Memories

Since Aaron’s death I’ve been thinking a lot about memories. Memories of him. Memories of me. Memories of my other siblings. I realized that I don’t remember a lot about Aaron. He was 4 years older than me- so we never really played together (Unless he was picking on me in some cruel way) and by the time we were older and could have been close… I was bitter, judgmental and we were “estranged.” But I loved him- oh so much.

Here are some things I do remember.

I remember sitting upstairs in Mom and Dad’s peach room on the water bed with Michael on one side of Aaron and me on the other (I was probably 4-5 yrs old). He was ‘reading us’ a Where’s Waldo (actually I think it was Where’s Nephi). I think Mom and Dad were downstairs ‘reprimanding’ a troubled teen (1 guess who that was), when all of a sudden our fire alarms went off. We were mortified; we thought we were going to die. Aaron was calm, told us to stay calm and stay there. He ran downstairs to find out what was wrong and then quickly came back.

“The fireplace was broken and caught the roof on fire- Dad was fixing it- don’t worry.” He then sat back down and continued to read to us. He was the calm in that potentially scary time. He took care of us when no one else was there!

When I was in 2nd grade I got mono and missed about 2 months of school. I missed the eyeball section of science and therefore missed getting to dissect a cows eye- something I had been looking forward to since Aaron got to do it four years earlier. I was SUPER bummed. I remember Aaron sitting with me on the couch in the family room and helping me with my eyeball homework and then describing to me a cows eye and how cool it is to dissect an eyeball. He told me all about it, so that I wouldn’t feel like I was missing anything.

Aaron used to have pet lizards (when he was in elementary school), geckos to be exact. He could let them crawl all over his body- on his shoulder, face, neck, arms, ect. They would get loose in his messy room and we wouldn’t be able to find them (those things are small) and then we would find them in the weirdest places. Once we lost one… permanently and then later found the smelly carcass.

More later…Dad’s harassing me to go get tacos!