Mendy Hunter was born and raised in Pennsylvania. She is the fourth of eight children. Mendy left the lush, green hills of her home and headed west to BYU. After taking a scholastic break to complete a mission in Romania, she graduated with an English degree. Soon thereafter, she married, started a family and moved to Maryland, where she currently resides. Mendy now has four children and spends her days in the full-time occupation of motherhood. Interests in addition to her family include reading, quilting, hair-styling and blogging at Mother Is A Verb at www.mendyhunter.blogspot.com
I have seen death. I was touching my five-year-old brother when he took his last breath. “I love you, Brent. I love you,” I repeated as I stroked his arm. I wanted him to hear that, to know that, and to remember it when he slipped from this world to the next. His weary body had been fighting the leukemia for almost four years, but his death certificate blames pneumonia for his demise. (The slightest common cold quickly turns into pneumonia when your body doesn’t have the immune system to fight it.)
My father, older brother and I reclined on the bed around his failing body. “My right lung just collapsed,” he announced through ragged breaths. How did he even know what that felt like? I wondered. His breathing grew louder, more labored, if such a thing were possible. Then it was silent. Painfully, loudly silent; we did not speak to break the ugliness. There was nothing to say.
Whenever I think of that Wednesday afternoon in March twenty-three years ago, I weep. I cry out of sadness for the twelve-year-old girl who became intimately acquainted with grief at such a young age. I cry for my brother who lost his best friend, and, for a time, his faith in God. I cry for my parents who watched a disease gain victory over their baby boy.
And, if I am truly honest, I will admit that I cry for a thirty-five-year-old woman who still loves a brother she can barely remember. I have only a hand-full of recollections of him left in my memory. When I read my diaries from the months and years immediately following his death, I see the words, “I miss Brent” written in my pubescent bubble script and I don’t empathize with them. I never think to write those words now. I used to feel guilty that I don’t feel a big void in my life where another brother should be, but now I don’t. I understand that the void isn’t there because my brother still lives. Without a second thought, I count him as one of my siblings even though he hasn’t been around at Christmas or weddings with the rest of us. I still love him.
On the day he died, I knew that Brent’s beloved Transformers weren’t going with him, nor was his state-of-the-art Teddy Ruxpin bear, but he could certainly leave this earth with the thought in his mind that his sister loved him. Even after he took his last breath, I endlessly repeated, “I love you, Brent. I love you.” And I still do.
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