Halloween: My Brother's Bones

Each Halloween, people celebrate the flesh-eaten creatures of the dark and ponder gruesome images of blood, bones, and death. But each October, the orange-yellow leaves remind me of the little buried bones that were once my brother.

In October 1964, my brother passed away at age 7 from leukemia, which had racked his sprightly body for a couple of years. You want Halloween horrors? I recall his screaming some nights from the pain in his legs. You want grotesque faces? My brother’s face swelled up like an odd-shaped balloon from his medication. You want fear? Fear charged the air at my house, an unspoken worry for my brother’s life.

Yet, his disposition was almost always sunny. Throughout the needle-pokes and painful treatments at the National Institute of Health, he loved to joke around with and tease the nurses. He was the one of us three kids who would share his blocks or model cars, the middle child peace-maker, the one who would have played the violin.

Halloween might be a time of horror over skeletons and ghosts for most. But for me, it is the time I think of Jeffy, and the grownup age he would now be. Each October, when giggling children in scary costumes ring our door bell for treats, I think of him, and thank God for his short life as my brother: His spirit lives on and his quiet little bones are nothing to fear.