A Tribute For my Brother

Is it by accident or by fate that we end up where we are, sometimes getting lost in the possibilities of the roads that we have not taken along the way.  Thinking back to when, to where, to how we have come to settle upon the small plot of earth which we inhabit now, it is not always clear.  What brought us here to this place that we consider home?  The seemingly small or large life events that moved us to the point at which we now reside could have been earth shattering, or, they could have barely made a quiet rumble underneath the soles of our feet.  I know that the string of events which led us to this point on a bluff overlooking the Pacific ocean was part my own spiritual earthquake, so to speak.  They say that you should never make any life changes or major purchases or important decisions following the death of a loved one but we did, and by doing so, we followed our someday dreams to the place that we now call home.  

We were led here by the very sudden passing of my younger brother.  My only sibling.  The only other person in the world who knew the punchline of my childhood anecdotes and jokes.  The sudden end of my brother's life was like the abrupt ending of a long conversation that was only just beginning.  Stunted, hastily cut short, truncated by an early exit.  It made us think.  A lot.  It made us wonder if "someday" was too presumptuous and too far away in pursuing some of our dreams with a major one being a home near the beach.  And so, we did the one thing that we were told not to do in the months following my brother's death.  We decided that it was time to purchase another home near the beach.  We dove in head first without doing a lot of thinking(we might have thought ourselves out of it) or searching.  We opened the gate which led to the front yard of this place and knew that we had found it. Over the course of the past five years, I slowly began spending more and more of my time here.  I didn't want to leave.  We had a beautiful, large home that our daughters had spent over a decade of their lives growing up in, but after my brother died, it no longer felt like home to me.  Something about the peaceful call of the ocean was drawing me away from there.  I needed to be here.  

We never purchased this place as an intended full-time home.  I'm not sure why that was, and honestly, I do not really dwell on it.  With all of our children and pets, it is not really as large as what we have become used to over the years, but we do know that as our youngest two Angel Daughters get ready to fly off on their own, we will have more space than we need in the future.  We sold our large home last summer after our youngest daughter graduated from high school, and moved everyone down here for good.  I can feel my brother's presence, support and encouragement for our decision.  He has a favorite light upstairs that he has become quite adept at turning on and off at very appropriate moments and he visits us quite often even though he was never here in life.  I know that if he were physically here, he would definitely approve, yet I also know that if he were still here, we would probably be living someplace else.  It's one of those odd juxtapositions in life that needed a certain number of events to occur in order for the equation to work out as it did.  Would I prefer to have my brother still here and for us to live someplace else?  Absolutely.  Am I glad that his death lit a spark under our spirits which allowed us to make the choice that we did?  Absolutely, which is why I believe that there really are no absolutes in life, strangely so.  

Just after the five year yahrzeit(anniversary) of my brother's death a couple of weeks ago, Mark and I were in the car and it suddenly came over me that it was time to visit my brother's gravesite for the first time since his funeral.  I have considered going many, many times over the course of the past five years, but obviously, something(or many somethings) were holding me back from doing so because the thought would come and then just as quickly, go.  Mark said it was probably because I was not ready.  Maybe it was because my heart was still too tender, maybe it was because I knew what had(or had not) been inscribed upon his very simple tombstone.  The thought of my brother only being remembered as a "Beloved Husband and Father" and nothing else, is something that still stings me to the core, but I know very differently.  The sting is becoming easier to tolerate.  We located Rob's gravesite and placed three stones on top of his tombstone.  One for me, one for Mark, and one for our girls.  In Judaism, we place stones on the graves of our loved ones instead of flowers.  This is something that has been done for centuries as it is a constant way to keep building a memorial to the person that is more permanent than flowers.  When we arrived, there were no rocks on my brother's tombstone which seemed to break my heart more than anything.  It was the five year anniversary of his death and my sister-in-law had not bothered to bring his children to pay their respects.  Ouch.  I do know that others have been there in the interim since his burial and it is my belief that other mourners sometimes remove stones from other graves(as completely tacky and disrespectful as that is) because the cemetery does not leave loose stones just lying around on the grass.  It is customary to bring your own rocks, and not everyone thinks about that so whose going to tell if they "borrow" a stone from someone else's grave.  That being said, it struck me hard to view my brother's stoneless tombstone.  I knelt down to clean some of the dirt and bird poop from his headstone and then I looked up towards the sky and laughed through my tears.  Right above Rob's tombstone, there is a large tree with branches that hang directly over his site.  Something tells me that bird poop is not an unusual occurrence in this part of the cemetery.  I know that it will be much easier for me to return to the cemetery in the future and although I do not believe that it is where Robert's soul resides, it is where his body remains at rest and therefore, I will go back.  Robert Mark Sherman was my little brother and the sharer of my history.  He became a brother to my husband.  He was a son.  He was the most beloved uncle to my four daughters.  He was a storyteller and a comedian, oh what a comedian!  He could have me laughing until I could no longer catch my breath.  He was a loyal friend.  He wanted to make the world a better place by assisting the downtrodden.  He was a brilliant attorney who made very average grades in high school but when it came to passing the State Bar exam, he did so with flying colors on his very first try.  He was so much to so many.  His life was cut way too short by a failing heart which may or may not have been broken beyond what he could tolerate any longer.  

I often think about my brother when I gaze out at the rolling Pacific ocean, but most especially at night when the skies are clear and the stars are at their brightest.  Something about the constellation Orion brings me to immediate thoughts of my brother because I believe, that for some reason, he is probably  viewing it too, just from a different angle in the universe.  I am home, for now, and he is home, for now, and somehow I believe that someday we will see one another again in a different place.  And if nothing else positive came out of his sudden passing, I do hope that he knows that because of our sad loss, we learned to take the "somedays" more seriously in the now and that the love that we had and still have for his beautiful life was something which led us home.

