A Cousin's Death

CREWE, VA, March 4, 2006 -- Many cousins, most of them being from my mother's side of the family, have blessed and enriched my life. This was especially true of Donald.

You had to know him to understand why this was so.

I also probably was drawn to him because the Donald in his name had been taken from that of my father.

But more than his name, Donald was a special cousin, for he was a special human being. I am not supposed to tell you, my readers, this. I am supposed to let you figure it out from what I write. But this exercise is self-therapy for my hurt, and I am hurting a great deal even as these little words are being written.

When I learned of Donald's death in early March, 2006, I nearly lost it. I nearly lost self-control, for I could not believe he had died in North Carolina. Oh, Grim Reaper, tell us it is not so. Get to hell out of our midst. Tell us that Donald, the Donald we remember with the distinct smile covering his handsome face, is still among the living.

When news of the death reached me at The Journal, I had just the night before returned from North Carolina. Even while in my native state on something of a mission of mercy for my sister, we had not been told of Donald's passing.

The trip to North Carolina had forced me to finish last week's paper by Monday night, February 27, and rise early and head to Carolina with my younger son, Mark, on Tuesday morning.

The whole exercise forced me to miss the biggest story of the week, the special election in which Jane Brown won out in a field of four to continue as Nottoway circuit court clerk. But even it I had been here, I would not have gotten that story because of press deadlines. We print the newspaper on Tuesday afternoon and to break that routine causes more trouble than most folks can understand who have not walked in our shoes here.

Anyway, I got to see my sister, whose husband recently was taken from her by a heart attack, and to attend to some business relating to her welfare. It had not gone well, but the outcome of the trip had turned out about the way I had thought it would.

I had gotten to show Mark around the little Carolina mountain town where my sister and I grew up. It is a railroad town, too. We were overwhelmed by how prosperous and well-kept it appears. Don't tell me that all small towns have to be down in the dumps like some we all know painfully about in our part of the world.

Mark and I decided to head back to Crewe by mid-afternoon. It meant that we would travel about 650 miles in one day. But Mark, for all his 18 years, is a trooper, and he drove us home to Crewe.

We got back to town in time for me to help with labeling, inserting, and delivering last week's edition.

Then on Wednesday, still hurting from my experiences the day before involving my sister, I learned of Donald's death. I felt as though I had lost two relatives in the same week.

Donald's death truly tore me up, as we once said in the western North Carolina mountains.

I thought of Dr. Warren Lambert's words at Berea College all those decades ago. He was delivering a eulogy on Morris Gay, a student firefighter who had died in an accident while answering a fire call near the campus.

Dr. Lambert, who looked like the Confederate generals he admired, said, "We don't cry for the dead. We cry for ourselves."

Yes, I cried for my loss -- for not seeing Donald for so many, many years. My career took me across the American South while Donald moved from the mountains to Henderson, N.C. We lost touch.

But the distance and the years never could diminish what he meant to me. He was more than my cousin. He was my friend. He was like the brother I never had.

When I was drafted into the Army in the heart of the Vietnam War, he was on hand to raise my spirits. He already had served in Uncle Sam's green machine, having pulled a peacetime tour in Japan before 'Nam heated up.

"You're going to have to run a lot," he told me about boot camp. "You'll be fine. You'll be a good soldier."

I carried his words with me throughout my service, especially during infantry school at Fort Bragg.

Before all of that madness, Donald and I would get in his car and take long rides across our native Mitchell County, which is not far from the Tennessee border. We solved all the world's problems and never could understand why we were not in charge of the country's affairs.

He, his two sisters and three brothers had come up the hard way on Jakes Branch Road outside Spruce Pine.

His dad, my uncle Audie, had died when he was child, leaving his mother, my Aunt Mary, to raise a large family with little money. She was too proud to seek public assistance and not much was available in those hardscrabble days.

Mary, my mother's sister, was a saint, a true saint, and the family managed every crisis and forged ahead.

The trauma of losing his dad and living without many creature comforts did not diminish Donald's happy nature. Fact was, his household overflowed with the things that truly matter -- love and patience and understanding, and cooperation.

He drew people, including the ladies, to him.

He did well enough in school and finished at the old Harris High School in Spruce Pine. After the Army and a broken marriage back home, he headed off to Henderson for a new start.

When I worked at a service station back in Spruce Pine in the summers between academic years at Berea, Donald often would show up sporting a new vehicle and wearing the face of the richest man in the world. God had blessed him with a cheerful soul despite the ashes of a tough childhood.

The last time I saw him was years ago when we all gathered for his mother's funeral in Spruce Pine. She, like my mother a few years later, died of colon cancer.

A younger brother, Dewey, died in recent years.

It is clear to me that Donald did well for himself in Henderson. He became a designer for Sara Lee. He rose to be a deacon in his Baptist congregation.

With some people, even if you don't see them all the time, you feel them in your life. He was one of these folks. Even death will not rob his presence from my life. But the death of Donald Edward Burleson has impacted me more than any other deaths since those of my parents in the mid-1980s. I am haunted by Dr. Lambert's words: "We don't cry for the dead. We cry for ourselves."

But in this case, I also cry for my cousin Donald.

Amen.

(Originally Published March 9, 2006)