Objects In The Mirror

Bryan Thompson
September 8, 2026

Bryan sipped his coffee slurry as he scrolled through the New York Times the morning of his sister’s death.

After finishing his usual hot black coffee, he now settled for a cold brew made each morning with cold-brew coffee and chocolate protein drink mix, crushed ice, and ginger sprinkled on top to minimize nausea. The cold brew was not chosen out of preference but was a compromise born of the desperate need for morning caffeine competing, as it did most mornings, with his ulcer.

“Is this Mr. Thompson?” the male voice on the other side of the phone asked.

“Yes, this is he,” Bryan replied.

“Is your sister Lisha Thompson?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?” Bryan asked.

“I am here at her apartment. Her neighbor asked me to call you. I am with the Sheriff’s Office. Your sister was found dead this morning.”

Bryan’s coworker would later remark that she believed the call to have been over at this point. In a cube next to his, she assumed that the conversation had been exactly that brief at first.

Then, after a few minutes, she heard the unmistakable sound of a sob, followed by the question:

“Could there be some kind of mistake?” Bryan asked in a soft, wet-sounding, tortured whisper.

“No. There’s no mistake,” the officer replied firmly.

After a few minutes of silence, his coworker appeared in Bryan’s line of sight, tissues in hand. Lightly touching his hand, she somehow guided him to a chair in the nearby conference room. Closing the door behind them, Nancy said little as his shoulders slumped. From behind the hand now cradling his face, he said, “This is going to kill Mother.”

More than one person offered to drive him home that day. Insisting on driving himself, he made his way home, where he met his partner, Kent. After sharing the news, Bryan collapsed into Kent’s arms, and they spent quiet moments together, heads touching, silently taking account of a day they both knew would come.

Lisha’s substance abuse had begun, by her account, about 10 years prior to her death. Bryan would often wonder how much of what she had told him was true, given the many half-truths and lies she had shared during the last years of her life. Her body had been found the morning she was supposed to move in with his Aunt Norma, who had told Lisha that while she was welcome to stay, she could not simply stay around the house all day drinking. The tiny airline-sized bottles found near Lisha were likely her attempt to limit the amount she drank in anticipation of securing the latest place to crash.

“Please call Mother,” Bryan managed to say to Kent. “Make sure she is at home and let her know we are coming over.”

Lebanon, Tennessee, is about 50 minutes from Belle Meade, where Bryan and Kent lived. With Kent at the wheel, Bryan let the whizzing landscape distract him from the conversation he was about to have with his mother, Rose. For some reason, he found himself remembering a day when he and Lisha were five years old or so, traveling in their Aunt Norma’s VW Beetle from Columbia, Tennessee, to Nashville.

Bryan had the habit of falling asleep in the car when someone else was driving. That morning, he stayed awake as he remembered listening to Petula Clark’s “Downtown” with Lisha while Rose and Norma passed sandwiches to the two children, who were busy copying Dagwood comics with Silly Putty in the backseat.

Barely one year apart, Bryan and Lisha had been close from the earliest years of their childhood. Through the many schools they attended, the various stepparents and stepbrothers and sisters, they were always each other’s closest companion. On drives like this one, they would share plans about their future, conspiring together to make great works of art with their Silly Putty and ingenuity.

Now in his fifties, Bryan felt himself falling asleep on the way to Lebanon to tell Rose her daughter was dead.

The gravel driveway crackled under his feet as Bryan approached her front porch.

“I need to talk to you,” he said to his mother, his hand on hers.

“What is it?” Rose asked earnestly.

The tears that had stopped during the drive returned. Big, wet tears streamed down his face and splashed noisily onto the wooden porch, preventing him from answering for more than a few moments.

“Is it Lisha?” Rose asked. “Is she sick?”

Bryan quietly shook his head.

“Is she dead?” Rose asked.

Bryan simply nodded.

Kent told his mother later that he had never witnessed the kind of grief he saw and heard from Rose that day. The howls of pain that came from Rose as she sat with Bryan echoed through the outdoor setting, loudly enough to drown out the nearby traffic.

“Not my daughter. Oh Lord, not my daughter,” Rose shrieked that morning.

The medical examiner’s final report would list chronic alcoholism as one of the three causes of death on Lisha’s death certificate, along with hypertensive coronary heart disease and morbid obesity. To Bryan, Lisha’s death had come to seem like a very slow and intentional suicide, coming as it did after many emergency room visits, rehabs, and detox centers. The last of these had advised Bryan that his sister’s BAC had been .40, a “likely deadly” reading. Lisha had understood many times that she was close to death.

Bryan was shocked by Lisha’s death, but shocked in the way that people say they are when they cannot be surprised.

Rose’s pain that day would give way, it seemed to Bryan, to what he believed was a deep, bone-level, perhaps spiritual exhaustion. Selecting the funeral home, the casket, and, in Rose’s case, her daughter’s outfit for the coffin, she completed each task wordlessly, ending each only with a deep, staggered sigh that left her mouth in waves.

During the days and weeks that followed, Rose and Bryan would spend more time together than usual—in cars, in Lisha’s apartment, in a funeral home. It seemed to Bryan that he spent much of those days wandering. He moved through rooms, some filled with strangers, others containing only scattered pieces of Lisha’s last days on earth, as she had held onto the ledge of life with only enough strength to endure the various indignities of addiction long enough for the next drink.

Bryan and Rose also seemed to circle each other at times: in the kitchen, where they had to clear empty bottles from the sink just to pour a glass of water; in Lisha’s bedroom, where her body had been found and which still smelled of death. It was as if the space between them was being saved long enough for Rose’s daughter to once again appear.

Rose was never again the same person following Lisha’s death. Two years later, she had a stroke. A few weeks after that, she too passed away, shortly after being admitted to a hospice center.

“She has one foot in this world and one foot in the other,” Bryan would say to Kent after his last visit.

“How do you mean?” Kent asked.

“I am not sure how else to explain it,” Bryan replied. “She is not fully here—a little less here every hour and a little more in the next place with Lisha.”

Bryan said it with weary certainty.

On the drive to work his first day back, Bryan stopped at Starbucks for a hot black coffee. His palm full of Tums, he chewed several before washing them down with the acrid sting of his favorite substance.

Smacking his lips, he drove to work, preparing the excuse he would give his doctor for the assault on his stomach. But at some point, he said to himself, I have to be able to live my life.

Settling into his cubicle, he moved aside the tissue box and opened his computer. Not expecting any calls that morning, he sipped his coffee and read the condolence card on his desk.

Maybe today he would stop on the way home and get some more cold brew.

On the other hand, this coffee really hit the spot.