Views From the Buena Vista

The beginning of our week started out like this.  Threatening clouds, wild waves, and just enough pounding rain to keep me inside with the shades raised high and a stack of books close to my side yet my eyes remained mostly trained on the horizon, my mind thick with thoughts.  I enjoy the sun, but I live for these dramatic days on the Pacific shoreline in which nature puts on the most spectacular of displays.  There is something about the turmoil on the outside matching the turmoil on the inside that creates a feeling of symbiosis deep within my soul.  I am drawn down into thought.  Thoughts about where I have been, thoughts about where I am now, and thoughts about where I will someday be.  The notary came by, last week, to have Mark and I sign paper after paper after paper as we are refinancing our beach home for a much better rate than we were able to lock into almost four years ago.  The words "in thirty years" flowed easily from the notary's mouth and stopped me cold in my thoughts as my hand systematically signed and signed and signed and signed and dated.  In thirty years I will be eighty years old.  80 years old.  My four Angel Daughters will be as old, or older than I am right now at this moment in time.  My nieces will be in their late thirties and early forties.  My parents will, most likely, be gone.  Long gone.  And my brother, he will still be only 41 years old...Has he had the chance to meet one of our heros, the larger than life Clarence Clemons, yet?  Dear God, I hope so.

Rainy days cause these kinds of thoughts to bubble up to the surface of my being.  The thoughts simmer there, oftentimes for days, bringing with them feelings of nostalgia, regret, hope, and renewal.

And as I take my old girl, my dog, Becca, outside, something in the water to the left of the bluff catches my attention and I am momentarily caught off-guard.  I hold my breath so as not to lose sight.  The surface of the water breaks with circular swirls of tiny bubbles.  Breath.  Air.  Life.  And then a fin...

And as I look down, she appears, gliding lazily along on currents.  My breathing somehow syncs along with her graceful dance along the water.  Under, above, under, above, like my moods when the rain comes and then leaves.

That evening, the sun returned just in time for sundown, the water smooth as glass.  It is 80 degrees outside here today.  The only clouds in the sky are wisps of cotton against the most beautiful of blues.  I am here, back to today, back to thirty one years away from my 80th year, back to life as it is.  I like it here. How to make the next thirty years slow down to a pace which does not feel like here and then gone?  That is the question that lays heavy on my heart.

Untangled

Walking down the beach a couple of days ago, Mark and I came upon the remnants of this giant tree which, after spending countless years being battered and tossed around in the immeasurable grasps of the ocean,  was carried back to the shore in yet another form.  Recognizable as to what it once was, but transformed in remarkable ways, this tree, now driftwood, must have spent years, even decades, rumbling around in the tumbling waves being shaped and transformed and smoothed and sharpened into what it is now.  As we approached this giant relic upon the beach, I was enthralled by its stoic presence.  I imagined it as it must have been, a graceful, strong tree rooted deeply in the ground someplace, green leaves swaying with the wind, branches turned up toward the sun, thriving for year upon year.  And then, I marveled at what it now is.  A solid piece of driftwood with trunk and branches and roots, stuck solidly in the sand on this beach in San Clemente.

We are like this, shaped by love and pain, longing and letting go, hope and regret.  We are often swept along in the emotions of life trying our hardest to stand firmly rooted in our deepest beliefs, knowing what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is not.  And yet, we change, we transform, and eventually, we even release, allowing the tides of life to pull us along while remaining some of who we once were, but constantly being reshaped, and smoothed and sharpened into who we now are.

Today we go back to court to so that the judge can rule on the monetary issues pertaining to the case I was forced to bring forth for visitation with my young nieces.  It has been over three years since my beloved brother died, two years since we filed our first motion for visitation and two weeks since we were told by the judge that although he would do things differently if it were up to him, the court could not find the mother of the children "unfit" and for that reason, and that reason alone, the state could not step in and force visitation on a parent who did not want to allow it. 14th amendment rights and all that...  When everything is said and done, I will write more about the decision and my thoughts about The Grandparent's Law(which includes siblings of the deceased), but for now I will only say that with the case that our attorney presented, there was absolutely NO way we could have won this thing.  We were led down a path in which only one result could have occurred according to the judge so now we must just tie up some loose ends and proceed with the next step in this process.

Over the course of the past three years since my brother's death, life became much more complicated than it should have been.  I found out a whole lot about who my family is(my husband, our four daughters, my father and his wife) and who would be willing to tangle the very tender strings of my heart into tight little knots, not caring whether or not they choked the very life out of me in the process causing me to end up in the same place that my beloved brother is.  And. I. Mean. That. Sincerely.  I discovered that there are people whom I considered "family" because my mother and my brother brought them into my life, individuals whom I cared for, defended against one another, entertained in my home, gave specific honors to at my children's Bat-Mitzvahs.  I let them in and I allowed them to be a part of my children's lives.  But, we cannot look back.  And once again, we have been reshaped by the experiences of life.

And as I begin to untangle the roots of my heart, I will keep this giant tree in mind.  I will remain steadfast in my beliefs and I will stand behind my decisions.  Life isn't only about remaining rooted deeply in one place.  It is about accepting the changes, transforming through the pain.  And sometimes, it is about untangling the mess that life can wrap around our souls.

*If you could say a silent prayer or send some positive energy our way as we head into court this afternoon, I would greatly appreciate it.  The thought of having to pay her attorney a dime, would prove that there is NO justice in family court and we have already lost too much.