Friday June 4, my brother would have been turning 50, except that on Wednesday June 9 it will be seven years that he passed. It isn't easier each year, but we just have to deal with it. People thought that we got along because we were both black sheeps (well I still am) but really I got along with him because he was a simple man. He was approachable, personable, relatable, and now I am trying to keep him cherishable.

In 2014, at about 9:45am my cousin showed up to my parent's house all shook-up. My mother told me that he looked real scared and was claiming that my sister, Tina, was on the side of the road from a car accident. I asked my mother if she called my sister, and she said my sister was fine. But I could see something wasn't sitting well with my mother as she would drift off, something I would hardly ever see her do. She was (and still is) a very busy woman. I even questioned her if my cousin had gotten to her.

She dismissed it and went about her business. About twenty minutes before she normally left for work she told me she was going to take my cousin home. That was something she had never done before. That day my older son and his father came to pick up my other son up - something they never did before and after that day.

At about 10pm, my father received a phone call. When I saw him walk out of his room in just his underwear, I knew something was not right. I got up and followed my father to the living room where I could hear the person he is talking to sounding frantic. My father then tells me to go get my mother's phone - something she had never done before or after. I returned the last missed call.

I thought it was my brother, but it wasn't him. It was a police officer who was "babysitting" my sister-in-law because she had fainted when they told her about my brother and refused to go to the hospital. Her daughters had spent the weekend with their father, my brother, leaving her alone. He was on his way back home, but was in the fatal accident and never made it home.

My cousin said it was my sister Tina, but it was my brother Tavi, who was on the side of the road around the time he went to my parent's house.