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Kevin Died- I remember that it was in the last weeks before school started, the time was changing for me as the time for returning to school drew closer. I dreaded returning to school, not because of school itself, but because of how it meant time would be more regimented, I was losing the open expansive time, especially the Florida summers the weather so predictable, "partly cloudy with a chance of afternoon or evening showers", the weathermen getting a seasonal holiday, for the more segmented time. I was beginning to mourn the impending loss of time expansiveness, it was that time of year.

And so when I went off riding on my bicycle looking for Kevin that late afternoon I had some sense of adventure and purposefulness, a reason to check with neighbors up and down the street looking for my young brother not yet three years old. I reveled and celebrated the open time of late afternoon even while I went from one haunt to another looking for and asking about my brother.

Although there was a wide age difference between Kevin and I, me almost 12, we had formed a bond. Kevin had character, pazzz. He was expressive. Today he would be called hyperactive. For me he was expressive, coordinated to an amazing degree, his own person at a tender age, a personality.

Even when my search did not find my brother I felt sure he would turn up, someone else looking for him would find him, or he would just appear as he had in the past from an unexpected place to the surprise of all. I checked back at home to see if anyone had found him once and then went out looking again.

Unknown to me at the time; I was on the cusp of something completely new for me. An innocence was about to be lost. I was on the edge of a huge abyss and about to fall. I can't think of a greater shock; an earthquake, an eruption that has occurred in my life.

First love, marriage, divorce, the birth of my daughter, all of these significant and life changing events were long anticipated. They all brought anticipated and unanticipated joys and trials, sorrows and new perspectives. None can match the shock value of what was about to occur. The earth moved and changed beneath my feet.

Kevin was found near home floating face down in the small lake behind our house. When I got back home from my ride there were people in the backyard. I don't have a memory of what I saw. I remember an attempt to recessitate. I know I didn't immediately grasp the significance of the events before me. It would take several days and then years and even now, more than forty years later the damage from this earthquake is still visible to me. It is still a place I can visit, I have built my life over the earth left by the quake.

My mother and step-father at the time were lost to me while they mourned the loss of their son. I fell off the cliff. Nothing in my life experience had the finality of the present. As a parent years later I came to better understand my parents loss. My brother, David and I spent some time with a neighbor and a friends of our family in the days after the event.

The day of the funeral my brother and I went to a tour of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in town with a friend of the family. I wanted to go to the funeral. I don't know if I voiced my feelings of wanting to go to the funeral or not. The decision that I would not go was made, I have remembered the surreal bottling factory tour juxtaposed with what I imagined to be my brothers funeral.