When Gabriel Lost His Laugh

When Gabriel Lost His Laugh Lee Waldman

Everybody has a different kind of laugh. Have you ever noticed that? Some people have belly laughs. They start deep inside and their whole body shakes, vibrating from toes to nose. Some people chuckle, like they're trying to hold something back. Their heads want them to be take-me-seriously types, but in their hearts they need to smile. Some giggle. They're the ones who've learned to be polite. They laugh even though they don't want to. They also say "please, thank you, and sir" way too much. Some guffaw - I can't explain that one. But my brother Gabriel's laugh was different. It was uniquely his; a joyful shriek. Bigger than a giggle, not yet a chortle. It was a whole body laugh, a joyous laugh, with happiness oozing out at the seams.

I don't remember exactly when Gabe started to lose his laugh. When we were little, he would laugh all the time. It was like he had this great private joke. That only he knew the punch line. There he'd be, sitting in his wheelchair, just hanging out the way that he always did, and suddenly his laugh would erupt. It would fill our whole house, seeping into every corner.

Crabbiness fled when Gabe was laughing. He could light up a room, filling the dark corners where sad and sorrowful people stood. It hardly mattered that Gabe was retarded, that he couldn't do anything for himself, that he was in a wheelchair, or that he couldn't talk. He had a great laugh. It said all that needed to be said.

Gabe's laugh also covered up some less-than-appealing things about him. He's not always the prettiest thing to look at, skinny arms and legs, short brown, bristly hair, a long skinny face that just doesn't look "right" somehow. Looking into his eyes, it's easy to see that he isn't like the rest of the world. He looks bewildered, kind of like he's watching T.V. but the words are all in a language he doesn't speak. It doesn't matter to me, or to anyone in our family that he's so different on the outside, because on the inside he has a beautiful soul.

Even though Gabe and I are twins, and I'm growing older, he's still like a baby, only doing what babies do. It's not that he looks like one. He's tall as me, almost, if he could stand, and skinny as a Number 2 Pencil. No fat on him anywhere. It makes me jealous. He looks skinny and frail, but he's tough. He never cries. Gabe broke his leg once. A really bad break too. He never even whimpered. He does cry when he gets his teeth brushed though. He hates that!

He drools a lot, and sometimes that bothers me, especially when his shirts and pants get soaked. He doesn't always smell flower - fresh either. His breath isn't the best, usually pretty sour and stale. He still has to wear diapers, and even after he's been changed, the dirty-diaper smell hangs around. The most amazing thing is that even with all of his problems, Gabe's laugh was what people remembered. It's amazing what a laugh can do!

You'd think that someone like Gabe would be lonely, but he's not, at least I don't think he is. We all talk to him. Mom sometimes has to remind me though.

"Seren," she'll say, "as long as you're in there with Gabe can you PLEASE talk to him."

"Sure Mom," I'll say.

So Gabe will sit there, rocking his wheelchair back and forth, back and forth, and I'll talk to him about nothing and everything: About school, swimminwish I knew what he hears. He sits in his chair, all skinny and drooly, his eyes vacant, like he's really not there - like he's looking at you but not seeing you. Sometimes he scowls, scrunching his eyebrows like he's thinking really hard. We call that his "vulture" look.

I think Mom and Dad had a tough time getting used to the fact that Gabe wasn't going to be "normal" like me. Their sadness sometimes was like a blanket smothering our house. Like an avalanche of sorrow. They couldn't dig out from underneath it. You could feel it when you walked in the front door. It felt heavy and thick as smoke. Smiles were hard to find.

Gradually their sadness faded, and turned into acceptance. But I could tell that they never REALLY got used to it. Finally they could look at Gabe without that almost-ready-to-cry look.

If it hadn't been for Gabe's laugh things in our house would have been horrible. It always brought a little bit of sunshine in. Little by little, over a long time, without any warning, he stopped. I can't exactly remember when. It seemed as if the older, the taller and the skinnier he got, the less he laughed. When he was little, blond and chubby, with a beautiful round face, Mom or Dad could tickle him and there it would be, that lovely, filling laugh. As he got older, his hair turned from blonde to brown and his baby fat disappeared. His laugh just left too.

Gabe was still happy. He was always happy. He was the happiest person that I knew. He would still smile, and his smile still made others smile, just like his laugh had done. But his wondrous, contagious laugh, that gift of Gabe's to the world, had become harder and harder to find.

And then, one day it wasn't there anymore. I watched Mom and Dad as they noticed. A conversation would start, and then nothing. Sometimes it would happen while we were eating dinner, sometimes when we were in the car on the way to the store. It was almost as if they were afraid to bring it up because then it would be real. You know how it is when you're certain that the monster really is under the bed. You think that if you don't look under there, he won't get you. Gabe was becoming Mom and Dad's monster. If they didn't say it, if they didn't talk about it, it wouldn't be real, and Gabe would still be just this side of O.K.

