Our Michael  − August, 1993

He was almost five years older then I was, but you couldn't tell it by looking. Due to some prenatal complications that I never really understood, my cousin Micheal would remain a child until the day he died.

He wore these thick, coke-bottle glasses, and his tiny, pale face looked unprotected without them. He had hair the color of sawdust and a grin that no amount of pain seemed able to drown. He was my grandmother's favorite. Everyone knew it, but everyone understood. There was something about this kid that made you smile, whether you knew you were or not. My grandmother used to play a game with him in which he would search out the soft spots on her wrinkled face with his hands, and when he would find one, he'd slap it. She would don this exaggerated look of shock, and both she and Michael would laugh, most times until the poor boy couldn't breathe. They were good for each other, I think.

Michael required an enormous amount of attention, and this, I'm sure, had weighed heavily on my aunt. But even through the exhaustion and nights of frustrated tears, she loved the boy. Unquestionably, she loved him. She loved him enough to wake up in the middle of the night for eleven years to feed him when he cried, using the tube the spouted from his belly like an umbilical cord to get the precious formula into his frail body. She loved him enough clean up after him when he decided to paint his room with the contents of his diaper. She loved him enough not to lose her faith.

Michael knew very few healthy days, and as a result of this he was in and out of hospitals regularly throughout his short life. My aunt and her daughter, Jennifer, spent many nights in cramped hospital rooms while Michael slept. I can only imagine what they must have thought as they watched him there, his small chest rising and falling as he lay engulfed by his hospital bed.

One night, while I slept blissfully ignorant miles away, Michael was rushed to the hospital for reasons I can't recall. Organ failure, maybe. Everyone was up half the night, waiting for an update on the situation, but every call Wendy made from the hospital left a little more fear, and a little more doubt. Suddenly, as my family sat around the kitchen table and talked, their wait came to an end. Michael wasn't going to come home this time, Wendy told my grandmother at last. Michael had died.

It hit my grandma the hardest. For the longest time she couldn't make it through a day without breaking down, and everyone began to worry about her. Something vital had been stolen from the woman, but all we could do was wait helplessly. Eventually, to everyone's relief, she pulled herself together. She still cries when she tells of the game she and Micahel used to play.

A few days after Michael's death, I was sitting in my bedroom at my grandmother's house, talking to Jennifer. Death had come to our family, and we were both struggling to find a place for it in the small worlds we had created for ourselves.

"I told my mom that I was happy for him," she said. The television spilled muffled cartoons into the room, but we ignored it. In the living room, I could hear the adults lost in some discussion or another. Unimportant. 

"She asked me why, and I told her because he's an angel now."

"An angel?"

"Yeah, and he's all grown up and not like he was here at all."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, and he's watching us, too. He's happy now."

Later, as I lay on the brink of sleep in my own bed, I thought about Michael, and of what Jeniffer had said. It seemed right, that Michael was an angel. He always had been.

Comments:

pepero (February 28, 2007. 07:27pm)

whenever i hear the name *michael* and *angel* in the same sentence. i think of st michael the archangel who battled satan. your lucky to have your own little angel in your life. btw, i *miss* reading your stories.

Oblivious (March 2, 2007. 08:04am)

Aw, thank you Caroline. I've got a few in the works that I should be adding soon.