Donnie

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

My big brother Don died the other day. He’s the first of us to go, so I’m not used to it yet.

I almost never called him Don. Maybe because I only really knew him when I was a child, maybe because there were seven years between us, maybe because the criminal who was my father kicked him out of our house when I was thirteen, but I nearly always called him as a child would. I called my big brother, Donnie.

Though my childhood hero who protected our dying mother from the coward she married, I barely knew him as a man. Our times together as adults were always good times, but rare times.

He was a gifted dancer, who married another gifted dancer.

They created a passel of kids, who created a passel of other kids, who are creating a passel more. All the kids who knew him loved him, and will tell stories to the kids who never knew him who will then love him too. Life after life. Everlasting.

I told my own story about Donnie many years ago when I was at university, in a tale about the death of our mother.

I recalled a heavily wooded park our family used to go to, where Donnie would run the cobweb paths and hide, and I could never find him. Because I could never find him, they were his secret paths. When she was very sick, my mother sought to give me hope, and promised to recover and show me where they were, but she died.

In the story, I remembered that a few days afterward I stood in my mother’s kitchen washing dishes, humming a tune mindlessly and pleasantly until I realized the lyrics I had been singing over and over to myself, but had not heard, were the words, may we always be together.

I put away the last dish, left our house, and walked by myself to the park, where I sat on a fallen tree and tried to remember all I could of my mother, but my grief was too great. I imagined that if I looked through the trees and squinted my eyes hard enough I might see her. But instead it was my brother Donnie I saw, and I heard him laugh and watched him duck through the path I could never find.

In the story he was gone from me again, and I shouted at the trees that hid my brother’s path and I knew I wouldn’t find it but I raised my body in a child’s determination to follow him anyway, and ran the wooded paths alone.

At least that was how it was in the story.

I didn’t quite catch which secret path Donnie went down this time either.

But I’m guessing I’ll go down that path myself, alone, one other day.