Michael in
the Sky
Michael loved the stars. He mastered the telescope long before he rode a bicycle, and knew the constellations while other kids stumbled over their ABC’s. It made a crazy sense then that the oxygen tank, nasal prongs, and later the breathing mask made my brother look more like a space cadet than the desperately ill patient he truly was. The IV tubing snaked in all directions, flexed along the carpet, over the La-Z-Boy armrest in triple tracks, serving meds and air, and the discreet collection of bodily fluids.
It won’t be long, the family doctor said, as if we were waiting outside a five-star restaurant.
Much too long, I wanted to shout. Endless days and nights, obscene weight loss, morphine drips, and grimaces that Michael said were lazy smiles. My ass!
But Michael needed to be my big brother and so I let him tell me how dying was a mere transition, how our souls are not in our bodies but our bodies in our souls, bigger, more beautiful than anything we could possibly imagine. I wanted to believe that, the way I believe in the laws of gravity. I wanted to believe my tall, handsome brother had a soul the size of Texas and was headed straight for the stars.
Sadly, I’m a better doubter than believer.
Early on, I fought back my grim suspicions. Michael would kick the disease, Mother declared, and I nodded, a dashboard bobblehead. Fifty-fifty shot, the oncologist said with an expert’s confidence, but then Michael answered with a loose, reckless laugh.
“Better odds than the lottery.”
His cavalier tone left me edgy and angry, but I blamed my mood shifts on the moon and hormone imbalances. Thyroid, I said. It must be thyroid.
The nagging doubts didn’t stop Mother from throwing a “Beat the Cancer” party, a neighborhood open house any other time. Relatives and neighbors drank piņa coladas and told miraculous survivor tales. Aunt Charlotte recalled a colleague who’d been given a dismal prognosis and then outlived his doctor by ten years. Mr. Pollack, who lived next door, recounted his wife’s near-death experience—the floating, the white light, and then the flaky details of dead relatives and spirit guides directing traffic to the “other” side.
Okay, I’m game. Other side of what?
Two beers and a dozen stories later I needed fresh air. I slipped out onto the patio and found Michael sprawled in a lounge chair. The air was remarkably mild for late October, a deceptive patch of Indian summer. My mind wandered to earlier seasons, idle and innocent, and then to my ongoing university term, crammed with tests and lectures and endless Q & A’s.
Outside, Mother’s newly purchased tiki lanterns sputtered and spat. Weird shadows played across the deck. Michael gazed up, transfixed by the night sky.
“It’s going to kill me, Junie. You can’t tell Mom, but the end will happen sooner rather than later.”
I fought the truth then, the same truth I’d had all along, but it was different when Michael said it, an unstoppable prophecy. I wanted to repeat the dumb stories of miraculous cures, experimental drugs, or lay right into him with, Ahhh, you got your medical degree and forgot to tell us. But even in the half-light, I saw the future in Michael’s face. He needed to tell someone—an honest, last rites’ confession. That someone was me.
I kept the secret until Michael weighed less than I did. His face became a mask of keen angles and shadows, an El Greco portrait. Mother maintained an upbeat pretense, but gave in that last afternoon, oddly the easiest—eyes closed, long, raspy breaths, and then the oh so gentle drifting away.
When people ask about Michael, I tell them my brother was an astronaut. Michael would have loved that and laughed like crazy. I’d like to believe the disease that spun through my brother’s lungs and kidneys and then cruelly to his brain was a perfectly acceptable mystery like the Big Bang theory and the ever-expanding universe, where stars are born, perish, and are reborn every day. The sky is an incubator, Michael once said, a billion embryos spinning through space, events we cannot see yet know are happening through wavelengths, color shifts and surprising, sometimes breath-taking leaps in faith and reasoning.
A little like love, I guess.
Restless nights, I wander to the patio, settle down in a lounger and read beneath a pale yellow light. There’s always a crazed moth willing to bruise its frail wings in a flutter of desperate longing. I could easily kill the creature. But I do not.
Instead, I dog-ear my page and gently close my book. And then, though I know it’s foolish, even daft, I gaze up and search the starry sky.
Copyright 2007 by Margaret A. Frey
Margaret writes:
