Two of my brothers-in-law passed away in 2011 and 2012. Two different characters and two different circumstances of death. Sometimes when a close relative or a friend passes away, I find a very little old memory of him/her flashes through my mind. It is not usually a memory that reflects a big or significant something, no, it is usually a simple and foggy situation that quietly sat down in my memory until it found, at a certain moment, its way out. It could be as significant as finding an old button in the street that vaguely meant someday someone passed by there.
One day when I was around 11 years old, the first brother in law, my two cousins and I were walking along a small narrow canal that ran through the green fields on the outskirts of my brother-in-law's hometown. When I picked up a small stone from the ground and throw it in the water, he asked if I knew how to throw it and make circles of splash waves next to each other instead of concentric splash circles. I didn't, and he showed me how to do. I tried few times and did not succeed.
The last time I saw him on the bed in the hospital after a long bitter battle with the disease and just few hours before his departure, I found myself recalling the cheerful young man who showed me how to throw a stone in the water in that very far breezy afternoon in the countryside.
The second brother-in-law got married to my sister in a much later stage of my life. It is common to hear praises mentioned for the dead, but here I find words stand unable to interpret my feelings toward him. He was one of the very rare persons who made life, for those around him, bright and worth-living. Once we had a calm talk in my room about a personal problem that put me through a difficult and critical phase of life. He did not try to lecture or to advice, but talked about little funny incidents that happened to him when he was teenager.
His death made me wonder how a flame of humour, energy and kindness could get extinguished suddenly like this, and how a small grave could embrace what life seemed once not big enough to embrace.
You express rightly the way memory deals with those who have passed by us into another place. The merest bit of film plays within us, and we glimpse the motions of a man, of a woman who was once in our life.
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