THE END
~
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is dedicated to my brother Martin, who remains in his son, Island
July 11, 1981 – May 31, 2012
“An honest man from where the palm trees grow”
My Summer
*Note to readers: I can’t write about Martin. Just thinking about him right now makes me want to cry. I will die with my brother’s story locked safely away in my soul. Maybe I’ll see him surfing on the edge of the world when I leave this one, maybe I won’t. This book isn’t about him – it’s just inspired by him. As a special thank-you to readers, though, I would like to share the Facebook post that inspired this book, ironically enough. In the spring of 2014 I wrote a short note to friends to mark the two-year anniversary of his death (and to preemptively address what I knew everyone would be awkwardly asking me about anyway), and posted it along with the above photo. The book quickly exploded out of that idea in my mind, spinning sorrow into something real. Here it is:
Today marks the two-year anniversary of my brother Martin’s death during a botched surgery at age thirty. His demise was sudden and awful and senseless and final, but in my dreams he still looks like this, frozen in his prime like an insect suspended in amber for the ages, with sun on his shoulders and sand under his feet and a breeze at his back, young and brave and free forever. And though he left us far too early, it is an injustice to human life to measure it solely by the years we spend on this Earth. Years are one yardstick, but so are the souls we sink into, the smiles we create, the people whose lives we alter. Time is relative but impact is not, and by that standard Martin fit a little eternity into those three decades. He was the best man I ever knew, good and honest and true, and he changed me. His death turned my life upside down and remapped the road of it forever, but I am unafraid, because with the lessons he left me I am confident in every step of this new course. It breaks my family anew every day to watch his three small children grow up without him, but with the fortitude he instilled within us we will see them through and make sure they know just who brought them into this world. Because he deserves it. He was Martin. His life was so short on time, and yet so incalculably grand on impact. I am so grateful for those thirty years.
If time is the ocean in this photo, most footprints left on the sands of it are temporary, washed away soon after they are cast. Many people leave damage or heartbreak in their wakes when they leave this Earth, or even worse, nothing at all. But Martin’s strength and power and resilience were the amber that cast his footprints into stone.
He left me a road map. I will follow in his steps forever.
This book is the first step on that journey, Martin. These words alone cannot do you justice, but love can try. You will never know about this book, just like you never knew about your surprise daughter who was born eight months after you died, in whose eyes and smile and spirit you remain, reincarnated in love. When your wife approached me with a positive pregnancy test a few days after your funeral, I smiled and cried simultaneously as the oldest feeling in the world rose up within me: life goes on. And when we brought the baby to your beloved grandfather, Dondaddy, who had been so shattered by your death, he put a hand on her little arm, nodded, and died twelve hours later.
Neither fate nor circumstance nor the scalpel of a careless doctor could stop the timeless and relentless cycle of love being born into love, dust to bone to love to dust again, and this book is the fruition of that truth. I hope I haven’t let you down. It would’ve been so easy to sink down deep after your death, where things were safe and dark and simple, but thank you for leaving behind a legacy of human survival so powerful, I was inspired to pick up my arms and start swimming.
Your children are so beautiful, and every time I hug them, I can feel your heart beat. I promise I will move heaven and Earth to help give them the futures they deserve. We miss you so much down here, but we are not alone: we have each other. So sleep well – I’ve got this. Please give Dondaddy a hug for me, though. A full, hard, honest hug. A Cooper hug.
And to whoever is reading this: the topics of physical and intellectual disabilities were very close to my brother’s heart, and are now very close to mine. The disabled aren’t sainted caricatures, they’re real people – they’re Summer. They’re you. They’re me. They like Funfetti cake and trashy reality shows and sometimes they get mad and shout curse words. So next time you encounter someone who was born differently than you, I hereby challenge you not to smile vaguely and look away, but to nod, say hello, mention how great the weather is, do something, ANYTHING to let them know you’re listening. Their issues don’t make them any different from anyone else on the inside, but still, you never know who could be aching for love; you never know who could be a Summer just waiting for her chance to be heard. So go hug somebody. Go talk to somebody. Go love somebody. I dare you. What’s the worst that could happen?
I wish you love, and I hope you hope.
Float on forever,
Seth
2015
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seth King is a twenty-five-year-old American author and former journalist. He can be found at sethkingbooks.tumblr.com.