One Way Ticket

At six o'clock in the morning on June 9, 1998, my mother drove to my house, blowing her horn. It was her seventy-third birthday. I came to the door, and she called out in a shaken, tearful voice for me to phone the coroner in Gulf-port, Mississippi--my younger brother Mark had just been killed. The first thing that came to mind was that the accident had to be alcohol related. Mark had been struggling with his alcoholism for more than twenty years. In the previous thirteen years he'd bounced in and out of AA many times. We had lived in fear of this phone call for a long time.