Mourning the Dead

Edvard Munch had a thing about death, and when I saw an exhibit of his work last summer, there was a whole room full of paintings that were about death and dying.  This one in particular really captures how I feel, almost 50 years later, about the death of my brother.
He was born over half a century ago and came home on my second birthday.  I don't remember that part, or when he got polio five months later.  I always remember him in a wheelchair, and as such he was more often home than not.  We were unusually close for siblings, mostly as a result of his physical limitations, and when he dies when I was ten, I was a bereft child living in a house with parents who had lost their child and a remaining sibling who could barely walk and talk.  The loneliness and sadness that this painting captures is so much about how hard, almost impossible it was to move beyond that grief.  It wasn't until I was in college that I could even face that it was a problem and even today, I will sob through anything that I write that skirts on his death.  However, that is not the memory that he would have wanted to leave behind.  So I find joy in my sons, who carry a bit of him inside them, and on this one day each year, I cry.  It is a compromise.