Brainy Bird’s first day of high school is tomorrow. If he is nervous about it, he is not letting on. I have butterflies in my stomach for him. So much runs through my mind, and the next four years are all about him, yet I cannot help but recall the day that I started high school.
One of the most popular songs on the radio when I started high school was Bryan Adams’, “Everything I Do, I Do It For You.” That is certainly fitting in my life now. As everything I do in life is about getting Brainy Bird and Little Chirp ready to be young adults. I am not raising boys; I am raising young men. Brainy Bird is such an intelligent child, and he understands and appreciates all that I do for him. He also appreciates that I am his mother and not his friend, and he respects the rules in our home.
I wish that I would have understood and appreciated how much I meant to my own mother when I was Brainy Bird’s age. I was an awkward and very unattractive girl at Brainy Bird’s age, and I realize now that it was hard for my mother to see how much I struggled.
I wasn’t nervous on my own first day of school. Instead, I was extremely sad. On my own first day of high school, I attended my 16 year-old cousin’s funeral. There is little more horrible than attending a child’s funeral. I still remember what the preacher talked about. He talked about my cousin Joey’s love for baseball and how Joey worried about his English grade. The preacher said that Joey was no longer worried about his English grade, and that he was now free of his worldly struggles and in a better place.
The one thing that I remember about Joey is that he was always nice to me. He was nice to me when lots of kids weren’t. He was nice despite how akward and horrible looking I was. That meant a great deal to me back then in my fourteen short years of life.
Joey’s whole life was just sixteen years. That breaks my heart.
I believe in God; I believe in one God. I know that we are all children of this one God, and for me my path to Salvation is through Jesus our Lord and Savor. Just as the preacher said at his funeral, I believe that Joey is in Heaven. I wonder if at age 42, if people are still calling him Joey in Heaven. I wonder what it was like for my parents to reunite with one of their favorite nephews when they got to Heaven.
Yet, I still mourn his loss. I mourn his childhood, the devastation that his loss had on my family, and I mourn the man that he could have grown up to be.
Right now, Brainy Bird is laying in his bed, most likely asleep, without a worry in the world. When the sunrises it will be time for Brainy Bird’s first day of high school. I laid awake as the sunset and rose before my first day of high school, and I cried. I cried for Joey, and for all the sorrow in the hearts of my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins and my mother and father.
As I sit here tonight and think about my life now versus my life then, the past feels like a really, really long time ago. I guess it was 26 years ago. It was such a long time ago, and my life has change completely in a good way, yet I still think about Joey. Somewhere there must be a balance between remembering and honoring the past and living in the present.
As I cry tonight for my cousin Joey, I think of everything that Brainy Bird and I have done to get ready for tomorrow, and I hope that I am striking that balance. I am very excited about the days that await my fourteen year old, but I will never let go of the sorrow that I feel for the young man that was taken from us way too soon.
Joseph W. Schneider, we haven’t forgotten you. We never will.