Goddamn it, you've got to be kind

BLOT: (03 Jun 2014 - 01:48:41 PM)

Goddamn it, you've got to be kind

My brother, Shawn Bolden, died officially on Thursday, May 29, 2014 around 4pm. He was thirty years old. He had been brain dead for an unspecified time before then, with some estimates suggesting late night Tuesday, May 27. I managed to see him before then, and so I like to think that somewhere, in whatever dreams he may have had, that he had heard my voice, but I have no idea. He suffered a severe head trauma on Monday, about 5pm or so. At the time, he was responsive, but doctors said he was deteriorating fast. I have no idea if anything anyone could have done could have saved him. At least one doctor said that the damage he sustained was fatal, just not immediately so, which means he was never going to recover. I am not sure if this is comforting or not.

What I am sure of is that when we buried him, on Sunday, the first of June, that his service had very little to do about him and almost everything to do about people going to hell, which felt disrespectful. Some of my family took comfort from it, I suppose, because they are of the general opinion that Shawn had enough religion to get to the Pearly Gates, but it was like watching a reverse Pascal's Wager, about whether or not it was worth it to risk having an everyday life versus dying soon to have one everlasting. I have no opinion I am going to state here about whether or not Shawn made it to heaven, I just mostly hope he had a few good dreams before his brain turned off. That would be enough for me, right now. I also just want to fill in a few gaps that were not spoken on Sunday, and to talk about Shawn rather then merely the concept of Shawn-in-hell vs Shawn-in-heaven. Not only because it will be nice to talk about him as he was, but because Shawn hated going to the sort of funerals where they emotionally blackmailed family. Shame his touched upon that same thing.

That's a picture of Shawn, on the left, and Danny on the right. My younger brother by 7 years, my older brother by about 10. That is generally how I remember Shawn. Slightly plump. Tall. Strong arms. Almost never not smiling. Bushy hair managed by a practical cut. Scraggly facial hair. Clothes a bit ragged even when he could afford better ones. To add to the picture, he talked in fairly heavy Alabama drawl, but one influenced by TV and something like urban culture. When excited, he could be almost hard to understand, but he tended to talk fairly slow. When growing up, his inclinations were towards vehicles, hunting, and fishing. In that, he was fairly standard redneck. I think most of us pegged him to be a candidate for a truck driver or some sort of outdoor sportsman, but he was a bit too much of a homeboy for the former, and like many rednecks, seemed to use the latter more as an excuse to get out and get his hands dirty.

One thing that some of you know, and others do not, is that Shawn was not born my brother. He was born my nephew. For reasons, he ended up spending most of his time at my house while growing up. Eventually, some paperwork was signed, I think, that gave my mother legal guardianship over him, but whether or not we were fully legal siblings, I am not sure. What is important is that Shawn and I were raised as brothers and treated each other as such. He introduced me as his brother and I introduced him as mine. We played videogames together. We went to movies together. We got mad at each other. We swapped secrets. We built little stick huts in the woods. We went on walks. We talked about stupid shit. I cooked lunch for him while my mother was at work. I made him do his chores. He tattled on my porn collection. He stole some CDs from me. We would wrestle so hard we would come out bruised. I bought him a cigar to celebrate his daughter being born. I one time swapped out his newer PS2 for my slightly older one without telling him [he never seemed to notice]. I was there at his wedding. I was a pall-bearer at his funeral. Everything that mattered.

Danny and I talked some, this weekend, about how Shawn was as a kid. How he was this big, somewhat brash and blustery boy that would get so nervous and self-conscious at random times. Like when he would go swimming. He was afraid of water being over his head so he would clench his nose and dive in feet first, and then paddle around with his head out of the water, but he had a look of sheer glee on his face to get that far. Or when he would get on the trampoline and wouldn't really try any sort of backflips or anything, but would just kind of bounce on his knees and then his feet and was fine with it. He was the kind of kid to look up cheat codes to videogames before he would try them out. He was scared of snakes, so much so that I once freaked him out by dropping an obviously rubber one on him. He was weak-stomached enough that once when I faked vomit, he ended up projectile vomiting for real. Heh, I was a mean older brother, at times.

Around the time he was 14, I moved up to Huntsville to go to UAH. I missed quite a bit of his growth into an adult. I would see him about twice a year. He would be a bit taller, every time. Often a little more bad-boy. I remember coming in late one night, around 2001, and he was asleep in our father's favorite recliner, a late-night hunting show on TV, and he had a rifle in his lap. It was such a Shawn moment, to see him nodding off and dreaming of being a top-notch deer hunter.

We had times where he would travel back up with me to Huntsville, and we would stop off at some state park or another, and tour. He was growing into that not-quite-grown awkward stage, where he was more and more social aware. Sometimes he would get flustered at Mama's insistence at taking pictures of Civil War re-enactors and such. He was there the night we underwent the big storm in Guntersville State Park, though for some reason I did not mention him in the post. After that, he and I slightly drifted apart. He hung out with people I did not know. Had fairly different opinions on most things. We still got along, and quite a bit, but it was out of mutual love more than mutual interest. I do not know what sort of pre-marriage love-life he had. Or what his goals were. We just enjoyed talking about nothings, mostly.

Probably the most time I've spent with him since my move to Huntsville was this past holiday season. He had moved back in with Mama and so he and I had several hours to sit around and catch up. It wasn't necessarily pleasant, some stuff had gone pretty sour in his life, but he was still glad to see me and I think kind of wanted to impress me despite all the crap that had gone down. It was a bit weird, but families often are, and so I appreciated the effort.

The last time I had gone down South, prior to last week, was to visit my mom right after she recovered from surgery to remove cancer [which, as far as I know, was successful]. She had moved into an apartment, and Shawn had taken over her old house, and we were on a very tight time budget so only had something like six or seven hours with her. At the time, we just missed Shawn visiting and we figured that was ok, because we would have more time down the road to visit with him, then. This would have been something like March. Damn, huh?

If I had to tell just one story about Shawn, one actual story that wasn't just an impression, it would be this one. One time I had walked down to our family pond and as I coming back up, Shawn ran up to me, purple in the face, and screamed, "She's gonna get me! HELP!". Turns out that Shawn had done something and had gotten into trouble, but when Mama fussed at him, his blustery response was, "I'm going to tell Pa [my father] on you!" My mom did not take kindly to such threats. She picked up a belt, and he took off. As he ran to me for help, there were two options: turn him in and get it over with, or run off with him and probably make it worse (but more fun). I thought about both, I remember looking behind me and wondering how far we could get, but then I talked him to going ahead and getting it over with. I sometimes wonder, though.

At the funeral, there was a slideshow of images from his life, photos from all over. I was in a few. I remember a few others. There were some of him as a grown man with a wife and kids, after I had become the guy that visited during the holidays. It was good to see those millionbillion-Shawns, not just the one in the casket, who utterly lacked the animation or the goofy grin of the living-Shawn. Also sad, because that little kid on a tractor was only 25 years in the past, and that man standing in another photo with his own five-year-old child easily had more than half his life in front of him. So it goes. I do not regret not visiting more. I love my family, but I do not think I could have reached out in any particular way to him that I hadn't already done. We were who we were, and we loved each other for it.

But I want to end on a particular note. The title of this post is from a Vonnegut novel. I'll conclude with the full version. Something to keep in mind. I won't lecture about "Hug a Loved One", but this quote was the first words to pop into my head upon thinking about his funeral. Shawn's song is sung, but I'm glad I was part of it.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: June 2014