Mark's Death − 5 March, 1997

It was a Wednesday. March 5, 1997.

We had not gone to school on the Monday or Tuesday, because Mark was in the hospital. He had gone into the hospital on Sunday night. I suppose I should begin there.

Almost 10 years later to the day, I met a woman named Jennifer Cull who saw Mark the day he got sick. They were at Sault College, she was dating his friend Harry. She told me that he said that his throat was sore and they had said to him that he should go home. Mark used to be at school all the time on the weekends. He loved it there. He loved his program. He would stick around and work on his Martin Brodeur Webpage. At the time, that was a big deal. I don't think any of us knew he had the webpage until after he died and his friends told us. But back then, the Internet was still sort of a novelty. We didn't even have access to it at home.

It's funny the little things that you remember. We had KFC for dinner that night. Mark started to feel sick, and I thought he had gotten food poisoning, since he had seemed fine earlier. He went to lie down in my parents room, and I think that I was playing cards in the living room - maybe with Sarah or Michael, but these details are sketchy.

What I do clearly remember is Mark staggering down the hallway from the bedroom. Did I know then that he was short of breath? Or did I find that out later? That was why my mother decided to take him to the Emergency Room. I remember that it wasn't really a big deal at the time - with seven kids in the family, it wasn't unheard of that someone get sick and need to go down to the Walk In Clinic or to the Emergency Room. It certainly did not actually mean there was an emergency. Anyway, I still have this visual of him walking down the hallway, doubled over and stumbling, one hand on the wall to guide him and help him keep his balance. I didn't know how bad he was yet. I thought he was hunched over because he was nauseous from a touch of food poisoning.

This was not the hard part...

And then I remember being at the hospital. I'm sure I didn't go down with them initially. But I have no idea how I got there. What transpired before this memory is long lost. But at this point, he had been taken to the Intensive Care Unit. They had taken him there immediately on arrival, recognizing that he was very ill.

He deteriorated so fast. From the moment I saw him staggering down the hall to the moment I saw him in the ICU, the difference was incredible. He was delusional. He didn't understand exactly what was happening, and when he saw me, he thought that I was the one who was being hospitalized.

I have snapshots of memory. Whole hours are missing, when I don't recall what happened. My mother was beside herself with worry. I couldn't recall the last time that one of us had spent the night in the hospital, but I was pretty sure that he would be fine. After all, nothing terrible had ever happened to us before.

He was agitated and stressed, and was repeatedly trying to climb off the hospital bed. He said he had to go to the bathroom and they provided him with a small, portable urinal and my mother quietly asked him if he understood what he was to do with it. He looked sort of bewildered, and yet replied, "Yes. You just push the button and it's done." It was unnerving to see him so confused, and yet, at the time it had not even occured to me that he wouldn't be walking out of the hospital within days.

The nurses decided that he would need a catheter, and they pulled the curtain for privacy. When they were finished, and the curtain pulled back, Mom and I went back to his bedside and his eyes were misted with tears of humiliation and he said, "Mom, these nurses are really nice, but they won't just let me go to the bathroom."

This was not the hard part...

It must have been around this time that we first heard that he had strep pneumonia. We did not understand what that meant, and the medical staff seemed to understand little more than we did. It didn’t sound very scary. We did not know this condition could be fatal. My memory is unreliable. What day was he was sedated and restrained? When did he ask my mother for a hug? When did we first know that his lungs were full of infection? When was it that he awoke from the sedation and mouthed the word water, to which the nurses responded that he could not have any (he was on an IV then) and they moistened his lips with a sponge? He started to cry. They sedated him again. All I can think is, he must have been terrified. No one understood what was happening. Did he?

When was it that my mother realized that his pupils were no longer dilating? I remember hearing this, and on some level knowing what that meant, but being unable to connect that understanding with the concept of my own brother. I thought we would still get to bring him home. What day was it that we heard the words stroke, toxic shock, brain hemorrhage, life support?

I can't remember how it all exactly happened. Time was funny. What I remember is the Wednesday. I remember going back to school, because my parents weren't sure what else to do with us. We had missed two days. I remember being in gym glass - was it first period? Second? My gym teacher came up to me and quietly told me I had been summoned to the office. I asked why. She didn't know.

Next, I remember meeting my brother Lucas and sister Sarah, who both went to the same high school as me. I was surprised to see that my mother's friend, Jean Daynard, was waiting for us. I asked her what had happened. She said that mom would tell us. There was not another word said while we got into her van and drove to the hospital.

