A Goodbye

My family suffered a brutal loss yesterday. It’s still hard to think coherently about it. When people ask who Brandon MacDonald was to me, I usually say that he was my brother. He was more than that.

When I was five years old, living in Columbia Maryland on the ridiculously-named Flamepool Way, a new family moved into the house across the street. The MacDonalds had two boys—Brandon was eight, and William was 3. Back then, we rode Big Wheels around the neighborhood—you know those plastic trikes which were often based on Saturday morning cartoons or TV shows kids loved. I don’t remember what kind I had—Masters of the Universe, maybe? But I remember Brandon’s. He had a Knight Rider Big Wheel that he dearly loved. He called it KITT, just like the Trans Am that starred in the TV show.

In our neighborhood, we liked to jump in front of each other’s Big Wheels and dare the driver to hit us. I did that to Brandon on the bike path that ran past his house to our subdivision’s Tot Lot, and instead of slowing down or turning off, he sped up, trying to hit me. I found that hilarious and exciting, and somehow, that made us friends. What made us more than friends was a game we played based on the ThunderCats—not my favorite cartoon at the time—I was more attached to Transformers, Masters of the Universe, and G.I. Joe, but it was one I enjoyed watching. Brandon devised a series of real-life Thundercat trials based on characters on the show. We started executing these, and he even hatched a plan to convert my grandmother’s old Plymouth sedan into a Thunder Tank. The problem with that was, we both hated the game. I thought Brandon enjoyed it and that it made him happy, so I kept playing even as I had to grit my teeth for every excursion. When I finally confessed, it turned out that Brandon felt the same.

It's hard to remember exactly how this revelation fused us into brothers. Maybe it was the discovery of our mutual willingness to sacrifice for each other. Maybe it was knowing that any thing we did together was more fun than operating separately. Maybe it was simply being two boys of relatively similar ages who carried a lot of pain and felt like outcasts among the other kids in our neighborhood, our schools. In 2005, when I called Brandon and told him I had been commanded in a dream to move to New Orleans, he told me that he had had his own dream that same night. In it, I had appeared at his apartment with two plane tickets and told him it was time to move there. We began planning immediately. Then, in August of 2006, when Katrina and Rita had devastated the city, we moved down.

Last night, after I learned of Brandon’s death, my girlfriend and I drove from our house in Baton Rouge, where we’ve been living since January to New Orleans. We visited Cooter Brown’s with a good friend. This was one of the first places Brandon and I, and our other brother Mikey, visited after moving to New Orleans. I’ve in no way healed from the loss—it’s very raw, very immediate, and I feel it physically as a dull ache in the small of my back—but I understand that while I’m sorry he had to leave us so much sooner than I ever expected, I’ll never hold it against him. I hope that as he makes his way under the shining sun of some Higher Planet, that he looks up sometimes and remembers me as fondly as I’ll always remember him.