by Wayne Perron

Created on: August 01, 2008

I remember thinking how much my brother resembled my mother the last day I ever saw him. He didn't look like himself but he looked really familiar to me. The I realized that he had grown so thin and wan that he looked a great deal like our mother. Far more so, I can say now, than any of us other kids, and I think he knew that. It wasn't like he could help it and probably wasn't too bothered by it at the end of his life anyways.

He was thinned by disease, a cancer of the throat, and the jovially grouchy brother I knew to mow an acre of grass with a push mower without stopping looked like he'd been left in the dry cycle too long, all shrunken up and withered.
I tried not to see that strong resemblance he had, far stronger now, with the ravaged look of his final days, his face a gaunt constriction of emotion, knotted to keep from showing that he was afraid, knew we were, too and didn't want to fold his hand. He was still the oldest child, even looking like he did.
As I stood there, fighting vainly for some empty headed chit-chat to toss at him like we had always done before, it struck me how much he'd grown to look like our mother. His hair was thinned and short now, not the long head of hair he'd maintained since the 1960's and his face was clean of its usual burden of heavy beard.
What I saw was the face of my mother, our mother, herself long deceased, but eerily present in that hospital room in the face of my dying brother. There is nothing to say satirical here except that my brother was still ripping one liners about his impending death and where his ashes should sit on my mantle when he was gone. Burned out and burned up, by cremation to be truthful, and that was the way he wanted to go out.
If death had come on cat's paws into that room, it's likely my brother would have invited Him to sit down, take a load off and talk a while. He had stories to tell, about the 60's, death during the Vietnam war days though he didn't get sent over farther than Guam, about why being death must be an absolute egg-sucker of a job when you got down to looking into it.
He died the following month after I had to go back home and I wonder if he might not have used his now uncanny resemblance to my mom to somehow slip by, getting one over on death, and might eventually be found somewhere far away, mowing grass and grumbling how easy it was to cheat death, and how much he liked getting over.
I still expect to see him roll into my driveway, his hair grown out longer now but the beard gone so as to maintain his incognito status from death. "If you keep moving, like you're mowing grass, they just can't keep hold of you." He'd say. And he'd grin.
And it doesn't hurt to look like someone as sweet as your elderly mother, either.

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