This was not the hard part...

Then, it seems, it was dark outside the hospital windows right away. Or else, again, I am forgetting much. We were all sitting in his hospital room - which wasn't actually a room at all. It was just a bed in the Intensive Care Unit. There were other very sick people in the room. We didn't really notice them though. At least, I didn't.

I don't remember anyone talking all night. Just the sound of Mark's respirator, clicking and whooshing away, the nurses talking quietly, people shuffling down the halls. Someone must have told me that he was brain dead. At some point, someone must have told me that they were going to take him off life support. But I do not remember any of this actually happening.

What I remember is the nurses pulling the curtain. I think my parents may have had a priest perform the last rites at Mark’s bedside. But I no longer know for sure exactly what happened, or how things unfolded that night. What I remember is that, while each night previous had seemed chaotic, confused and clumsy as we fumbled our way through them, this night was unreal in the way that each movement seemed deliberate and exaggerated. I think we were hardly breathing. The atmosphere was profoundly heavy. All the world seemed to shrink outside the room. All history and futures seemed to subside outside of this moment. This was the moment we would watch Mark leave us.

The curtain was pulled shut. We weren't allowed to watch them unhook him. The sound of the respirator stopped. It was quiet, and then a few moments later, they pulled the curtain aside. Mark's body had begun to turn blue almost immediately. His body was swollen from the IV. There was blood crusted on his neck from where they had inserted a needle. There was a bag of blood hanging at the side of his bed. His eyes were still half open, and were coated by a milky sort of film. His body had been ravaged, the sickness had been too much and he had gone into shock. I stared at him - knowing that he had had a stroke, that he had hemorrhaged in his brain, that he was dead. Only a few short days earlier, he had been alive and healthy. My mind could not make the leap, it was impossible to accept what was in front of me. Only a few short days earlier, he was laughing with us - he was alive ALIVE - and now he was simply gone.

I could hardly recognize him.

This was not the hard part...

I had imagined grief would feel like dusk falling, dark and slow. But it did not descend on me. Instead, it rose up from inside, a torrent, an angry rushing that washed through me and emptied through my eyes, leaving me hollow and unsteady. I remember the heat of it, the way it stole my breath, the way it numbed my fingers and lips. I remember the way my skin burned raw. I remember Mark's friends standing by his bedside, their faces all red and pinched with crying, holding his hands. I remember the sensation of the room falling away, the impact of disbelief and sadness and confusion. I remember a nurse holding my arms, saying over and over, "There was nothing we could do." I wanted to twist away from her, but it felt like there was not enough air in the room, and though I could feel my body heaving with breath, I felt like I was getting no oxygen. I was suffocating. I was drowning. It was awful.

Mark was nineteen. I was sixteen.

Memories become a blur, a vaccuum of movements and time. We walked out to the parking lot in silence. We drove in silence. What was there to say? Loss had stolen all of our words. It had made us strangers. We could not look at each other. When we got to the house, I went inside and called one of my closest friends, Cali. I wanted to tell her that my brother was dead. I wanted to say the words so that they would not just be sitting within me, souring my insides. But when she answered the phone, all I managed was her name before emotion closed my throat - no words would come. A rush of sorrow roared through my body, and it hurt in ways that I didn't know that I could hurt. I couldn't stop myself. I bawled into the reciever, holding it hard against my face, unable to tell her what was wrong. I gave her no information, no explanation. Just my tears. I didn't know how to say these foriegn words to her - "My brother is dead." From the other end of the connection, I heard her voice, small and sad, "Oh, Sam" and she cried with me. Eventually, Laurie came into the room and wordlessly took the phone from my hands, and, though I was taller than her even then, she gathered me up and carried me to bed.

In bed, I lay awake in the dark, listening to the way that this night had silenced my home. Like a church. Like a tomb. Each of us must have retreated to our own bedrooms, unable to face each other. I had spent myself. My chest throbbed. Shock had begun to settle over me. I focused on my breathing. On how dark my bedroom was. And then came a muffled sound from the living room, and realized it was my mother. I pictured her sitting on the couch, face in her hands, her arms and heart and womb aching with this incredible loss, and I thought - there is no comfort for this. And, though I thought I had emptied myself, I cried again until exhaustion was too much and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

That night we survived my brother. That night was the beginning of the rest of our lives without him.

This was the hard part.