Empty Shoes

Last week I was driving home along one of the country roads I can take into the office. It's a beautiful road, now complete with high edges of corn right up to the gravel. At one point there's a little one lane bridge and several horses that gather around galvanized tubs of water. The sun in the evening intensifies along this stretch and life feels really full and complete with all the love I need. More often than not lately I have been listening to the iPod or music, but last week I was feeling a bit disconnected from the world and put on the news. And the sun got more intense. And the world got hotter.

This is what I want you to think about right now: your little brother. (Or your son. Maybe your nephew. ) Can you see him when he was eighteen or twenty? I can see both of my brothers. One emailed me today to talk about beekeeping. The other is full of nerves about taking his MCAT. They're young and beautiful. My beekeeping brother gets so nervous sometimes I can see his hands shake, and it breaks my heart when I see that. I hate that he gets so worked up about things. He is a walking box of trivia, and he knows the most obscure facts. Even though sometimes he acts hard, he's really a huge softie who loves when his dog sits on a raft in the pool. He rescues delicate looking bugs by bringing them into the Florida room and putting them into the fern. He checks on them to make sure they are doing okay.

My other brother wakes up early every morning to ride his bike down trails, working up a sweat before he sits down in front of textbooks and problems. He graduated with a dual degree months ago. He pushes himself really hard, and is one of the most fair people I know. We talk a lot about politics, and sometimes we disagree, but he listens intently to me. And sometimes he even changes his mind. And occasionally he even changes my mind. We both cried together after the London bombings since he lived there too, worked for an MP, and attended the LSE. I gave him a book that detailed cheap London eats, and it was his Bible while living there. He went to a Persian restaurant with some regularity and would talk to men who sat next him in the hot restaurant, sharing his bottle of wine.

I'm older than both of them, by seven and ten years. I can remember how my youngest brother called me "mom" for awhile in his life. Sometimes he slips and still does the same. When my other brother was about three, he decided he didn't want to eat anything else other than Cheerios, and after a few weeks of this, my parents put their respective feet down about that: If he didn't eat what was on the table, nothing then. At night, after he was put to bed, I would sneak him up bowls of cereal, and tell him stories as we both ate milky bowls of Cheerios under the covers.

One of my brothers was a tow-head when he was kid. One of my brothers chased sparrows at the swim club all summer long hoping to catch one. When I would babysit them at night, both of them liked for me to sing songs to them as they drifted away in their bunk beds. Their most requested tune, "Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free...."

I can see the freckles that both of them had/have on their noses. They look like my freckles. I remember that one brother liked to lie in the grass in the backyard and have me try to count the freckles on his cheeks and nose.

Can you see your brother? Son? Nephew? What color is his hair? How does he laugh when you tell a stupid joke? How does he laugh when you say something really funny? Do you remember seeing him cry ever? Think about the times you watched the stars with this boy. Think about how he looked at his high school graduation; was it full of promise and youth, his young man's hair curling out from underneath the mortarboard?

Last week, my brothers came to me on that country road as I drove along listening to families in Ohio talk about their boys.

I thought about my brother and his shaking hands when he gets nervous.

I thought about my other brother, sweating in the morning riding down shady bike paths.

I pulled over into the edges of a cornfield and cried to think about the deep hole that losing either of them would create. I thought about the empty shoes I had seen the week before that and how the site of all those shoes and names nearly brought me to my knees.

And there's nothing anyone could do to convince that losing either of my brothers was worth it.

And when you think of your boy, what could convince you it was worth it to not hear his voice on the phone at night? His hand close into yours? His "I love you" on your birthday?

Really. What?