A Letter To My Brother

February 28th, 2025

Dear Darrel,

???? I've tried to hold off writing this letter for as long as I could, but my feelings—constipated because of the shock and awe of your death—now burst forth like a runny bowel movement from eating Taco Bell and consuming too much malt liquor.? The deluge of my emotions is tortuous, and I write to drain the sepsis—your sudden absence—from my soul.??????

???? I feel like Keanu Reeves in the latest John Wick movie over the thought of whether or not you can hear me.? While most would probably think I'm crazy, I still talk to momma and continue talking to you.? Even if you can't hear me, I instinctively know your replies to my remarks and queries.? When I get down and frustrated, momma's voice whispers into my ear to let me know that things will get better.? And when I feel like I'm tired of life, your voice is now infused with hers, telling me to never give up and to keep moving forward.? Due to your absence, it's become my responsibility to ensure our family never goes backward.? And that's what scares me the most, Darrel—the responsibility—because I've always thrived on chaos, but I no longer have you to hide behind.?? In the past, I took solace in the fact that if I wasn't successful or if I sucked, no one expected anything out of me because I was the second born, not the first.

???? When we were growing up, it used to piss me off to the height of pisstivity itself that you were an overachiever because it was simply another burden I had to endure.? Already held captive by the expectations of parents from the South who were schoolteachers, I was crushed by the weight of their expectations, yet you always responded like an Olympic weightlifter, bench-pressing their aspirations of us with ease.? Yet now that you are gone, any childhood beef has become irrelevant.? Death has a way of doing that:? we always think we have time to mend things, but it's the time that always has us.?

???? I know Daddy tried to raise us without emotion, but he finally displayed the hypocrisy of his conviction; I never saw him shed a tear when momma was gone, but he cried when you died.? I wanted to reach out and hold him—to console him—but you know how awkward and foreign that would have been, so I let him stew in his emotions as I tried to rectify mine.? No parent should have to bury his child, but he did, and now he is left only with me:? the one who was the oil to his water, the one who caused him much consternation when I was young.? The irony of our destiny is not lost on me.?Perhaps I overstand why God has left me as the last man standing, but the better man to me is the one who died, and now Daddy is left with this carbon copy of you.????

This is not how life was supposed to turn out.? I wasn't supposed to be the one to hold it all together.? I was simply supposed to be the younger brother.? What was once a family of four is now only a family of two.? The only remaining question I have for you is, what am I supposed to do when Daddy is gone and I'm all alone?? So far, momma hasn't replied…and neither have you.

Sincerely,

Your brother Shabazz