Makes me wanna holler

On Monday afternoon, while sitting on my beloved deck, I heard the sound of what I now know were gunshots. There were two victims in the purported drive-by shooting, brothers. The younger of the two was 17 years old. He died. It was reported that the older brother, a 25 year old man, repeatedly yelled “My brother is dead, call the cops. my (sic) brother is dead.”

While I once overhead an argument which precluded a fire and the death of a young woman, never before have I heard the echo of gunshots which resulted in the loss of life. A teenager’s life. They were certainly the most horrifying sounds I’ve ever heard – and will continue to hear, I’m afraid.

I can’t stop thinking about the mother of those two young men. What had she dreamed for them and how must she now be feeling? Was he her baby? I have sons with that same exact age gap. I’m familiar with it and know what it looked when they were little boys born eight years apart from one another. The hope I had that they would one day find common ground as their age difference shrank over the years. Did this mother have the same musings? Is she more comforted or anguished that her boys were together when they were the victims of what appears to have been a targeted attack?

Today, less than 24 hours after this young man died, I drove my car down the street where he was killed, something I do with frequency. I expected to see a memorial, a common enough acknowledgement of loss often seen in urban settings and roadsides which have witnessed death.

Instead, there was nothing.

No candle.

No flowers.

No balloon.

No sign to indicate that a family had lost one of their own, just yesterday.

No clue how that mom will survive losing her child.

No imaginable way to make these killings stop.