11/13/60 - 08/17/02

For some reason, we stayed home that Saturday night. A rarity in and of itself, since we were in adoption limbo at that time, and kidless. There was a street dance in the Dutch community eight miles west of us to celebrate potato harvest. We never missed it, but on this day we decided not to attend at the last minute.

The phone rang. It was my older brother telling me to come home. Our brother Daren had drowned. He was on life support in order to confirm or deny brain activity. It was 8:30 p.m.

The baby of our family. There was sixteen months between he and I.

He loved to fish. He had also inherited my father's frugality. He, along with his best friend, had constructed a raft of sorts to fish from instead of buying a canoe. It was a huge innertube with a plywood platform attached to the top of it. They used it all the time.

We are not really sure what happened, but somehow the innertube popped and the platform broke. My brother fell through. His friend made it to shore.

Daren didn't.

A recreating group of athletes from the local college formed a chain and felt along the bottom of the pond with their feet until they found him. They got him to shore and tirelessly fought to keep him alive until the paramedics arrived.

It was hot and the water was warm, and he had been under too long.

He was a swimmer, but there was a lot of blood. I have to think he hit his head when the tube popped and he lost consciousness.

My mom made the decision to let him go minutes before we arrived at the hospital. I didn't want to see him. If I didn't look, he couldn't really be gone.

Could he?

The college students were present at the funeral. They were racked with the guilt that they didn't reach him sooner. They assured me that he didn't struggle or suffer. Whether or not that is true doesn't matter. It's what I needed to hear, and I am thankful to those young people for realizing that.

He was never a husband or a father.

He was my brother, my playmate, my friend.