By L.A. Hunt
“Gilligan, Rat Face, and Rags.” There, I typed it. It’s shameful and I hate thinking about how I said it. Well, more than said. I sing-sang it, which is even more unforgivable. And I said this terrible thing to my sister. My rock. My only living family member and I can’t think of any scenario now where she isn’t present, offering perspective, advice, and laughter. Granted, we were kids when I thought of that toxic jingle. But I was also her older sister, and I should have made her feel safe, not isolated and alone.
This all came into my head while I sat on the bed in our hotel room in Pensacola while my sister yelled into the phone. “My father, as you call him, abandoned us a long time ago. And now you want us to ask for his permission to bury our brother? Unfuckingbelievable.” She slammed the hotel phone down. I flinched and felt bad for the phone cradle. And the receiver. And the coroner’s secretary.
It was policy, apparently. Contact the living parent. Our mother had been gone for ten years. Our stepfather, the man who raised and loved us like we were his own, a year. And because my sister slipped up on the phone to the coroner, we had to revisit the past. Which is, I guess, what triggered the jingle. As a general rule, I don’t like thinking about the past, which is also probably why I recently had a nervous breakdown, which is not a real medical term, I came to learn. The past, I thought, lives there for a reason, and really, we had come so far as a family, living through, and moving on from the trauma of domestic violence, we had put the proverbial past behind us once our mother had remarried. That’s not a thing either, putting the past away. So, the shame, my shame, slid in and lodged itself in the back of my skull that day in November in our hotel room in Pensacola. Grief is complicated. And because I’m me, I had to compound the already unbearable grief of my brother's death with the shame of being mean to my sister.
Shame is sneaky. It disguises itself. It can take the form of an overachiever. Or a people pleaser. It’s good at hiding, too. Behind the pancreas, or under the ribcage, even. And then it morphs into something else altogether. Anxiety, depression. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, closer to sixty than fifty-nine, the palms start to sweat, the chest tightens, the shaking takes control of the entire body, and the feeling that death is imminent sends shockwaves to the brain. And this, what, breakdown? It all happens in public.
“I’m so pissed at myself,” she said.
My brother-in-law and I sat in silence in the hotel room and waited. The moment it flew out of her mouth, this thing she regretted saying, that we had a living parent somewhere in South Carolina, I wanted to ring her neck. That man is not in our life. That man hurt our mother. That man scared me when I was little. But instead, I looked up how far the nearest Bucee’s was. Near the Florida - Alabama state line. A twenty-minute drive. Let’s go. It’s too much here in this hotel room. I want to go to a place where my brother went. Maybe he’ll be there and buy us beef jerky. Which I do not like. But I’ll eat it. Because I love him.
Loved.
No. Love. Present tense.
I love my sister too. So why am I thinking about how I hurt her when we were younger?
Oh, Pro-tip: Don’t over-share. Not when you want to recover your brother’s body from the morgue as soon as possible. Don’t offer more information. Don’t elaborate, just answer the questions at hand. And when a coroner asks, “Any living parents?” your answer should be no, especially if there are people in your past that you’d like to stay there.
Listen, there’s a reason our brother chose my sister over me to be his emergency contact. And beneficiary. While she handles shit, I cower in the corner and cry. If things don’t go her way, oh man, she’s relentless. My sister has always joked she was the family pit bull (no offense to actual pit bulls who, it turns out are just big mushy marshmallows, my sister too), unafraid of danger, or blood, or other people.
Three days earlier, my sister got The Call. My niece, a deputy sheriff, assured us protocol had been broken, that an officer should have come in person to break the news. Alas, my sister received news our brother had died over the phone while she was at work. Because of the three-hour difference, I was in bed when she called me. It’s the dread we all feel in the pit of our stomach. Why is the phone ringing at five am? Why is she calling so early? Why is she screaming? Why can ‘t I understand what she’s saying? Why am I crying now? What. Is. Going. On?
A notification appeared on my phone. His roommate messaged me on Facebook. “I have all the information. Please call. I know everything.” So, I did. And he did. Have all the details.
Details.
We want them. It’s a natural response in a crisis. But this desire to “have all the details” about everything, I’m convinced now, is our Achilles heel. Because we don’t think about how we will have to live with those details. We don’t realize they are filed away in our brains. Forever.
