Kimball

NIGHT WATCHING 

  

My brother nearly lost his life 

One rainy Halloween when I was twelve.

My memories fragment

Forming a collage of desperate whispers

Waiting room vigils

And a bloody watch suspended in time.

Big brothers don’t die at sixteen

They grow old and fat and bald

To provide babies for an aunt’s knee.

The prospect of death

Took these sweet imaginary children too.

So at twelve, I mourned our future

And waited, in pure white and confusion.

We cursed the machine and prayed for the doctors.

It worked.

The machine was left mangled in the October rain.

And my brother is nearing thirty.

2/18/80

 ~~~~~~

The accident happened on the day before his sixteenth birthday.

My brother Kimball neared thirty, and indeed, passed it. But he went on to live out fifty-seven years of what anyone would call a complex life. If there was a straight path from point A to point B, Kim would wind through the alphabet in haphazard fashion, standing, falling, sometimes sleepwalking, gaining and losing people along the way. He could be infuriating, adorable, hurtful, and he could be so loving that it would nearly break my heart with its sweetness.

The motorcycle accident left him with two shattered legs, and the forty-two years that followed were filled with operations, crutches, wheelchairs, braces and countless pins and plates to hold his bones together. With one leg shorter than the other, he limped for the remainder of his life, and the resulting pressure of his 6'9" body on his hips and ankles put him in ongoing pain. 

The pain led to alcohol and drugs, and recovery, and relapse, and finally, in his forties…a full recovery that gave him a sense of himself, and peace.  When he felt it slipping, he would go down to the jails and spend nights in the detox units, helping others through those impossibly desolate first nights of getting clean. And he would remember. There but for the Grace of God go I…

And then, just as he may have been taking a breather…his thinking started getting fuzzy. He couldn't seem to find the right words. He forgot how to get places he'd been hundreds of times before. But he remembered how to get to the hospital, so he took himself there. He didn't know it, of course, but he would never drive his car away from that parking space.

The tumor on his brain was aggressive…it needed only from late January to early May to take him from us.

Kimball made me laugh more than anyone else ever could, and looked at the world with a deliciously warped sense of humor and an attitude filled with grace. From the time the kids were little, up until the very last time we were all together, when “Unca Kim” came to visit, we would eat, swim, play poker, and laugh. And laugh. And then laugh some more. Kim could make those kids giggle to distraction. I asked them once why they loved their uncle so much, and one of them said, “Unca Kim is like Disneyland!” I didn’t even need to ask what that meant.

Kim was my big brother in every way. Big. All nearly 7 feet of him. I have so many memories as a young girl of him standing over me, exaggerating that booming voice of his, trying to scare me into doing something he wanted me to do. But I learned the truth quickly…he was the gentlest of giants, a man of endless love and great compassion, with a soft spot for his little sister. When I was being bullied, he was the first one to come to my defense.

Kim and I shared the unique experience of being children of a famous person. We grew up in a spotlight, with magazine articles that talked about the perfect life we were leading…while we, in the reality of it, spent more time with our nannies than with our parents as their marriage unraveled. I was the only girl, which came with its own set of challenges…but Kim was the middle child, and I sometimes wondered if, for all his size, he felt he simply disappeared. 

But in the end, he turned out to be the most creative of us all. While in the hospital for nineteen long months as his legs struggled to recover from the Halloween night accident, he taught himself guitar, and to read music. Soon, the piano followed, then the flute, and then a myriad of instruments that he could layer one atop the other in the recording studio, before adding his smooth baritone, singing words that grew painfully from his growing understanding of a transient world.

So, although that “middle child syndrome” might have made him the weakest of the three of us, he was in fact, the strongest. When I think of him choosing the chart for this life, it occurs to me that he might have been a bit less ambitious: “I’ll be the middle son of an American icon, have an accident at fifteen that cripples my legs for life, acquire an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and on top of it, have to bend down for every doorway I pass through.” 

Kimball passed with flying colors. And now, he’s quite literally flying.  No limp, no pain, no struggles.

As an added gift, Kim gave me a roadmap about how to face death with bravery, honesty, and humor. His last three months will inspire me every day until I go to meet him. I sat with him as he toggled, sometimes in thirty second increments, from grief, to pain, to flirting with the nurses, to long, profound and deeply loving searching of my eyes, then to dancing with head and shoulders as his cell phone rang, then to a string of profanity that was positively Shakespearean in its beauty and variety, then sleep. Through it all, he was fully present, not wishing to let the morphine that was readily available dull the moments he had left here.

One day, as I was feeling very far away and sad about Kim, I talked with a friend who had just visited him, and asked, in very somber tones, “How’s he doing?” The friend laughed and said he had just left Kim, with five gorgeous women in his hospital room, sitting on his bed, giving him massages. And as I laughed too, I thought, “Kim is a lover. A lover of life, a lover of women, a lover of food, a lover of laughter.” He loved all the good things this life has to offer, and faced the bad things with courage. I can hope to be like him.

When I finally finish my work here, and cross over to the other side, I expect to see him standing there with arms open, saying, “Soooooozie!” ready to scoop me up off the ground in a huge, warm Kimball hug. 

Until then, I live my life fully, as he did. 

‘Night, Kimmie…your little sis loves you…

~~~~~