This is a story of a boy, a man, a father, a brother, a son, a friend. . .
On August 6, 2010, I received a phone call from my brother's neighbor telling me my brother had died. Words were spoken, but I have forgotten most of them. The rest of the day was a blur of phone calls, notifying siblings, parents, and friends. I went to my brother's apartment with my sister. It was a drug overdose. We were questioned by detectives. We met with neighbors. We had to make arrangements to move him to a funeral home. All the details that need attention and decisions that had to be made were crashing in on us. There is no mercy or time to grieve. Only take control of the situtation and move ahead. Nothing prepared any of us for this kind of loss.
I knew his affairs were in disarray. He was sick and poor. Years of health issues foced him to seek public assistance through Social Security disability. There was a divorce left incomplete. There were children involved who lost a father. There was a culture of poverty and drugs that I had no clue in how to respond. I couldn't begin to understand how people could watch a man die and seemingly do absolutely nothing. I wasn't prepared for a system that would appear to regard a drug addict's death as one more step in battling the drug problem. Even more than that, I struggled with a system that was too busy to provide the personalized care for the sick it was supposed to help. In short, I never realized how truly far down the road of medicating his physical and possibly his emotional pain he had travelled. Whatever he felt in the deepest recesses of his soul are forever locked in secret.
In the days and weeks following his death, my siblings and I looked at his personal effects and began to piece together what might have happened. In the ugliness of that day, we recognized that whether or not we could fully comprehend the environment in which he lived and the people with whom he associated, it became abundantly clear that they had lost someone they truly cared about and who cared about them. Even in the shock of losing a brother, a fraction of my heart began to heal.
This is a story of a boy, a man, a father, a brother, a son, a friend. . .
The man that died that horrible day may have taken a road which led to an early end to his life. But that is not the story of who he was. In remembering his life, I can move on and live the rest of mine with a little more hope and peace. But, more than that, I want to tell his story so that even if one person decides to make a change, his death will not have been as senseless as it seems right now.
Two weeks after Charley died, I brought his ashes home to our parents. In the three hour drive to Prineville Oregon from my home in Salem, it was just him and me in the car. I had a lot of time to think and reflect. Just before you get to Prineville, you descend down a grade from the top of the rimrocks to the valley below. I remembered my mother telling us that when Charley took flying lessons he always loved flying over the rimrocks. The next evening, I drove to the top of one of the rimrocks and sat for a period of time just to think. All I could hear was the whisper of the breeze. Even the bustling town below seemed respectfully more silent.
This is a story of a boy, a man, a father, a brother, a son, a friend. . .
He is gone from us. His tears and pain are forever locked away in the past. His laughter and joy are forever in the presence of God. His life was too short, but he touched many. The spirit of who he was is but a whisper on the Rimrock.
