Cease Fire

He lay in his Army green, medals forefront.  A grieving tear drops onto his lifeless body. A closer look. My body shakes. Questions crowd my mind. Why? How? I don’t understand. I hear groans and tumult from the doorway. Three young teens stand in the shadow beneath the frame – thrown, broken, despaired.

One charges forward high paced laced in anguish. I follow. He throws his arms on the rim of the shiny casket. Head hangs low, knuckles turn white. I slip my arms around his thin waist. His thirteen year old casing quivers. He trembles violently. Bitter salted water stream down his cheeks – mine too. We embrace.

Mother runs in and pulls him away. “What are you doing?” she yells. She ushers him toward the exit. He leaves a trail of tattered gloom. “This isn’t how a young son is to remember his father,” I plead. Yet nothing can be done. The deed is over, the task is finished, the unfaltering persistent quest to live has ended.

The room sits empty now. No one approaches the lonely body. “It’s just a body,” I say to myself. Silence. I feel his spirit near. Then emotions. Feelings mixed with anger, disappointment, freedom, and truce loiter in the air. Anger that he was taken so quickly, yet freedom for him - one desperate soul longing to find his place. He fights the world. He fights himself. A cease-fire - and God takes him home.

Others approach now and enter solemn - gloomy. They carry thick mounds of moods and lay them at the base of the coffin. Some stagger away while others amble. I watch from a distance. A realization pricks my sometimes stony heart. We all deal with pain in our own way – busting jabs of anger and plush gentle swipes on the cheek are just a few. Some walk dazedly by and pretend it doesn’t matter.

“It’s just a body,” I remind myself once more.  But the body I try so hard to declare as empty is my brother’s. No. He is not gone. I turn and know his life is easy now. Ours is difficult, calloused ridden and broken down. “Will the sun shine tomorrow,” I ask the Lord in a gentle whisper. “What will life look like now?”  

He is happy. I see his face smiling with my dad’s. My nephew sits too. I miss them all. And then the vision fades and flows away as if someone waved their hand through the silky water. But in my heart is left a peace - deep - profound. Rays of light beam through my window. Yes. Breathe. Live.