Ethan

Next week we are going up to Philadelphia to Max’s family home where two of his older brothers still live because his oldest brother, Jeff, is coming in from Michigan for a visit. I think I have mentioned before that Jeff is 21 years older than Max and was leaving home for graduate school when Max was born. Nevertheless they’ve always been pretty close. Jeff and Max are the only two brothers that married and had families. Marilyn, my sister-in-law on Max’s side of the family, is very kind and welcoming, and Jeff and Marilyn’s daughter Jennifer has two boys who are both older than Sarah.

There must be a word for this kind of family situation in German or another foreign language, where some grandkids are born after great-grandkids in a family. I Googled this morning, and I got nothing. When my mother-in-law passed away, she was in the hospital having her heparin levels adjusted and was apparently chatting with some nurses and joking and laughing about the fact that she had a new grandbaby coming although she already had great-grandkids, and amid laughing she starting coughing and choking and her heart gave out and she went into a comatose state. I’ve always felt a bit guilty about that. It was a huge shock and loss to everyone.

Jeff and Marilyn, along with Jennifer and her brother Julian, came out very quickly after Sarah died, and they stayed a long time. Jeff and Marilyn lost their third child, Max’s nephew Ethan, when Ethan was 16 or 17 and Max was 22 or 23, I’m not exactly sure. It was a terrible loss. Ethan killed himself with a gun the family owned. Nobody really knows exactly why. Max says that the belief is Ethan had some anxiety around leaving home to go to college. But the specific circumstances are not known. Teenagers can be so impulsive and one thought follows another into action. Jeff and Marilyn wanted to be here for us when Sarah died because they knew what it meant to lose a child, and they were.

Jeff called a couple of weeks after they left, and we chatted for a few minutes. He asked how I was doing and he told me “I still think about Ethan every day.” This was reassuring to know, and a little daunting too, I guess. It reminded me for some reason of my mother telling me that her father, my Papa Manny, would sometimes get sad and maudlin thinking about a younger brother who died back in the early 1900’s when the boy ran into the street and got kicked in the head by a horse when Papa Manny was “watching” him.

I guess people live a long time with grief, guilt, and their memories. I don’t have to worry about forgetting about Sarah. But on the other hand, there’s probably not going to be a point when these “triggering” moments just go away, and I stop feeling guilty for not being here when she died.