As I laid my lifeless body in the bed, prepared to rest my drowsy eyes, I heard a deep cry. I awoke frantically and ran to the place where the cry was coming from. I looked up as I rubbed my tired eyes, and I saw a rather familiar figure sitting slumped over on the long, brown familiar shape that I identified as the couch. The familiar figure had hair as dark as the night, a body that was bigger than society’s view of the ideal body, and tears falling down her dark complexioned face to her night shirt. I recognized this figure as my mother. I looked in despair as she threw our house phone down onto the ceramic floor.

As she did so, I could hear her shouting with mouth wide open, “Not my child! Not my child!”

As I approached her, the others in the house quickly ran to see what was going on. Her two daughters who were three and seven in age stood there in the empty hallway in shock as they watched. The strongest woman that they knew, who had stuck up for them in the past, who had raised them the best way she could have, was shattered on the floor in a pit of despair. The picture didn’t look right! This should have been one of them crying, not her! How dare she ruin their faith in her! I was done witnessing this! I knelt down and tried to pick her up, but she wouldn’t get up.

I screamed loudly, “What’s wrong?” After those words, she then pierced through the very depths of my inner being with the words that were shouted violently from her mouth next.

“Your brother is dead! He drowned!”

The house was in a roar of pain from my sisters’ and my mother’s cries. It was up to me and my dad to help ease the situation. We were the men, wasn’t that the right thing to do? When our women cried, wasn’t it our job to help relieve them, even though we very well wanted to break out in tears? My eleven year old self kept the tears bottled up because it was enough to see the house’s queen on the floor. The king was trying to help our beloved queen, while remaining strong, and I was trying to revive our home’s princesses. Our queen got to her knees with the help of my dad, and she crawled all the way to the black Expedition that sat in the driveway and told us to come on. The ride was going to be eight hours, the most excruciating eight hours of our lives! He was dead, but we wouldn’t let him die! I prayed and prayed about this hell that we were expecting to experience in the future upon arrival to the hospital where his lifeless body laid, and his drowsy eyes, his drowsy eyes finally rested, and would never cry deeply again.