By the time we reached the emergency room parking lot, he was already dead. The memory of my parents’ arrival is seared into my brain. I felt as if my body was detached from my being, the night surreal, the moment unending. Inside the emergency room, my brother lay dead on a gurney, his body bruised and bloodied. The men in our family convinced my mother and I not to go inside, saying that it would be too painful to see him that way. As if, seeing his waxy body at the funeral home was easy? 

I did not go the second time. The afternoon when my father was the dead one. I watched him die before my eyes, and I couldn’t bear another trip to the emergency room. I stayed with my infant son, as my mother and husband followed the ambulance. There is no easy way.

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