My Brothers Death

Diary - Entry 1

I have started this site in honor of my brother,Todd, who passed away on Saturday, November 14th, at 4am, two weeks shy of his 46th birthday and disrepectfully buried next to my mother, the next day, on her birthday. . .November 15th, with no obituary notice of any kind. . .one ugly plastic wheat wreath around a toy John Deere tractor, that they had recycled from my fathers 60th birthday party.

As a child, he was so much more than what the outside world saw.  He was tender of heart and spirit, almost ghostly in appearance and always smiled.  As an adult, his life, was full of pain, sorrow, sometimes homelessness, and always overshadowed by alcoholism . . . which I knew, he used as a coping mechanism. I believe it  is the fault of my parents, step-parents, his poor choice in a mate, and lastly, the visual trauma we so often witnessed at home, that left him a stuttering, deformed and wizened old man before his time.  He was made fun of, whispered about and surrounded by hypocrites, and those were just family members.

Our childhood was difficult at best, but not because of our love for one another, but because of the lack of maturity and framework within our parents, who never should have been parents in the first place and compounded the problems of marrying to young by, jealousy, rage, drinking,and physical fighting so vicious that one gave as good as the other got.  They were like oil and water together.   Divorcing, remarrying, divorcing and remarrying and having another child.  They could not leave one another alone.  Todd, Vic and I got lost in the shuffle and got passed from relative to relative within our small familial enclave. 

Why do I say these things?  To lay the foundation of what will be written here and because, like many others, we come from a well respected southern family whose patriarch was not only a large cotton and rice farmer, but he was a pastor in the Assembly of God churches (and I use that term loosley).  His revivals were as ledgendary as his ego.  Therefore, to the outside world and our neighbors, we looked normal. . .and like many a southern family, our skeltons run as deep and wide as the century and a half that we have lived here. 

In the end, all the dirty laundry will be washed and hung up for the world to see. . .