Robert Allen Kerkhoven

My twin brother Robbie died in June 2000, when we were 11 years old. He was sick for a couple of days, with a high fever and he just wasn’t well. My mom took him to the doctor, to make sure it was nothing serious, and they told her it was just the flu, and that he should just be taken home, and get some rest. That day he stayed in bed all day, and when I got home from school, I sat with him for the rest of the day. We were really close and I had missed him at school that day.

We had always loved thunderstorms, and that night I woke up to see that there was a huge one going on. We shared a room, and I knew that he would want to see it, so I decided to wake him up, so that we could watch it out the window. He was facing away from me, so I turned him over. Just as he turned, lightning lit up the room and I saw that he was covered in what, to me at the time, looked like bruises. I shook him to find out what was wrong, and he wouldn’t wake up. Obviously something was wrong, and I started screaming, I couldn’t stop. My parents woke up and came in, turned on the lights, and saw what I was screaming about. My mom ran to him, my dad grabbed the phone, and my mom said he wasn’t breathing. My dad started to do CPR, and my mom called the paramedics, but when they got there, they said it was too late, he was gone.

I miss my brother every day, and I only wish that we had known more about this disease before it was too late, so that we could have seen the warning signs, and possibly known it was more than just the flu, or so that we could have been vaccinated earlier on. We didn’t even know that a vaccine was available until it was obviously too late.