Losing Ty

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Losing Ty
• Lorna Milne (bio)

Look at the gift of being, now . . . And what will our time leave?

—Robert Macfarlane, geophysicist and author

How much evidence needs to be present before something is done? And who gets to decide?

—Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author

On a cool spring day in 1967, our parents away on a trip, we lose our little brother Ty John. I’m not sure why we called Ty by his first two names, likely because Mom did. Sometimes we simply said TJ, a hard and soft sound with a lyrical ring to it. When we were in a hurry, it was simply Ty. At any rate, Ty is missing, and our parents aren’t home to lead the search through our eastern Montana town.

None of us four older children remember the babysitter from that weekend. Perhaps it is Mrs. Hehn, who is kind and never spanks us. She also bakes gingerbread cookies, laying them out on racks to cool before helping us decorate them. Our parents rarely go away— once a year at most. And Ty getting lost is no fault of the babysitter. He’s a hard child to keep track of.

I look in all our hiding spots in the backyard, then scour the neighborhood. I play with my brothers; I know their haunts.

As time goes on with no sign of him, the search intensifies. Mrs. Hehn asks for help from other adults in the neighborhood. My mother’s best friend drives up and questions me: where did I last see Ty? The babysitter calls the police, who stop by in their black car to question us as well. I overhear the babysitter ask the police if she should ring our parents, which makes me think of the river. Two blocks from our house flows the Yellowstone River. Ty loves to fish at the river; however, at age three he’s too young to go alone. We are most certainly not allowed to go in the spring, when the banks aren’t exposed.

My sister Darcy and I, ages eight and nine, walk down the hill to the river. Standing on the high bank I fear Ty is lost for good. Huge blocks of ice crash and swirl downstream. In 1967 breakup of the Yellowstone was an event. Townspeople congregated along the hilltops to watch the drama of ice-cake collision; our friends who lived close to the river evacuated their homes. The county sheriff woke Dad in the middle of the night if the water crested the railroad embankment behind his farm implement business. We’d hear Dad hurriedly dress and leave to move machinery out of the path of overflow and ice. All this is far from my mind as I peer over the edge looking for a small boy [End Page 419] making his way down the deer path with his fishing pole. The image is impossible, though, as ice wedges litter the hillside and the bank is underwater.

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Ty, Brenda, and the author in western Alaska, autumn 1982. Author photo.

Trudging home with a knot of despair in my gut, I hear cries of relief coming from our backyard. Ty is found! Darcy and I run up the street and through the backyard gate to see him standing by our toy box, the lid propped open. Flushed, Ty repeats, “I breathed through the hole.”

I pick him up and scold him, “Didn’t you hear us calling?”

To this day, Darcy thinks Ty hid from us in plain sight. I think he crawled into the toy box to hide, then fell asleep. Or he was too young to lift the lid. He is only found when someone hears him call out.

_______

Years later, in the days after my brother died, I forgot appointments, walked through a construction zone unawares, ran a red light, forgot the names of good friends. I had little sense of how my day fit together, or how it should. I was, as they say, grief-stricken. Struck by grief.

Sixteen months earlier, when I learned that our fifty-one-year-old brother had...