This is my brother–no, not the religious right-wing jerk I frequently refute in this forum. This is my younger-older brother, Sean, Christmas 1981. Strange that that will have been thirty years ago in a few years. I don’t talk about Sean much. What can I say, my oldest brother generates a lot of attention towards himself by being such a hate-mongerer. Then again, Sean is dead. It’s rather impossible for him to piss me off, especially since I never even met him. Yet, I’ve always felt a special bond with him. I can’t tell our baby photos apart. He was my link to my other siblings, the one who made it less strange that my other siblings were/are 12 and 7 years older than me. When I was little, I used to wish he weren’t dead because I was sure we’d be good friends and we’d play together. As a child, I don’t remember ever not fully comprehending death–thanks to Sean. When I was little, my mother still mourned him constantly. I feel like I spent much of my early childhood in the cemetery and, as a result, learned all sorts of odd facts about cemeteries. As a teenager, I went to a pioneer cemetery in Old Washington with a goth boy who tried to scare the rest of us by saying that he used to play in cemeteries; instead, I scared him.
Sean died when he was six months old from a rare form of leukemia at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. While Jamie Lee Curtis’s daughter asked her repeatedly to tell her again about the night she was born, I was always asking my mother about the night my brother died–but, at the same time, I was terrified to ask because I knew asking would mean my mother was going to cry again. But I had to know. I had to know every last detail of my brother’s short life. So, over the years of my childhood and young adulthood, I learned more and more in small doses, and still continue to learn more.
My mother knew there was something wrong with my brother. He was her third child, after all. She was old hat to Typical Baby Behavior at this point. She took him to the doctor and told him his symptoms, but he dismissed her as a scared new mother and didn’t do anything. She went home and Sean continued to get worse. My parents took him to the emergency room of a Little Rock hospital, where they did bloodwork and found leukemia. My parents were given a choice: Arkansas Children’s, which was in town, but would charge, or St. Jude’s in Memphis, which did its work free of charge and was reputed to be one of the best hospitals in the country. The decision was made and Sean was airlifted to St. Jude while my family raced back home to pack, then to make the trip to Memphis. In Memphis, my dad got lost and flagged down a taxi to ask directions. The cabbie was nice and escorted my family to the hospital, no charge.
But my brother was already dead. My mother carried my dead brother down a long hospital hallway in the middle of the night. Having seen television spots of St. Jude before, I know that it is brightly painted all over. I can only imagine the amount of pain crushing down on my mother as she carried her dead child amongst murals of sunbeams and happy children. When my mother told me this part of the story, when I was older, I was amazed at how strong my mother had been in such a state of crisis. Other people might have had to been escorted out, maybe tranquilized to cope with such a sudden loss of their child. But my mother just picked up his dead body and carried him down the hall.
As a young child, my mother had explained to me that Sean was up in heaven. I used to stare up at the clouds on car rides, wondering if Icould catch a glimpse of him way up there with god. In my mind, god was cradling him in his arms, and Jesus was sitting on his right-hand side, both of them taking care of my eternally-baby brother. As I grew older, the story of his short life and death became more complex. After he died, the doctor that had dismissed my mother stopped practicing medicine. In college, I learned that my brother also had a rare problem with his genetic chromosomes that the doctors at St. Jude didn’t understand the meaning behind. I asked my Biology professor if he’d ever heard of it, and he said no, nowhere in the animal kingdom had he ever heard of this happening. I researched the chromosomes in question and found that my other family members also have problems associated with these two chromosomes.
When I was little, I used to cry at random because Sean was dead. Even though I’d never met him, he was my brother and I noted his absence when my family of five was placed at restaurant tables with six chairs. Even though I’d never met him, and he was only on earth six months, his short life would influence mine forever. While other little girls might sell Girl Scout cookies to earn badges or to go on camping trips, I put my blood, sweat, and tears into raising money for St. Jude. In elementary school, my school had the Math-a-Thon fundraiser each year. Each year, I would be one of the top donators to St. Jude–because it meant something to me. While my friends didn’t really care if anyone donated, I went around asking every adult I knew. The closest I ever came to raising the most money in school was the year I came in third place. Usually, I came in fourth, and that killed me. My brother had won the Bike-a-Thon the year after Sean died. He won a ten-speed bike that sat in our storage room with flat tires, which I desperately wanted to ride, but I wasn’t allowed to touch it.
What I learned from Sean’s short life is the power of helping others. If my brother had gone to any other hospital and lived for any amount of time, it would’ve bankrupted my parents and I probably would not have been born. Instead, my childhood was filled with fundraisers and community service projects. One year, the Bike-a-Thon was done in memory of my brother and my mother was the chairperson. Sean has been dead 27 years–his 28th birthday would’ve been just two days ago–but his death has given my life so much more meaning than I think it ever would have otherwise had if he had never gotten sick (and, obviously, I was still born). His life and death puts a face for me on the people who are helped by the kindnesses of others–in this case, Danny Thomas, et al. When I think about cancer or St. Jude, I think of my brother, even if it’s just the imaginary fun a lonely little girl created in her mind when her siblings wouldn’t play with her. Weird as it sounds, I was never afraid of death as a child because I knew my brother would be there waiting on me.
In hearing stories about my brother’s life and death, I learned what it really means to be brave. Last year, someone called me a “pillar of strength” during an emergency situation. While they would’ve been freaking out, I was calm. Having learned from the example of my mother in times of crisis, I couldn’t imagine any other way to react than to deal with the situation at hand because this situation–the threat of suicide by a friend in my home–demanded immediate action. Little did I know that my reaction would convince my friend to let me get her help without creating a dramatic scene and calm my friend’s parents hundreds of miles away on the phone. I learned that day that I, too, could be brave, and this bravery could be a positive influence on others. If I’d never had tragedies in my life, and even before my life began, I would not have learned this.
Today, among my many other bracelets, I wear two bracelets in remembrance of the brother I never knew: one for leukemia research, and one for St. Jude. Each time someone asks me what they represent allows me the opportunity to share my brother’s short life with another person, allowing his memory to live on in them and putting a face to childhood cancer. In college, a friend who was starting a “swear jar” and looking for a charity to donate the money towards, told me that she would never donate to St. Jude because “they get too much money.” I would like to think that when I looked at her and firmly told her that my brother died there, that in the awkward oh-shit moment before she began apologizing unceasingly, she learned to consider that she never knows the full history of those to whom she is speaking.
Recently, I attended my first Quaker meeting. We were given a question to ponder to collect our thoughts and then, there was relative silence for an hour, sans the occasional quaking. As it was my first meeting, I could only ponder how strange this experience was. Thoughts like “This is really weird,” “Dear god, that woman is gorgeous,” “Ugh, that shirt is hideous,” and “Why are you staring at me?” circled through my brain. It was only towards the end of the hour that I started pondering the Christian message. Then, the hour was up and I had thought of nothing remotely brilliant, and I realized how shallow I’d been thinking the things I did the past hour, and I felt bad. In the weeks since that meeting, I find myself still pondering that question.
Give him the gift of livestock . . . to someone else! For as little as ten dollars, you can buy a portion of a sheep, goat, or pig for a needy family through 
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