The Hardest Thing

Funny how you think of the line from the recent season of Doctor Who:-

“It’s funny: the day you lose someone isn’t the worst. At least you’ve got something to do. It’s all the days they stay dead.”

I recently had someone come up to me and ask me how my brother Sean was. He hadn’t been in circulation for a while, and he’d been looking for Sean since he came back.

I had to ask him a number of times to sit down, and he really wasn’t hearing the tone of my voice, so I just told him straight that Sean had been dead for five years.

I never told Mum about this.

Just recently, I was watching a TV show, and this poor bastard was just unable to do right for doing wrong, and he never could get his footing, and I was gnawing at my knuckles, tears pouring from my eyes, because I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about my brother, lurching from one bad situation to another to another.

I could not tell Mum about that.

And just this morning, I was chatting with Sean in my dreams. He was still alive, and the thing ended with him going through a door. And I asked him if I would see him again, and he looked back with great sadness as if to say “Maybe later. Not for a while.”

Damn. That’s practically every single morning this week that I’ve woken up in tears. What is wrong with me?