On the death of my only brother

My brother died today.  Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know.

We lived three time zones and what seemed like fifty years apart, and the sound of my phone ringing at 5:29 am confused me at first.  I knew it wasn't my alarm, but it took me a second to figure out it was a phone call, and that coming, as it did, at 5:29 am from a number I trusted (because it was ringing at all, rather than going straight to voice mail), it was unlikely to be good news.  I looked and it was my older sister.  She gave me the news.

He is the first of my three siblings to die, unless you want to be a stickler and count the two who didn't live beyond birth, and who came before me.

He was almost ten years older than I, and he left the house and set out on his own when I was 10 or maybe 11, so we were never close in the way one expects brothers who are a year or two apart to be, or even the way brothers who are separated by ten years might be, if there were three or four siblings in between as often happened in good Catholic families.  

No, he was the last of the first two, and I was the first of the second two.  There wasn't much to connect us or the decade between us.

I do have good memories of him being my brother: Going to baseball games on the riverfront, and riding the bus home after stopping at a drive-in for burgers at what was probably just 10:00 pm but seemed, bathed in neon as it was, like a time from another world; or seeing him play high school football, or hearing the head coach compliment him on the local radio broadcast.  Him sending me $25 my freshman year of college when I was flat broke, but also blaming me for telling mom to throw out his baseball cards; he was convinced I had dumped a small fortune in the trash. The two of us, speculating as adults whether mom was the way she was because dad was the way he was, or whether dad was the way he was because mom was the way she was (we decided the answer was "yes.")

But we didn't have a lot in common.  The only moderately liberal thing I ever heard him say was in an argument with my father, when he pointed out that Jesus--like the hippies my father was disparaging--also had long hair.  He was anti-union as a teenager living in a union house, and I doubt he ever voted for a Democrat in his entire life: In that, and in other ways, he seemed to be the mirror image of me.

We both wanted to leave Dubuque, but I sensed he was always running away from his past, while I always felt like I was running toward a future.

We both, of course, had issues with our father, perhaps the one thing that bound us.  That bond was shattered when we heard from dad's war buddies at his funeral about the things he had to endure: Being airdropped into New Guinea with a bulldozer and another soldier to clear a landing strip out of the jungle, but being greeted within minutes by sniper fire that killed the other soldier, and being forced to live behind the blade of his bulldozer for two days.  And mom, of course, making some references to the bodies he had to push into mass graves, her story tailing off into the ether, as if she were hoping the reality would evaporate, magically attached to her words.

After that, I forgave dad and apologized for not understanding.  I got the sense my brother was unable to do that, but I never asked him after that one time when I suggested it would be a good idea.  

Maybe it was that dad, with his eighth grade education, told him he couldn't go to that fancy college in New Hampshire where the football coach had been recruiting him.  Knowing what I know now, Dartmouth and Gary would have been a match made in heaven.  He ended up instead at the West Des Moines Institute of Technology, where he became the poster child for undermatching in my professional career. 

I had not heard much from him since Thanksgiving, 2016.  He called, as he was wont to do on holidays, and mentioned that he had been uninvited from Thanksgiving dinner because of his support for Donald Trump.  I told him I would have uninvited him too, meaning that the first part of that call represented the last civil words we shared.  He later told me that "you don't want to move to Oregon" (you can guess the reasons why), and I had to tell him that he didn't need to offer unsolicited life advice to someone over the age of 60.

There were only a few more interactions in the intervening years: My atypically caustic (even for me) "reply to all" to his political email before the 2020 election, and an unanswered text I sent to him on the evening of January 6th.  The politics that had long divided us passively were now dividing us actively, and the one thing you didn't want to do is to get between the two of us when we were having a stubborn match.

I'm less sorry that we didn't patch things up than I am that we couldn't. We are opposite sides of the same coin that was our father, a man who once held a grudge about a twenty-five-cent depression-era grievance for over 40 years.  But this morning I told my kids we had both made our choices, and I suspect he was as puzzled by my world view as I was by his; in the end, all we can is follow our own compass and our own path.

I hope Gary's path was satisfying for him, and he got to do all the things he wanted to accomplish.  And I hope the next part of his journey is just as good as this one just concluded.

Love you, Gooseberry.