I knew it was real, and I knew they were sad, sad to the bone, and afraid, scared to death that they were going to have to let go of more of the Gabriel they had wished for. Mom tried to make Gabe be "normal". She shopped for him at The Gap so he was always dressed in style. But the clothes couldn't cover up his "Gabeness". The fact that he was retarded showed through all of it. She cut his hair short, and he was always clean. But nothing that Mom could do would fix it for any of us. Gabe was Gabe.

It wasn't easy for me either. Gabe was part of me, we were born together. Here I was, having a "normal" life, doing the things that kids were supposed to do, and look at Gabe. Stuck. Then there were the times, when I was little, when I didn't want to even be seen with him. I once asked Mom and Dad to keep him home from my soccer game! They didn't, of course. We had quite a "conversation" about it too. The problem was, that I was supposed to love him, and I did, but it was hard to ignore the ugly parts.

The more Mom and Dad tried to keep their sadness inside, the harder it got. One day I walked into the bedroom while Dad was showering. Through the bathroom door I heard the strangest noise. It almost sounded like crying.

When Dad got out, I asked him if he'd been crying.

"No", he said, but in a tired, sad, and quiet voice. "I was singing. Was it that bad?"

I knew he wasn't singing, but I didn't say anything.

On another day I came home from school and found Mom just staring at Gabe, waiting. . .for something. When I asked her what she was waiting for, she all-of -a-sudden, got busy.

"Nothing," she said and wouldn't talk to me about it after that. Even though the counters didn't need cleaning, she cleaned them - - - three times.

The worst part was that they stopped talking to me. I wanted to shake them both, I was so frustrated and hurt.

"What's the matter with me!!!," I wanted to yell. "Don't I count for anything? I'm your kid too!!!"

But I couldn't say those things to them. I could tell that their hearts were still so sad that there wasn't room for me yet. So I locked it up inside of me, but it hurt a lot. I learned what the word heartache means. I think Mom and Dad did too.

I found myself beginning to hate Gabe. I loved him, but I hated him. How can you hate your own twin brother? I didn't know which to do first. But most of all, I hated myself for hating him.

Watching him every day the way that Mom and Dad did, didn't help. I just stopped watching him altogether. I tried to pretend that I didn't have a brother. It didn't work, except to make me sad. Worse than that, it made me feel guilty.

So, there we were, Mom and Dad weren't talking, I was feeling horrible, and Gabe wasn't laughing. I called a family meeting.

We sat down at the kitchen table; me, Mom, Dad, and Gabe. The only sound in the room was the clock over the refrigerator, ticking. I did the talking, somebody had to.

"Gabe doesn't laugh any more," I said. "I don't know if you've noticed it, if you've decided to ignore it, or if you've even missed it, but he isn't." They both stared at me. "I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a fact." Nobody spoke, Gabe smiled.

Now I had their attention. "But I'm still here, me, Seren, your daughter, and I miss you guys. I'm sad too, but don't I count for anything around here? Remember me, Gabe's twin sister. When do I get a turn? You're both so busy being sad about Gabe that you're forgetting me!" I was almost crying, but I don't know if it was from sadness or anger or frustration. "Don't cry," I told myself. I wanted to be tough. I was afraid if I cried, they'd stop listening. I held my tears back, and then I stopped talking.

I waited for either one of them to speak. Mom looked straight at me, but she was really looking through me. I don't think she even saw me. Dad, stared at the cottonwood in our back yard as if it was really interesting. It's just a tree. Tears were silently running down his cheeks, one at a time and dropping onto the clear glass table top. Neither of them spoke, I guess they couldn't. I had said it all for all of us.

That's the way it was. We all sat for a long time. The only one making noise was Gabe. He just kept rocking back and forth in his wheelchair, bouncing it against the kitchen counter, and smiling.

Finally, Dad laced his fingers together and rested his chin against them. He looked straight at me. It felt like the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, that he had really looked at me.

"Seren, I'm sorry," was all that he could say without crying, but I knew he really meant it.

Mom looked at Dad, and then she looked at me. Her hands resting on the top of the table, she was rubbing one of her thumbs with the other one. "I love you Ser," was all that she could say. She could barely get it out before she started crying too. It was enough. I just looked at them both.

Our family meeting was over. I had nothing else to say, and Mom and Dad had given me what I wanted. They remembered me.

Dad stood up and went up the stairs to work on his computer. He usually bounces up the stairs two at a time. This time it was each step separately, as if he were carrying a hundred pounds on his back. Mom stayed in the kitchen. She didn't talk to me or to Gabe. She began to clean the counters; again. I went to my room to try to do my homework. Gabe stayed in the kitchen with Mom, rocking, and smiling. From my room I could hear the rhythmic squeaking of his chair as he rocked back and forth in it to the stereo playing James Taylor.

"Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone. . . "

Gabe still doesn't laugh. He smiles, but those seem to be disappearing too. I see them less and less often. I miss them, and so do Mom and Dad. It's not easy to let go of things before you're ready.

Somehow we'll get through it though. . .