These are the details my sister and I will have to live with the rest of our lives. The roommate said goodnight to my brother at one am, even asked him, “Everything okay?” My brother answered yes. Sometime later, he was at the sink in the kitchen. That’s where it happened. During the fall, he broke his nose on the counter. The roommate found him there when he woke for work. A sobering detail came much later, he stopped breathing. Fentanyl.
But my brother was sober.
Except he wasn’t. More details to deal with.
When the death certificate came in the mail, it read, “Polysubstance Toxicity (Fentanyl, Ethanol, and Clonazepam), it was my turn to call my sister crying.
Here’s a story, a good one: When I graduated with my MFA, we chose a “walk song” to commemorate the moment, something meaningful to each of us, the graduates. Mine was “Moving on Up” by Primal Scream. When my sister and I gathered my brother’s belongings the weekend of his death, we got into his car with all the things that meant the most to him, his whole life in the trunk of his Jetta. I turned on the ignition. Out of the speakers blasted “Moving on Up” by Primal Scream. I never mentioned the song to him. We cried and drove to Bucee’s.
He wasn’t there, of course. But the trip gave me the breathing room I needed. The Flori-bama souvenirs comforted me in their familiarity. Every Bucee’s is the same but different. The Florida stores have palm trees on their t-shirts while the stores in Texas have the lone star, and in Georgia, peaches. Walking the aisles, my gut in knots for my brother, I could count on the items on the shelves to distract me. When I walk into a Bucee’s, there’s always something I didn’t know I needed. This time, it was Christmas presents for my grown children and my husband. They think Bucee’s is hilarious. And in a way, it is. But on that trip, I was thankful for its tacky branded shorts, and spatulas, and candied pecans in a way I never was before. I bought all the things and my family had fun opening them that Christmas and I got to think of my brother and how he was responsible for their joy. It made me smile, just for a moment.
My sister apologized in the car on the way back to the hotel.
“Why the hell did I backtrack and say we had another living parent? What is wrong with me?”
I shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
And anyway, it wasn’t her fault some wormhole opened inside me.
I sighed. “I have to call him then. And tell him about Mark. And tell him to release all rights so we can take care of our brother.”
“Yes. Ugh. But yes.”
So, I did. And he did. Release all his parental power to my sister and me. And we cremated our brother and took him home.
It’s been a year since he died. And I’ve been thinking about that “parental power.” It dawned on me that once our biological father released parental power, he also relinquished his power over me and our family’s past. He released me. From fear. And anxiety. I wished my brother was here so I could call him and tell him what took me almost sixty years to figure out. We’d laugh. “Better late than never,” he’d probably say.
I’ve also been thinking about that horrid jingle. I apologized once to her, my bright, shining star of a sister, through tears, after our mother died. She forgave me and said it didn’t matter. I can’t imagine it doesn’t bother her or she doesn’t think of it from time to time. It bothers me. More and more. I feel guilty for not being a better sister to her for most of our childhood and young adult lives. My therapist calls this “inappropriate guilt,” which is how I found myself in the throes of massive anxiety attacks at Target, and the grocery store, and countless other places where strangers were kind to me. And each time, I’d call my sister to tell her all about it. And despite the seriousness of it all, we laughed. And I laughed at myself and at all the years I spent not laughing. It feels good to laugh now. Especially with my sister. No one knows me better. Or loves me more unconditionally. She’s always on my side and sees the dark corners I don’t. I don’t deserve her, and yet, I can’t imagine my life without her. Look for us at a Bucee’s, we’ll be there laughing at the souvenirs but mostly at ourselves.
L.A. Hunt is passionate about lots of things. Her latest online search obsessions include books, coffee, zombies, outdoor living spaces, wireless bras, lip balm, zodiac signs as boba drinks, best wine patios, screenwriting hacks, doomsday prepping, urban gardening, Tokyo Owl Café and Texas BBQ. Her protagonists are almost always women, on the verge of all that life has to offer—the love, the loss, the conflict, and the heartbreak—all part and parcel of coming of age, at any age. She is an educator with twenty years of experience teaching high school English, four of those as a high school Assistant Principal. Along with an MA in Educational Leadership, she has an MFA in Creative Writing from the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency Program where her main genre was fiction, and her cross-genre was screenwriting. She recently completed UCLA’s Professional Certificate Program in TV Writing. She served as the Fiction Editor for the 2021 Winter Issue of The Coachella Review, the university’s literary magazine. Her nonfiction has been published by You Might Need Hear This Magazine, GXRL, and The Coachella Review, among others.
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