Empty Coffins
Sometimes he calls me. Although thirty years, two hundred miles, three tons of rubble, and a lifetime’s missed memories separate us, he still calls.
My brother always says the same thing. “Brother, help!” he calls. Over the years, his voice has gotten fainter. It used to be a broken scream, choking off at the end of the word in a smothered gurgle. Now, it’s a whisper. Barely a plea, more a statement, like a secret many years lost: “Brother. Help.”

I remember the first time my brother called me, the time that shaped all others. I remember when I didn’t help, couldn’t help, wouldn’t help.

There was a lovely sunset. The neighbor’s dog was barking too loudly. The TV was blaring, the Kardashians filling up the empty silence left where an argument had recently cut the air. After three years of absences and empty seats at the dinner table, that day the house seemed inflated like a child’s bouncy house, too full of memories and resentments and family. Still, there was the reassurance that soon one of us would apologize for the words that had been aimed so carefully to slice and twist.

I would apologize for accusing him of working too much.

He would apologize for calling me an unambitious layabout.

I would apologize for telling him that his kids liked me better.

He would apologize for hitting me.

I would hug him.

He would ask for fewer hours, spend more time with his family, live life again.
Instead, there was an indescribable crack, the sound a life makes when it is rent in half. Not a boom, not a gunshot, not quite an explosion.

Just a crack.

Just my brother. Just a broken scream, choking off at the end. Just many tons of earth and building giving way. Just, “Brother, help!”

The memories are a little off now, thirty years later. Why was he upstairs alone? What exactly had we said to each other? I don’t remember those things. They don’t matter. What matters is him calling to me, me not answering in time.

What matters is that immense hole in the ground. I am still overwhelmed by its suddenness, its grandness. The way it swallowed up our house, our objects, our memories, our brother and father and husband.

What matters is that when we gave his eulogy, there was nothing to say about him except that he was loved.

What matters is that there was nothing to learn from his death, no reassuring moral or meaning or reason. Just senseless questions and echoes calling from thirty years past. Thirty years of unanswerable questions and fading memories and and empty chairs at the dinner table and visits to an empty grave.
What matters is that he still calls me. Or at least, I still hear him. Maybe those are different things. To me, they’re the same thing. Only one thing matters: “Brother. Help.”


A bad omen, they whispered. A blessing, others proclaimed. The reporter who came afterwards to feed off his death and our lives had another judgement: a life lesson, a moral, a wakeup call to absent fathers everywhere. “Yes,” he said, fumbling with his camera, fidgeting his striped fedora, “very tragic of course, but such a strong message must be heard. Surely you want to share his death.”
I wanted to knock the crooked hat off his head, keep his greedy camera off my family, keep his mosquito eyes off my childhood home–my home where the muggy, stagnant air seethed with the dull whine of cicadas, where clouds hung heavy with rain unable to fall. Around my brother’s makeshift grave, grass kept unnaturally green had begun to discolor, burnt around the edges. Behind the reporter and his camera, the sinkhole made occasional crackling noises, shifting uneasily with its captured house and human.
“It will be a sensation. The symbolism of such an unanticipated death is simply beautiful.”
This is not some symbolic fairytale. My brother’s death was not a warning, a bless, an omen. There is no moral to this story, no take-away from this tragedy. There was just a man and a sinkhole and an empty coffin. My brother was not a lesson to be taught.
Not an idea.
He was just a man. Just a brother.
The cicadas’ whine clouded my thoughts, dizzying me as I stood before the grave––no, not a grave, just a sinkhole, just a chasm to swallow up all the bits and pieces of my life.
The reporter started up again, this time with the video camera recording, his voice blending with the cicada drone.
“Hello there to all you viewers at home! Tonight we here at B23 News are in Seffner, Florida with more news on the story that has started to sweep the nation, the story of Sinkhole Man. That is the nickname emerging for the man who disappeared along with his house into a sinkhole on Thursday. This is the kind of heart wrenching story that will make you want to go out and live life...”
Two days later, there was a ceremony at the sinkhole. It was the reporter’s idea, of course. The pile of letters and presents and tokens had grown up towards the heavens around the security tape. Signs: “He was great man.” “We will never forget you.” “Thank you for teaching me to live life to the fullest.”
In front of the seething mass of people, the tokens were pushed into the sinkhole, filling my brother’s resting spot with their messages. Neons (greens, yellows, pinks) careened into the sinkhole, garish against the shards of stone and dirt and crumpled wood. Any last sign of my brother disappeared along with first mementos into the depths of the hole. Crowds clapped, some sobbing, some cheering. Cameras flashed, cicadas droned. It was done.


Three thousand people came to his funeral, maybe more. They spilled out of the church and into the street and around the block and across the country.

A few, maybe, had loved him for who he was, not what he meant. The man with the handlebar mustache in the second row, the small woman with too-bright yellow robes. Me. His family.
Of the rest, almost no one had met him during his life. Still, they all knew him, his death, his story–they seen it on the news, felt it reach into their hearts and remind them that life was oh so short. I couldn’t hate them for being there. It was selfish of them to steal his death like this, to transform it into a moral for their own meaningless story, to transform him from person to idea, to fill his empty coffin with lessons, but I still couldn’t hate them. They just needed reassurance, needed to believe that there was meaning in all the evils of their lives. They needed to sit in front of the empty coffin and pretend it was there for a reason. They needed to mourn.
I don’t remember what the pastor said, or what songs we sang, or how the flowers looked, or if I cried when I saw his empty, empty coffin.
I only remember the people, each there missing their own brother or father or sister or mother. Each with their own senseless, meaningless death. Each with their own empty coffin. After the service, hundreds left. Hundreds more lined up to see me and the family, peering into our eyes to see if we all shared the same pain, looking for meanings and morals I couldn’t give them, mumbling their own stories–car crashes, falls, suicide, war, cancer, poisoning, drug deals, bear attack, lost.