Poem #87: Doors and choices

When I was 13, I lost a brother to suicide. Last week would have seen him turn 65. I think about him still. CW: suicide.

Doors and choices
For my brother. 

We are ejected from the womb bloodied, dazzled, helpless, 
Unaware of the infinity of doors we will open; 

Each day sees us choose, each choice cutting off access to countless doors, 
Simultaneously opening paths to a googol more, and more. 

Only one door is the end-door, suicide, opening to blackness and void. 

46 years ago, you chose that door, the bottle of rum a looming idol over 
	a scatter of pills and prescription vials on a kitchen table. 

Now, I dream those unwalked paths, those doors opening, you here, in my world: 

Sixty-five in most of them, paunchy, a cigarette cough or no longer here, 
a cancer or a heart attack your doom,

Cranky and conservative, outraged and progressive, 
a teaching career behind you, your child now grown or never at all, 

A scraper-by, bouncing between the decaying town that grew us and 
the meth and money camps of oilpatch Alberta, 

A shiny truck and shinier Harley in a garage next to a messy house, or 
a clapped-out sedan, 

Happy, quick with a joke, or resentful, considering, brooding, perseverating over 
	past slights and mistakes, 

balding, hairy, but always mustachioed despite the pleas of your women to shave it, 

strong, weak, fat, thin, slightly shorter than you were in youth, when you died, 

Divorced, still married, or divorced twice, 
Bitter, hopeful, resigned, still hopeful. 

Closer to me? Closer to our older brother, close to nobody, everyone’s friend. 

Now I am growing old, older than you ever were, and I dream of doors and decision trees 
where once I dreamed of stopping you, putting my hand over yours on the doorknob, 
staving off void for some amount of time that would have seemed infinite then. 

But doors and choices are no longer yours open and choose. 
They lie with you in a grave I do not visit. 

Perhaps your unopened doors dream their own dreams, 
fantasizing unfounded futures, rooms unvisited and unpopulated. 

And perhaps the choices you never made long to be considered, 
dream of being chosen or discarded. 

And perhaps it is the job of those who remain to climb the trees of their choices 
	all the more carefully, until the last limb cracks and sends us down. 

We who live here now, have made so many choices, 
surely some of which are regrettable.

Of yours, I only regret one choice, one door: the last.