As I write this, the sun is just beginning to wake up, and slowly, this day is starting to come to life.  The neighbor across the street is warming his car, and the Keurig is preparing some Italian Roast to warm my belly.  Life is good, and if you had asked me 10 years ago if I’d be saying that today, I’m not sure the 10 years younger me would have been sure.

Because that was the day I watched my brother die.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it this year, maybe more than most years.  The days from Black Friday until Christmas Eve of 2003 were, literally, the worst days of my life.  My mother’s brain aneurysm the day after Thanksgiving left her speechless and motionless – and the rest of us breathless – while we waited in her hospital room for a miracle.  We prayed, sang, laughed, cried, and slept with our eyes open not wanting to miss the moment she died or sat up and told us to stop making such a fuss.  Ultimately, though, she was gone on December 1, and as we packed up our things and walked out of the hospital, none of us knew that within a few hours we’d be back, this time with my brother, Stephen.

If you ever met Stephen, you never forgot Stephen. Born with cerebral palsy and some of the mental disability that often comes with it, Stephen was an arm-flappin, hankey-turning evangelist for Jesus.  He asked everyone he could if they knew Jesus, and no matter what their answer was, he would then ask if they knew when Jesus was coming back.  Needless to say, I lived my rebellious teenage years in total fear because I shared a room with the world’s only living rapture clock.  When you’re lying in bed wondering if you’ve just sinned your way out of heaven, a deep guttural voice asking when Jesus is coming back isn’t very comforting.

Stephen in the early years, cutting a cake and lighting up the room with his smile.

My relationship with Stephen was special, and not because he had special needs.  When he was younger and really didn’t understand his condition, he had a smile that stayed glued on his face, and it infected everyone around him.  As he grew, he became like every other teen I’ve ever known – frustrated with his life, his body, and most of all, his limitations.  His smile was still just as engaging, but not quite as permanent.  We lived through flashes of rage when things near him could be destroyed in a snap.  I guess I can thank Stephen for teaching our family that stuff really is just stuff.  Things break, and they can be replaced.

But when a man’s spirit begins to break?  Well, that’s different.  And on Monday morning, December 1, as my mother was lying in a hospital bed, Stephen’s spirit began to break.  Even as we prayed for a miracle, the reality of mom’s passing was settling in on all of us, especially Stephen.  He was inconsolable, and eventually he found himself sedated and lying in a hospital bed in the room next to mom.  And that’s when two people who couldn’t talk had a conversation.

It was one of my sisters who first noticed it.  Most of us were sitting around mom’s bed, listening to the strangest breathing pattern any of us had ever heard.  I’ve been around a few people who were near death, and I’ve heard the death rattles, but this was different.  There were distinctly deep breaths, and long exhales.  There would be a pause and then another, this one not as long as the previous, or maybe longer.  “Breathing SOS” is the only way I can describe it.  It was peaceful and beautiful, like she was saying something to someone.  It was then that my sister, who had been walking back and forth between my brother’s room and my mother’s room, told us that Stephen was breathing the same way.  EXACTLY the same way.

And that’s when we knew that mom was saying something…

…to Stephen.

I wish I knew what it was, but my guess is that she told him she loved him, and that he was going to be ok.  That he was surrounded by people who loved him, and that even though it would be very different with her gone, he would be taken care of.

Mom and Stephen were inseparable in life and in death.

Shoot, for all I know, maybe she told him when Jesus was coming back.  But whatever she was saying, it was over in minutes, and then within a few more minutes, my mother was with Jesus and Stephen wasn’t.  He walked out of the hospital that Monday morning, and shortly after lunch we wheeled him back in with an oxygen level in the 50s.  For those of you like me who aren’t medical, that’s not good.  Skin looks blue at that point, and so he went into the ICU, and for the next 20 days we replayed what we had done for a weekend with mom.  Pray, sing, sleep, eat, laugh, beg.

It was surreal, like the dramas that we normally buy a ticket to watch.  He would improve and then decline. There would be hope and then despair.  And finally, it all led to a family meeting in a cold hospital break room where we had to decide how long we’d put off what seemed so inevitable.  He had pneumonia in both lungs, the doctor said.  It wasn’t fatal, the doctor said.  Most people recover from it, and Stephen would, too – if he wanted to, the doctor said.

Stephen didn’t want to.  The next day was spent praying that he wouldn’t die on my nephew’s birthday (because who needs that for a birthday present, right?), and in one final, beautiful, giving act, my brother took his last breath just shortly past midnight on December 21, 2003 – the day after my nephew’s birthday.

I wish I could tell you that the end was peaceful and calm, that we stood around and sang hymns as my brother passed.  But it wasn’t.  It was hard, violent, painful.  His last breath didn’t come easy, and by the time it had come we were begging him to go be with mom and Jesus as much as we had been begging him to stay with us.

And he did.  I leaned over his bed and watched him as he died, and as he did, something was born in me.  Never before and never since have I felt that kind of grief – the kind that opens deep ravines into the soul, the kind that in one moment can plant something so deep within us that we know we’ll never be the same again.

There are moments that change us.  They change us because they stop us, even if it is only long enough for us to think, to hurt, to cry.  They can’t be stopped, or in most cases, even controlled.  They come and go as they please, and leave us stuck in places we would have never believed…wondering if we will ever move, laugh, or dance again?  They seem like periods, but they are more like commas, something that my 8th-grade English teacher said I didn’t understand.  But I understand them better now, because one day I stared into the eyes of my brother as he died.

And the next day, I chose to live.

Of course, life is different now.  In the 10 years since 2 of the most influential people I’ve ever known stepped out of my life, I’ve learned how to live “life past the comma.”  I’ve found that on a night when my brother’s eyes closed, grief opened my soul so wide that God was able to plant grace and truth and hope so deep within me that it cannot be pulled out.

Life is full of moments that will either define us or refine us.  And when we come to the worst days – and we meet Jesus there – he has a way of making sure that what appeared to be the end of the road is really just a bend in the road.  And that, my friend, is when stopping is no longer an option, because no matter how dark the worst days may be, our best days are still ahead of us.