FRIEND'S DEATH BROUGHT ADULTHOOD ON EARLY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992                   TAG: 9201100135
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
FRIEND'S DEATH BROUGHT ADULTHOOD ON EARLY
When I look back over the years, it is hard for me to tell when I actually grew up and made the move into what some people would call "responsible adulthood." There are many people close to me, I fear, who would probably argue whether I ever made that move at all.
Moments join moments until they become days, then years, then a big, messy blur that somehow becomes your life.
With Andrew it was different, clear.
One event, one awful, grief-filled event. And my brother was a man. A finger snap. A song on the radio. A telephone call. The amount of time it takes someone to die.
Though there are many times, still, that I can see a little boy in him, I know that he has made that leap now. He will never be a child again.
It was on a cold day in January, almost a year ago now, that his friend Chris died.
It was a day before the war started, when many Americans joined us in the numb, ripped-apart feeling Chris' family and all of us close to him already shared.
It would be impossible for me to say what Chris' death meant to my brother, only that the impact will never leave and that his life will be forever altered.
But for me, who watched it all - an insider because I was a mourner, too, but an outsider because I could never get inside my brother's head - I could see the change.
My brother has always been one to try to hide his pain. That old adage: Men are strong? I don't know.
"He internalizes," I can hear my mother saying after she watched some insult or other seep into his skin like a sponge. He never wrung it out.
When my mother called to tell my brother about Chris, he knew something was wrong. He left his friends and walked to a phone booth where he could be alone, where he could hide his tears. It was the last time he would hide them.
The day I watched him become a man, his tears flowed and he didn't wipe them away.
He stood there during Chris' funeral, in front of us all, a lanky arm draped across the shoulder of his friend Rob. (I cannot, in remembering all this, recall when exactly Rob stopped being Robby. Was it in high school? College? And I cannot remember, either, when my brother stopped signing his cards and letters "Andrew R." as if we needed that last initial to know who he was.)
My brother spoke to a sorrow-filled church about what Chris' spirit, what his memory, would always mean.
Rob, beside him, spoke too, words failing him, but their years together rushing into his face, aging him. Aging them both.
Perhaps it was Chris' years - though there were only 21 of them - that turned my brother and Rob into men.
Those years divided somehow, and crept into the lives of his two best friends. Those years kicked my brother over the edge. They took that slow transition people make into adulthood and turned it on its ear.
They made carefree college students into men.
My brother and Rob are in New York now, searching for their place in the working world.
They had once planned, with Chris, to move to Seattle. They visited that town; they didn't stay.
As this month wears on, Chris creeps back into my thoughts again, smiling, strumming a guitar, raiding my mother's refrigerator. Putting that awful gunk in his hair. Urging me on at the bowling alley.
They used to smoke pipes for awhile, my brother and his friends - for the taste, they said, they weren't trying to look mature.
When I see Chris in my head I remember him as younger - not a child, by a long shot. But not a man yet either.
It does not take a man to make one.

Madelyn Rosenberg is the higher-education reporter for the Roanoke Times & World-News.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB