When I lost my mother I was too little to understand. She went to heaven to be with God and she'd always be with me. That's what everyone said and in my innocence I believed it.

When I lost my father I understood too well. He told Cal and I he would never leave us and then on his hospital bed he tearfully admitted to me that he wouldn't be able to keep that promise just before his hand loosened in mine and I felt him slip away.

They called him a hero but he was shot in the back. In all of the western movies we watched together it was always the coward that was shot in the back; the hero wouldn't have been shot at all. He may have been doing his job and it may not have been cowardly of him to accidentally get shot but I could never stop feeling like it was a cowardly thing to have left us when he promised that he never would.

It hurt when I lost my mom. She used to sing to me after she rocked my brother to sleep and I would fall asleep gently rubbing the silky material of one of the scarves she wore to cover her balding head. They were her princess crowns she told us. Gold or silver ones would be too heavy so she said she preferred to wear a very special soft, flowing type of crown instead.

It hurt when I lost my dad. He'd always been there for us, supporting us, even when I knew he ached for my mother in the early summer evening when they would have been sitting on the back porch watching Cal and I explore the yard or bring them a jar of lightning bugs. He taught me how to be a good man. When he was just beginning to share the secrets of adulthood with Cal though he was taken away from us, leaving me to try and finish the job. I suddenly felt like the statue of Atlas I'd seen in my history books, the weight of the world balanced on my shoulders, the responsibility of making sure that my younger brother had a good life overshadowing the desperate hold I was trying to keep on a childhood I never really had.

Because I felt it was what I was supposed to do, I started drinking coffee the day after my father's funeral. It was awful but I found that a nice balance of lots of cream and six sugars dulled the bitter taste it left me with. I worked after school and my aunts and uncles helped out with paying for the house and necessities, wanting us to each keep hold of the little savings accounts our parents had started when we were each born and the equally little bit of money my father had left us to help pay for our college one day.

I thought I was doing good. I had Cal up and ready for school every morning and made sure he did his homework at night. We tried to carry on as normally as possible but we were always 'those poor Hoyt boys'. Motherless and fatherless which in a small Midwestern town also equaled hopeless to the people looking in from the outside. We didn't keep to ourselves but we weren't particularly outgoing either. Kids at school teased me that I was crazy for not living for having no one to answer to, parents bugging me to know where I was going and with who every night. They didn't understand that I was too busy trying to BE a parent.

As much as it hurt to lose my mother and then my father, the loss that cut me the deepest was when I lost my brother. He didn't get sick and pass away or take a bullet over 50 bucks in a gas station cash register. He made a choice and that choice turned him to a culture he knew my father hated more than anything. Maybe it was his way of thumbing his nose at the old man for dying or maybe at me for having been given the power to "run his life" but at 18 my brother found the love of his life in a little white powder called cocaine.