I often think back to my brother's accident. The facts are indisputable: a man alone in his car on a Wednesday evening, deviates slightly from its route, a few miles from his home and finds himself in the path of a truck he can not avoid. The force of impact does not forgive. The truck ends up in a cornfield, the man's car is destroyed. Those are the facts. I was fine try to understand the incomprehensible, I could not know with certainty what had happened for a good driver as my brother found where he was. All explanations have remained in the air even more difficult to consider that those quick to deconstruct because they are too afraid. I do not believe in suicide as an option, I will say right now: my brother was much too specific, determined to risk to fail, to survive, or to intentionally hurt someone. But he got sick? The winds were strong it seems, that evening. His jeep he was deported by a flurry came from the fields? And if the cause was a mere moment of inattention, as every driver has at one time or another, like my brother might have been very often during his twenty years of driving? I do not know.
After his death, accompanying the reason for which I had no answer, because the one who could explain what had happened could no longer respond, I asked how. Medically. Almost coldly. No, not cold, it's not true. Instead, methodically: I wanted to understand how the body of this man that I loved so much had been abandoned. My brother, when he was small, always said "want to see." I think about it, here now and realize that if he wanted to see me, I wanted to understand. So when I have not heard from my brother that the memories of the night he died, the shock of seeing him there, still, I wanted to understand the mechanics of his body, his wounds, to reach, difficult to admit that my older brother had no chance, and that had he survived, it would have been a way he would have rejected outright.
What remains there after the death of a loved one? Facts subside at some point. They are there, they still veiled, but there comes a time when to understand, to grasp this new reality, we must look at things differently, to reconstruct a narrative of the event which will incorporate these facts in the best case, but that will fill the spaces that the facts do not explain. And ultimately, here, now that my brother had felt unwell, he forgot to look before him, he was killed by a burst of anger or looking for a phone, do not change much to the fact that he is gone. Why, how, do not repair anything.
I do not write the death of my brother, yes. Or rather, I have written every day since October 25, 2006, for me to understand, to not accept it but live with it, learn to see beyond it and find my brother, my family life. (I know it's cheesy ...? Make way ...)
James Frey at Blue Metropolis, insisted today that the facts and truth are two. It is not wrong: the facts may be immutable, they are fragmented: they trace the portrait of an event can only be pierced. Telling it fill those holes, it adjust the facts to reach a truth (of the experiment, the subject of the current text) for the real drama of this, whether the death of my brother or September 11, become the reality of the character of the novel, new.
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