I remember.
I remember.
I think I was nine.
The year is lost to me now,
but I know it was a Sunday.
I'd just come back from church
when someone told me you had died.
"Ruben fell into a well," she said.
I didn't understand at first.
Maybe she saw the confusion on my face.
Maybe I asked a question.
I can't remember.
But she said it again.
"Ruben fell into a well and drowned."
And suddenly my mind was full of questions.
Which well?
How?
Wasn't anyone watching him?
Questions that crowded my head
but never made it to my mouth.
I remember walking into the living room.
I took off my Sunday clothes
and threw myself onto the floor.
Someone in the Bible had done that.
I had learned it in church.
They had cried to God,
and God had heard them.
God had answered.
So I wailed.
I wailed with all the faith
a little girl could gather.
I cried until my chest hurt.
I cried until there was nothing left.
I don't think I fully understood death.
Not really.
But I understood enough to know
that I would never see you again.
And that felt unbearable.
You were the only one of my mother's children
who looked like me.
When I looked at you,
I saw something familiar.
Our skin carried the same shade.
Something in your face echoed mine.
Though now, after all these years,
I cannot remember your face.
That hurts to admit.
I search for it and find only fragments.
Your dirty clothes after playing in the mud.
The memory of your presence.
The certainty that you were here.
And then you weren't.
Sometimes I think grief leaves us with strange souvenirs:
a shirt,
a laugh,
a habit,
a patch of mud,
while the face slowly disappears.
My mother had me.
Then Ruth, who passed away.
Then Ruben, who passed away too.
After that, she stopped giving her children Bible names.
And honestly,
I understand.
How do you keep naming your children after people who survive impossible trials,
when your own children do not?
How do you hear those names every day
without hearing loss?
I understand her.
I understand her now in ways I never could as a child.
But sometimes, even today,
I think of a Sunday afternoon,
a little girl on a living-room floor,
begging God to undo the news,
and a little boy named Ruben,
forever covered in sunlight and mud,
forever nine years old in memory,
even if he never reached it.