He Called Me Sis

Sometimes love arrives as laughter and shared memories. Sometimes it meets us in grief. This is one of those stories.

I heard a child ask her mother,
Why do leaves have to die?
She crunched through a pile of brown leaves on the sidewalk.
The colors were so pretty, she said.
Where did they go?

I didn't hear the mother's response.

Maybe I would have said,
We all fade.
Lose our color.
Why, just look all around.
Everything will die.
But when a grain of wheat dies,
it bears much fruit.

She might have looked at me quizically.

Without that metaphor, though,
I would not have been able to bear losing my brother.
He was too young.
It was too unexpected.

As I helped carry his body,
someone said to me,
This isn’t so hard for you as for the others, is it?
You were only his sister.

I was controlling my emotions.
There was no room 
for my emotions that day.
There was my mother.
His wife.
His sons.
Theirs needed big space.

But I was letting go of someone
who had always been a part of us.
To say his life had touched mine—and 
many others—would be an understatement.

But I wonder now,
if, even more,
it was his death.

There is no way of understanding
how, in dying,
we gain,
unless I take hold of that grain of wheat metaphor.

The earth and the heavens
are the work of God’s hands.
They will wear out like the leaves
and give way to a new creation.

But God is more enduring
than what He has made.

The first creation
will give way
to a new creation.
If I didn’t believe this,
I couldn’t bear
to lose those I love.

---

He called me Sis…
It was the summer
after he died when a moonrise 
both comforted
and amazed me.

The bountiful globe of the night
poked its head above the horizon,
deep red.

A glow of majestic,
magenta light,
turning orange,
then golden,
began to rise.

I stared
until its great white face
looked back at me.

Settling onto its throne in the sky,
it shone a pathway of white
across the water,
as if it were a message
sent directly to my heart from his.

I’m here, Sis.

---

Photo above: Home for a visit, summer I moved to NYC, 1978

Prose inspired by Psalm 102:25–27 and John 12:24. 

Moon over Lake Michigan, one year after my brother’s death, November 8, 2009.

In memory of Ed Wenzler (February 17, 1954 - November 8, 2008)