haunted...

my name is Andrew Edward and I have always been haunted by the memory of someone I never knew.

On October 29th, forty one years ago, six years before I was born, my mother's brother was accidentally shot to death in the woods several miles from his own home. He was fifteen years old. His name was Andrew Edward before me.

I have grown up with a few photographs.

There are fewer than ten school pictures. Which is so many and so few. The changes from year to year are so incremental and each one is a cypher for how much he has changed. How much more he dreams about. Each one is a cypher that reveals so much and so little.

There are a few others. A picture on Santa's lap. A yearbook photo when he is on the football team.

Maybe it is the scarcity of the photos that haunts me. All the gaps between the posed instants. And those gaps so full of life and living have only been recounted to me in stories and anecdotes, in silences and tears.

.

I know that he was extraverted, witty like my grandfather, a risk taker, a pole vaulter, had a reddish tint in his hair (another secret that black and white pictures keep), a strong swimmer, an outdoorsman.

He drove the snowplow before he was ten. He was a joker. Everybody loved him.

.

He called out to my grandmother as he left that afternoon, "if I'm not back by sundown, send out the militia." By the time she left for her bowling league, she passed the ambulance on the way out of the city.

My grandfather ran back into the woods because his son's hysterical friend came running out of the woods screaming that Andy was dead. He carried his son more than a mile back to the house.

My mother was a senior in high school. She answered the phone call from the bowling alley where my grandmother had an ugly premonition. She screamed "Andy's Dead."

.

Like the young suitor in Joyce's story, I have lived in awe of these people. My grandparents, my mother, her sister. These people have managed to piece together a life in the face of the deepest tragedy I can imagine.

I would watch as a boy, with a detached sadness when my mother was overcome by the loss. Sobbing while she vacuumed and washed dishes.

And when anyone was taking leave of each other in our family, my mother would start to cry. "Hug your brothers and your sister! Always tell each other how much you love each other. You don't know when you'll see each other again."

And I did hug them. As I squeezed them, I knew I was really reaching further, trying to hold tighter, trying to recover Andy. Who was always disappearing a little more. But who would always be here -- found in our embraces.

.

So ultimately, I am haunted by love.

I wonder if grief is a kind of catalyst that can turn people more bitter or more good? I wonder if grief is a solvent, whenever any other new problem arises in life, the new problem can quickly be tossed like a small bitter tablet into the always waiting, always fizzing cup of grief -- the cup which dissolves all minor sorrows -- and yet must be drunk again and again as a reminder of the ways that love and hope have always been the best things we've ever had? The best things we can ever keep hoping for.