Mickey

It was early autumn, sunny with large cumulus clouds in the morning sky, pleasantly cool with a slight breeze off the lake. It was mid-morning and i was heading to my second day of a memoir writing class at the University of Chicago’s riverfront campus.

I was happy because of the beautiful day and happy to be starting on a project that had long interested me. It was a good day in class; I felt I learned a lot about writing a memoir and was anxious to use the skills and format taught: scene, story, reflection.

During class, my bother Patrick texted me to say that his son and my brother Tom’s son had both passed the bar exam. I was elated and slipped out of class to call and congratulate them.

As I left the building after class I noticed another call from Patrick. I waited to call him from the car. When I did, no answer. That was odd. Now I was on Fairbanks heading south. The day was still glorious and sunny with lots of beautiful clouds in the sky. Suddenly the phone rang. With that call the day became dark, the sun disappeared, and the clouds turned grey.

“Mickey’s dead” he said, his voice cracking. “What?” It didn’t register, I must have heard wrong. “What?!” I screamed incredulously into the phone. Without looking for traffic, I made an immediate U-turn and headed north, towards Mickey’s condo. “He’s dead. I just found him. He’s been dead awhile. I’m here alone with him.”

Michael, or “Mickey” as we still called him, was one of my older brothers. He was just before me, so he was the fifth of eight and I was the sixth. There was five years between us.

When I was little I remember watching Mickey sitting at his desk on the back porch counting his paper route money. The pennies would go in piles of ten, then the nickels, then the dimes and finally the quarters. In those days there were far more pennies than anything else. I think the morning paper was only 4 cents. Mickey got his first paper route when he was only nine or ten years old. . . and he continued to work hard his whole life.

He worked hard in school too. I can still see him at that same desk studying, pouring over his books. When I struggled in school, Mickey took me to his back porch desk and taught me how to take one assignment at a time and not to stress. He also showed me how to nail wood planks together and add roller skates to make a boxcar. Then he would push me fast down the street. Now he was gone?

Today my knees are beginning to fail me; sometimes it’s painful to walk. Running, I had thought, was in my past. But when I jumped out of the car across the street from Mickey’s condo, I ran. The doorman saw me coming and quickly and kindly opened the door and ushered me to elevator.

When I exited the elevator it became sadly irrevocably true. Mickey’s daughter, my grown niece, mother of three, had just arrived. Patrick would not let her into the condo. She was crying, . . no, it was more like primmoral screaming. She saw me and collapsed into my arms. I’ve never been hugged like that. She was dead weight. I had to hold her up. She was crying, long guttural cries. She was begging God to change this.

  
Michael, his wife and two of his daughters, Tracy is on his right. 

I held her close and, stupidly told her it would be all right. “No it won’t.,” her reply came from somewhere deep inside of her. “No it won’t. It won’t ever be right again. I don’t know if I can get through this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this again. He’s all I had left.”

She was right about that. Her sister, just two years older, had died just as unexpectedly a year previous. Almost exactly a year before this very date. Tracy was Mickey’s oldest. She and Courtney were born less than two years apart while he was still in night school earning his law degree and working days as an undercover IRS agent.

Mickey, Courtney and my whole family had gone through the unbelievable pain, and heartbreak of Tracy’s death October 6, 2011. Today was October 1 a year later.  Now we were hit in the stomach again.

What was going through my mind as I held my niece was that I longed to see my brother. I couldn’t leave her of course, but what I really wanted the most was to fly into his condo and grab him by the shoulders and wake him up. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I’d shout. “Scaring us like that.” Mickey was always joking, he was known for his sense of humor. But this, this was not funny

Suddenly (or was it gradually?) the hall filled with my brothers, my sister, in-laws, nieces, and nephews. Everyone seemed to get there with lightening speed. My husband arrived and enveloped me in his arms.

The police finally left. “It was a natural death,” they said. “You can call the funeral home to pick up the body.” “The body!?” my mind reeled. “What body? That’s my brother.”

While waiting for the funeral home, we, the family, slowly entered that place in which my brother drew his last breath. First the siblings, spouses, then the nieces and nephews hesitatingly entered. Patrick was right it wasn’t a pretty sight. If there is a word for what I saw and what I felt, I really don’t know what it would be: shock, grief, sorrow, horror, sadness, anguish, heartache, pain, misery . . . none of them seem adequate. Even all those words together don’t begin to sum it up; the death was too sudden, the scene too awful, the grief and shock too great.

The body on the floor wasn’t Michael, yet it was. He looked so small lying on the floor. A few wisps of his still-dark hair were sticking out above the white muslin cloth with which the paramedics had covered him. Someone, I don’t know who, slowly pulled back the cloth. That cold, hard, lifeless, rock-like imagine of my big brother who worked so hard his whole life, who helped me learn to study, will never leave me.

The following days are a blur. Wake and funeral arrangements were made and held. Hundreds, maybe more, came and offered their condolences. Stories were told of Michael, how he helped so many people in his life, his jokes were repeated.

But as we lost Mickey, he gave us a gift: a gift of love. . the love we all share but seldom acknowledge.

My nieces lost their dad; their children lost their grandpa. We lost our brother, our uncle, cousin, and nephew. But what we did not lose was our love for one another. We clung to and supported each other throughout. We, the remaining siblings, were the pallbearers. As we carried Michael James Murphy down the church aisle and physically out of our lives I believe that each of us was remembering the good times: the parties in my parents basement, the graduations, weddings, births of our children, the fun times, the laugher which was so much a part of our lives together.

As we put his casket in the hearse and it drove slowly away taking our brother from us for the last time we hugged and we cried. We also told one another how much we love each other. We still have that. Mickey helped us to remember.

Thank you, Michael. Rest in peace until we meet again.