Happy birthday in heaven, Bub! It’s so hard for me to believe you’ve been gone for six years now. In some ways those years have dragged by with excruciating slowness. In other ways, it has flown. On February 17, 2017, you left so suddenly it took my breath away. Though I have no regrets about our relationship in the years before you went, I do believe every person who has lost someone as important to them as you were to me will always say they wish they’d had more time. Now it’s your birthday, and you’d have been 55 this year.
So much has happened in the space between the two dates. 2027 days of living without you in this world has been hard. Harder still since Dad and so many we both loved have joined you there. The crowd over here gets smaller and the crowd over there gets bigger, and I swear to you it makes dying much a far less frightening task than it ever was to me before.
Many times, people will look at me so strangely when I cannot speak your name without breaking down, even now. It’s difficult to convey who you were to me. I can go on and on and never feel like I’ve quite touched on it. So, I tell them simply, “Shawn was my person,” and hope they can somehow imagine how much it might bother me to have you gone forever. You were the one man who always accepted me as I was and never even intimated that I should change. That is a rare thing to find in anyone, and I rarely feel that from anyone.
I sometimes wondered in the first year if I would die from losing you. I believe there must be a way for people to know what their earthbound loved ones are doing after we go to the afterlife. There has to be. I’m sorry if I worried you in that time. I guess I had to decide I was going to keep going, and many times that doesn’t paint itself out to be the prettiest picture, does it? But I made it out. I decided to go forward. Slowly, but slowly forward.
There are moments every day when I think of something you would laugh at. I hear a song, and I think of how you loved it, or hated it. Whenever we are together as a family, I will invariably think of how you would love it, how you loved the family get-togethers. I have yet to go to a concert, but I know I will miss you when I finally do. There is so much I want to talk to you about, and even now I think about the fact that, if you were here right now, you and Brick would probably be downstairs laughing like idiots together about whatever lies you were telling each other about. I do miss your laugh more than most anything.
I guess I’m just trying to tell you I still miss you on some days like you just left me. They say grief is the price we pay for love, and if that’s how it is then I guess I am glad I have to pay so high a price for loving you like I do. Because even though I haven’t seen your face in so many, many days now, I don’t love you any less today than I ever did.
Children have grown up, and people have grown old in your absence. New babies have been born, and that joy is so terribly bittersweet because we all know how you would have loved them. We always make sure to talk about you, how good you were. We tell the stories about you and about growing up together, how we fought and how we loved, and how we clung to each other when we were grown, when we didn’t have to be close anymore. How we stayed so close, and how we became friends and not just siblings. Those are the things I tell them about. And the funny stuff, like how we went skinny dipping, all of us and our friends, right there at the park below the 10th Street Bridge, and your swim trunks somehow floated away so we thought you were going to have to go walk home naked… I’m laughing through my tears as I write this to you even! Hahahaha! Still funny 40 years later.
My last birthday turned me older than you got the chance to be. There is something so odd about that, so disconcerting, maybe stranger than the fact you’ve been gone more than six years. I am now older than my big brother got to be. You know, Bub, for the last few months before I turned 49, I kept thinking maybe I would just somehow die before it happened, because it’s not fair for me to be older than you when we were six years apart for my whole life. And I didn’t say a word to anyone, just kept thinking something would happen. Like maybe nature would hear my thoughts and correct the problem I was having believing my age when it was clearly a mistake for me to get older than you did. Isn’t that the limit? But I’m still here, and I’m slowly doing the things we talked about.
I am getting a headache from crying, Bub, so I’m going to go for now. I am sure I will cry again, and I’m sure I’ll continue to talk to you when I’m in the car alone. I promise not to spend more time crying than I spend laughing about you. I just miss you being on this earth with me.
I hope you’re having a big old party in paradise today. I hope you’re having German chocolate cake and mint chip ice cream, and you get the best piece. I hope you and Dad and Aunt Peggy and Connie and Uncle Mike and all the people we both loved who have gone are having the best birthday party Heaven has ever seen. I hope all your parties in Heaven are so loud that God has to come to complain about the noise and ends up hanging out with you instead, because these are the coolest people He ever made!
Love,
Bug
DEE SCOTT ERICKSON, author 