Knowledge in the strangest packages.
In about four hours and twenty-five minutes, it will be exactly three months to the moment Baby Bro's body gave out in my arms. I don't plan on being awake, but probably will be.
Though I know "he" is not there, I visited his grave yesterday (in my mind, though I talk to him whenever the spirit hits, that should be the place where he can hear me the clearest, sort of like not "roaming" with your cell phone :-) I told him how beautiful his nameplate turned out, and how he just missed seeing the new Davros on the new DR. WHO, blast it (what an episode!), and any headway I've made writing this month. I also thanked him for helping make my writing better, because he has in an unexpected way. I know it, and he knows it.
I had just gotten home at midnight after a ten-hour or so caretaking shift at their apartment when my sister-in-law called me on the phone and asked me to come right back. Everyone else had gone home to rest as well, and she just didn't want to be alone. I sat down on my sofa and cried because I was so tired, but there was something in her voice, just something... as if she knew but couldn't bring herself to say what she suspected might be coming. I couldn't NOT go back, even knowing that the 24-hour hospice nurse was with them--my heart wouldn't let me.
My SIL relaxed enough with me there that her exhaustion finally put her down. I watched over her tucked in blankets on the livingroom sofa in between spending time in the bedroom with the nurse and Baby Bro (by then, he was transitioning, unconscious with his body on auto-pilot). At around 6:20 AM, because I got this strong feeling that his spirit, or essence, whatever you want to call it, the ethereal substance that encompassed all that was Barry was trapped inside that body in some sort of limbo (yes, like that song, should I stay or should I go?), I held him to me, looked into those gorgeous eyes, lowered my mouth to his right ear and said in my most authoritative Big Sister voice to STOP worrying about us, NOT to worry about his wife, that we'll all take care of each other and we'll be okay, that he'd earned the right to rest and leave that aching body. I told him to go, GO, and that he'd better save a place for me. I whispered that I loved him.
Minutes later, he sighed and left.
I'll no longer struggle to put realism into a written scene like that, just dip right into my mental file cabinet. I now know the sounds, I know the feel of living skin that's barely 90 degrees in temperature, I know the last flutters of an arrested heart under my fingers, I know the long, final breath from deflating lungs, and a handful of other things I never realized because such a thing has never happened to me before. God knows this is the LAST way I would have wanted to hone my craft, but sometimes knowledge comes in the strangest packages.
Barry has made my writing stronger. More realistic. And I know the big lug well enough to realize that he's pretty damned pleased with himself because of it. I kid you not. WHAT a ham. :-)