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Glenn A. Osborn

I'm reading your death certificate, brother, and thinking about how, there at the end, your handwriting became more and more obscure. In contrast to the beauty of your thoughts. Beautiful things in horrible
handwriting.

You were two years older than I when mom and dad told me you were going to a better place. I thought they meant the gym or the root beer stand, and that you'd soon return. I thought you were invincible.

It was a big disappointment to discover you were not, when you fell flat on your face against the sidewalk for the first time, your bike a twisted mass, your face an open wound. And things got worse from there.
You would fall a thousand times before you admitted defeat.

No one could understand you anymore. Your speech, like a foreign language, forced us to ask you to write things down. I remember the first thing you wrote was about the lilacs outside your window, how they smelled like mother.

Later you scrawled that there was no god, and you spelled that purposely with a lower case g, telling us no merciful god would allow this to happen. I was twelve years old and played gospel records for you, dad's
old 78's of scratchy joy and harmony.

When you died, I was shooting marbles. There was a particular shot I took, a big glass eye against a gray green jumbo, that killed you, I think.

And here on this certificate, dated July 21, 1952, one Cecily Brown has, in almost calligraphic penmanship, given her official imprimatur as Coroner, attesting to the horror that was your death. Horrible things in beautiful handwriting.