BLETHERS WITH BRO

Well Murdo, it’s your day again today and as regular as the ebbing and flowing of the tide, my heart still grieves for you and tears still roll.

It’s 9 years already, but might as well be 9 seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks or months – time having eased the outward grief but certainly not the inner loss I feel for you – and never will.

Today I allow the inevitable avalanche of thoughts and memories to engulf me, though they flit about the brain cell every day.  Some daft thing will appear on telly and I’ll think how you’d laugh or mimic it, which makes a smile dance across my face.

Being the only family member remaining on the island, the rest having scarpered to the mainland, I feel your presence even stronger – a blessing in itself, though a cuddle would be so much better.  Yep, Tuta, as you used to call me as a little toddler, misses and needs you very much and can only find the ether’s pathway to have frequent wee natters with you.  I don’t know if a graveside would be any different, as your physical presence is gone.  But visits to where you were expected that dreadful day are in a very beautiful spot, with gentle lappings of the ocean that holds you tripping onto white sands.

Do you remember the time we went for a drive before my departure to Vienna and you handed me a ciggy box with a little bit of sand in it?  I do.  I also remember explaining to your young  and tender years that I couldn’t take it with me because of rules and regulations governing what could and could not be taken to my new place of work.  Oh how I wish I’d kept that precious sand.  This week I made a bracelet of snow jade with a small heart shaped box that opens and securely fastens.  You’d laugh that the elasticated band is too big to tie a hidden knot to complete the bracelet, though I’ve ordered some skinnier stuff to do the job.  In that heart will go a few grains of sand.  I have another bracelet to make which will be of moonstone or lapis lazuli and have a tiny ornate bottle which can hold one grain of rice, but which will have sealed in it a drop of the ocean that keeps you.  It means that when my health deteriorates I’ll still be able to pay my respects to you through those dainty trinkets.

Been working on a large picture of you as well, but as yet cannot find the oomph to complete it.  When it’s ready, it will have pride of place on my wall – and be one of the most unusual pieces of art ever.  I’d much rather have the real McCoy though – you.  That, as yet, if ever, is not possible and laying you gracefully on land is something akin to winning the lotto.  Just a dream.

I’ve come to accept that you are where you are and am privileged to have a view across the bay knowing you are there, less than a mile from the shore.  The horrors of what you endured that day will forever haunt me, especially when some dumb advert or programme shows underwater footage.  I often wonder if you'd been lobster fishing from a highly populated cruise liner or were a famous star, that you'd have been left to rot amongst kelp forests.  Instead, you were a hard working fisherman doing an honest day's work from a 24ft boat, the engine of which the owner persistently refused to fix.  He should be behind bars for manslaughter!
 

 
As yet, only gulls and sea creatures know your whereabouts and are keeping it a well guarded secret.  So be it. 

In my heart, you live on and will never be forgotten dear brother.  All my love and gentle thoughts remain with you Murdo xxx