My Brother Died Suddenly Whilst Still Quite Young

We hopped on a plane the next day…but this is not his story. But his dying young contributed to our having some time on our hands…and to the story.

Maria Rattray
4 min readSep 28, 2022
Like every living thing on earth we are born, and eventually we die. Image of flowers dying.
Like every living thing on earth we are born, and eventually we die. Image of flowers dying. Photo by Martin de Arriba on Unsplash

This is not actually a story about my brother dying young, though he did die.

The morning I took the call I had just said goodbye to my nephew, my brother’s son, and his two friends, who had been holidaying with us and were now off to Queensland to catch up with my sister’s family.

Bad timing.

One hour later I got the call. He had collapsed and died during the night.

As a teenager you’d never think you would say goodbye to your dad, go on holiday for several weeks, and never see him again? Would you?

What happened thereafter was we all took the first flights we could get, and flew over for the funeral.

Having done that we found ourselves back in Scotland with two weeks to spare because there had to be an autopsy.

Today I am thinking about Frank, my brother, simply because I just washed my husband’s Aran sweater, in the washing machine, and it survived!

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Maria Rattray

Writer, author, teacher, fun-loving poet. Trying valiantly to make the world a better place. Helping you to guide the future. Find me at: https://ponmyword.com