring, Eddy Caldera, a friend from school, drowned while swimming in the ocean. More sorrow. A year later, Edna Thompson, my next-door neighbor, died of cancer. More sorrow. The following year I learned that Danial Kowalachuch -- a fellow nerd in high school who had been my friend when no one else would -- was killed when his Air Force training jet crashed. More sorrow. A year after that, Barry Bennet, a fellow musician and my best friend at the time, was killed when a truck hit his car. Before he died in the hospital I held his hand and talked to him for hours. More sorrow. In 1980 I moved away from San Diego, ending up in Colorado. A few months later I learned that Deanie Phillips, the neighbor boy who had played with Steve and me for years, was killed by a drunk driver (his mom is the current president of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers). More sorrow. The following year Don Talbon, a friend from when I worked as a mountaineering guide in Colorado, died of cancer. More sorrow. That same year Don Carrington, a high school kid I'd befriended on a youth group ski trip, died when he was struck by a speeding motorcycle. More sorrow. The following year the manager of the band in which I played, Donna Pinkston, died when her car slid off a rainy freeway. More sorrow. In 1985 was the death of Jan Cowles, one of the directors of the wilderness guide outfit I'd worked for. More sorrow. A few years later, my younger brother's wife, Elaine, a wonderful friend with whom I had worked in '85, died of cancer. More sorrow. The following year my grandfather died after a long fight. More sorrow.
Starting with the death of my brother, each person who left my life forever took with them a piece of my life that they created. The holes can never be filled by another person; each new friend adds to my life but never replaces those lost. Instead, those holes fill with sorrow.
Sorrow is a liquid and rests at the lowest points of my soul. It's thick like oil and sticky like syrup. When left alone its surface thickens like the skin on hot milk. In that state it can fill the emptiness without spilling into every area of my life, but when jabbed or stirred by a memory, a photo or a fresh pouring of sorrow into my being, its presence and its pain scald the empty chambers where people's lives once were.
But the pain is no longer a shock; I've known its arrows so many times before. And the presence of the disturbance is better than the lonely void it would leave if I could somehow exorcise myself of my sorrow. So the sorrow remains -- pools of pain in the grotto of my heart, memorials to the fallen, proxies for the missing. It fills the emptiness, keeps me company, keeps me from being alone. Where there would be only a stark and barren valley, there is instead a lake on whose shores I can walk with the memories of my brother, my friends, my family.
Where in my life there has been a trail of losses and good-byes, where there were family and friends who now are no longer with me, where there was pain and anger at the sadness of separation, now there exists in my soul a balm made from the very emotion of separation, now there is a comfort I so fondly call my Wonderful Kind of Sorrow.

Email: el@elroy.com

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