I am certain that memories are often the tools of the devil.
Like you could be having a really regular day and then a memory is slammed in your face like one of those doors with the hinges that swing both ways. The initial slam slows its velocity a bit, but it keeps going back and forth, slap, slap, slap.
That's where my head is at tonight, in case you are wondering, in the past. It in September 2017. Before, it all, I went to see Lady Gaga in concert and I remember thinking how I wanted to take my brother the next time Lady Gaga came around. The entire show of dancing and singing and piano playing and celebrating all the glorious things that music can do was exactly an event that my brother would have loved. A few days later, he was dying. Two weeks later, he was dead.
Tonight, I walked by the doors we went in after he was air lifted. I passed by the building he died in. I drove over the bridge I was driven over by my best friend Karen after he died. Every step and every breath was haunted by the memories of his death--not of his life. I hate remembering how he died. I want to remember how he lived.
Death is the devil when it comes and it is the devil when you remember all of it.
And friends, I am telling you all of this because I think honestly and truth are the most important things. I think I can walk around and laugh--and I will laugh tonight and tomorrow and the next day--and then moments later I can crumble or maybe I won't. I will always carry this pain in me and these memories of death in me and there is nothing I can do about it, except acknowledge that memories can try to defeat me--and they might very well defeat me, but they won't win.
Because right now, my sweet son is asleep in his bed and my beautiful girls are asleep in theirs. That is real. My hair looks good. My statement of purpose is submitted to Johns Hopkins. I have my Lady Gaga playlist queued up for a weekend of car and kitchen dancing with my kids. I have the present to remind me that the memories--those memories are a tool of the devil--and I don't need to dwell in them. I can just simply acknowledge their existence and then say goodbye and pray that swinging door hits those memories on the way out.
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