My cousin died four years ago tomorrow, and the thought of it still hurts. It hurts me and I know it hurts my aunts and cousins and grandmother. It still sucks. It's still not okay.
It was a beautiful day, a Friday, and I was sitting in the backseat of someone's car on my way to work. Leroy was supposed to be coming into town that day to speak at my church, and I'd be getting off work early to pick him up.
We were pulling into DC, I was on 14th street, just before my stop at Independence, when my mom called. There had been an accident. Yamil had been hurt, and he might be dead. "They're still not sure," she said, but I knew. I knew he was gone already. I told her I'd be waiting for her call, that I'd leave my phone on so that she could call me once it was certain.
I walked down Independence trembling, up to my office, still trembling. And when that phone finally rang with the news I already knew, I fell apart. I went to the bathroom and cried. I stood in the stairwell and cried some more. Gone. He was gone, gone, gone.
I have no idea how I got through that day at work. I had to stay till two so I could head to the airport to meet Leroy; I don't think it was the arrival he'd expected.
We were all a mess at my parents' house. My dad was arriving from Romania that day and he arrived and broke down, still standing on the driveway, holding my mother. I remembered that he'd loved Yamil like a son.
At church, we sang "In Your Hands" in English and Spanish and I let go, for real let go, and sobbed and sobbed because I didn't feel like God was close at all, because if He were, He wouldn't have taken my sweet, beautiful cousin.
My mom, sister, and I went to Puerto Rico the next day, leaving Leroy with my daddy in VA. We had a layover in Boston, and I remember feeling raw and just on the verge of tears the whole time. The guy on the plane next to me wanted to talk and I just wasn't having it; I didn't have the strength to speak and control the tears, I just wanted to be left alone.
We went from the airport to the funeral home. When we walked through the door, the knot in my throat loosened itself into a flood of tears. I screamed, "No, no, no," and looked at the body that was no longer my cousin and thought, "It's not him, it's not him." I felt like my soul were being ripped apart. Gone. Here today, and tomorrow a truck drags you down the road and you're gone. Gone.
My gosh. He was so young - twenty-one - and he was gone.
After that moment at the funeral home when I collapsed - literally - on my aunt's lap in a mess of tears and unintelligible sounds, I got it together because I had to. I had to be strong for my aunt, for my uncle, for my cousin J, for my grandmother. I had to be strong.
It rained the day we buried him. A torrential downpour as we walked down the paths to the plot where my uncle's parents were buried, where my cousin was joining them: coffin in the stone and cement of a Latin American cemetery, none of the lush, green fields of the States. We walked in the rain, soaked to the skin, water filling our black dress shoes. I remember thinking it was appropriate weather for the occasion.
When we got back home, I would randomly cry at the thought of all we'd lost as a family.
Yamil.
So full of life. So funny. He was the one who would take us out, who taught me about good music, who would visit us everywhere we lived. Every time I go back home to PR, he's missing. His absence is still painfully obvious. Our family has never been the same since he was taken away.
¿Dónde estás? Te busco, sólo encuentro un lugar
de piedra y silencio.
Tu cuerpo acecha tras la sombra,
tu cuerpo laberinto eterno,
encubre peligro y misterio,
peligro y misterio.
-- Robi Draco Rosa "Cruzando puertas"
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