A Death in the Family
My brother died in June 2008 after a year’s battle with cancer. I hadn’t seen him for four years before that, each of us busy living separate lives on opposite sides of the country, but we saw a lot of each other in his final 12 months. As one of my friends said, “When a person is so sick, you miss them for a long time even before they’re gone.”
His illness brought us close to his extraordinary friends. A current myth says that men are from some other planet than women, that they can’t relate and are afraid of emotion. But I watched as my brother’s friends, mostly men, came to visit him in his last two weeks at hospice. They held his hand and talked to him. They made him laugh even when he seemed half asleep. They hugged him. They sat around and watched South Park and Monty Python episodes with him.
I’ll never have another brother, but I’m glad to have spent time with Jonathan, James, Rick, Bob, Brian, David Z., David K., David C., Ofer, Francis, Alan, Allen, and even Joe, the local Target pharmacist. And there were others. Their kindness in coming to see my brother and to talk with his mother and three sisters is something I hope never to forget.
