Yet another post from three years ago, from another blog. March is a month for bittersweet memories in my small corner of the universe.
Our little hour,—how swift it flies
When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies,
Leaving us but a little while
To dream our dream, to sing our song,
To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower,
The Gods—They do not give us long,—
One little hour.
Our little hour,—how short it is
When Love with dew-eyed loveliness
Raises her lips for ours to kiss
And dies within our first caress.
Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame,
Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour,
For Time and Death, relentless, claim
Our little hour.
Our little hour,—how short a time
To wage our wars, to fan our hates,
To take our fill of armoured crime,
To troop our banners, storm the gates.
Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red,
Blind in our puny reign of power,
Do we forget how soon is sped
Our little hour?
Our little hour,—how soon it dies:
How short a time to tell our beads,
To chant our feeble Litanies,
To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds.
The altar lights grow pale and dim,
The bells hang silent in the tower—
So passes with the dying hymn
Our little hour.
---Leslie Coulson
My brother Jeff was born on March 16. A day later, and my parents would have switched his first and middle names and he might have been Pat. God forbid, because he never seemed a Pat to me.
He was one of the few people I have ever known who knew from the time he was little what he would be when he was big: be a musician. No doubt ever entered his mind about that. Or, come to think of it, about much else. He might have been the most self-possessed human being I've ever known, albeit with a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor.
He was a cool dude. A ladies man, yet he met the love of his life in college and married her as soon as they graduated. They both looked like they'd just jumped off the top of the wedding cake.
They had a hell of a life together. They bought a beautiful home on a wooded lot in upstate New York. Deer wandered through the back yard. We spent many happy nights there drinking beer, listening to music and laughing.
He was a freelance musician, gave private percussion lessons, scored for Warner Brothers, arranged music for high school bands, taught drum lines for drum and bugle corps, played drums in a rock band, and composed. He made a good living at it, too, which was a tough thing to do in that business. He and his wife were doing great right up until the time he was diagnosed with MS at age 31.
Most MS sufferers have remissions. He was one of the rare 4% who go straight downhill. I helped his wife put him in a nursing home 3 years later. A year after that, he died. My wife and I had spent his last day with him, the day they put in a feeding tube because he no longer possessed the strength to even swallow. I'll never forget the look of utter defeat in his eyes as we left him that evening. We flew 2500 miles home, only to pick up a voice mail message when we walked in the door that told us that he had died several hours after we had left him.
Many times, you're tempted to say that life is cruel. But, life is what it is. It has a beginning and an end. You have a finite number of hours, only you never know how many, in the aggregate, you get to spend. Spend them foolishly, and the joke's on you.
One of the reasons that I ultimately came to believe in God is that I simply refuse to accept that people who are so alive when they're alive cease to be alive when their earthly existence ends. If I believed that people like my brother Jeff, a candle that burned brightly but flickered out too soon, did not have an existence that superseded those of some of the gutter trash whom I've encountered in my much longer life -- well, then, I'd be have to grab a shotgun and meet out some justice here and now. Overall, I think it's more productive to believe that justice is delivered ultimately for all eternity, and that what we do while alive echoes forever.
Maybe I got to live longer than he did because I'm a slow learner. He certainly seemed to understand his purpose from the get-go, and he lived it fully and completely, or at least as completely as God permitted.
"Our little hour." Take a lesson: Spend it wisely.
Sorry it's been so long since I've visited.
What a beautiful tribute to Jeff. I recall your posts about your sister, but I didn't recall that you had a brother who died so young and tragically.
"What we do while alive echoes forever" - words to live by!
Posted by: Valerie | April 11, 2009 at 10:28 PM
I hope that not everything we do echoes forever. The dissonant echoes from my life would be excruciating.
Posted by: Kevin | April 16, 2009 at 10:29 AM