The Tree Between Blindness and Dinner

What my brother taught me about grief and gratitude

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Once, visiting my brother in Austin not long after he moved there, four of us were heading out to celebrate his birthday. My parents and I had driven down from Dallas, a three-hour trip through the late-June Texas heat. We stepped out of his apartment and onto the sidewalks of the complex. My father was already walking ahead, eager to cool the car down and get moving. My mother followed a few steps behind him. Wayne walked just behind her.

Squinting against the bright summer evening sun, I trailed the group in the typical teenage slump — I think I was about seventeen — of wishing I were anywhere else but heading to dinner with my family.

Wayne’s first seeing-eye dog, Tony, wouldn’t come for some years. He navigated with a cane, which was excellent for ground obstacles ahead, but useless for a threat from above. A tree just over 6 feet tall or so, with a manicured canopy of a half-dome, drifted its shape and hung out over the sidewalk. As his cane tap-tap-tapped the hot pavement, Wayne walked straight into it. Face first. It startled all of us, probably less than it startled Wayne.

He exhaled slowly while the leaves swayed to a stop, lowering himself onto a curb by an empty parking space. My mother bent down and sat beside him, her arm around his hunched shoulders. His quiet words were,

“Mom, I don’t want to be blind.”

A mother’s soft words of encouragement were murmured into this moment of defeat and I turned away as I felt the sting in my eyes, unsure of what to say. We went on to a dinner I don’t remember, but his words stay with me still.

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Maybe my anger began then. Maybe it began earlier, but that doesn’t matter. What does is that I took it upon myself to feel anger on his behalf. This walk to dinner remains a visceral representation of the heartache I felt for how he had to move through the world, and from that point forward I carried a quiet resentment. At the blindness itself, and at the world that made every sidewalk a hazard. But sometime in the year before his death, Wayne said something that complicated that anger. He said he had lived a great life, and was thankful for all of it.

Examining those diametric viewpoints shames me and, at times, confuses me. For years, decades, I carried the sorrow of hushed guilt that I could move in a way he couldn’t. I traveled the world. I moved across the country. I hated that I was experiencing things he never would or could. However, missing the forest for the trees, I overvalued the abilities of my own vision and undervalued the life he built. It was my own blindness.

Grief and gratitude seem like opposites, but I’m finding they show up together more often than you might expect, certainly more often than I expected. Being grateful for what remains during and after grief, knowing the end of the tunnel is near and still being thankful for everything that carried you through this magical existence, or simply being able to find moments of laughter as you walk through the pain.

These dichotomies are so important that life persistently forces the pairings on us: grief and gratitude, love and despair, pain and pleasure, success and failure. The high-school-locker-room-coach-pep-talk-style quote that once may have solicited an eye roll is what I now cling to, the valleys are what make the peaks. Every emotion is what makes us sentient, and it is impossible to cut off the tap of one without seeing the others slow to a trickle.

Wayne seemed to hold these extremes at once, while I’m still learning to accept them. He struggled, of course he did, but he loved his life and he wanted more of it.

Andrea Gibson, the singular poet who passed away last summer, wrote a beautiful piece among many, Love Letter from the Afterlife. I encourage you to read it in full but here are the opening chords that continue to strike my heart.

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?

I still hold the memory of crouching beside his body after he left it, caressing his arm, but I also hold the embrace of his laugh and the joy that lived within him.

Boy, I sure do hope he’s with me now, experiencing the world in a way he couldn’t before – not because he didn’t create a beautiful life, I just think he’d get a kick out of it.

As the sound of his laugh echoes in my ear, I think he just might be.

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