My Story

When writing the story of your life, they always say to start at the beginning.  The first crystalline memory that I have is at the age of twenty-three months.  I remember a warm, summer day under a tent in a grassy area with lots of trees.  There were chairs with people sitting in them all in a row, and my mom was crying.  Nobody wanted to hold me and I was passed from lap to lap.  I remember a lady named Andi Miller singing and then the memories end.  I cannot remember the casket that was there or the huge hole in the ground. My mom says that she had me potty trained before my brother died and that I completely digressed at that point.   

I was about five years old when I started having this memory disguised as a dream.  I kept having the same dream every night, and my mother had just had my other brother, Daren.  I now realize that I was probably worried that he was going to die as well.  When I told my mother the dream, she said, “that sounds like your brother’s funeral.” Since she had never told me about another brother, I was floored. She had a box of momentos from his birth and a picture of him in his casket.  She told me about John David Swisher, Jr., and how he had died the day he was born. She was holding him in the hospital and she commented to the nurse that he was a little blue.  The nurse whisked him out and she never saw him alive again.  Mom always blamed herself, thinking she must have done something that caused it although there was nothing she could have done to prevent it.  They said his lungs must have not been developed right.  

A few years ago, I bought a gravestone for my brother’s grave.  At the time of his death, it was all my parents could do to pay for the funeral and burial and then they got busy raising me and later my two brothers.  It always bothered my mother that they had not bought a marker.  So for Mother’s Day one year, I decided to buy a marker for his grave.  My mother still goes to visit the grave and remembers the baby she only held once. 

I have often wondered what my life would have been like if I’d had a brother just twenty-three months younger than me, but God is writing my life story, not me.  Sometimes I help mess it up, but he ultimately puts His signature on the pages.  We cannot change our past, we can only use it to help guide us in our future.  I have to say that God really is the best at writing my story, but it seems that sometimes I hear myself yelling, “Cut!”  I mean surely that was not what he intended.  I can’t believe that he wants to take this character out or put this character into my life story.  In the end, I always see where God was on the money.  So God, I give you back the reigns again–write my story, and make it sensational!