My younger, only brother dropped dead of a massive stroke at only 56. He had high blood pressure, was way overweight, and ignored going to the doctor. "I’ll be fine”. He wasn’t, and many who knew him are as much angry as sad as this was likely preventable. He left a wife of 30 years and three kids, two in college, one who will be a senior in high school.
Although less than two years apart, we were never very close. After fighting like cats and dogs as kids, we basically kept our own lives from adolescence since we were so temperamentally different. I was the brainy introspective kid, he the partying social animal. I drove myself through college and launched a corporate career. He wandered through two colleges, did a bit of this and that after graduating, and in his 30s finally got a vision and became a criminal lawyer of all things. He was no bleeding heart - he would say he never had an innocent client, but many overcharged ones - but it was the fun, excitement and the game in the courtroom. He’d be at a jail and two different courtrooms on the same day.But while never that close he’d be there at the end of the phone and at holidays. We’d pick up conversations where we left off after three months like it was three days. We had a historical shorthand for our deceased parents, family lore, that crazy family vacation to Disneyland in 1977. And we had each other's back because that’s what brothers do.
But "I just got back from my brother’s funeral" was not a sentence I was expecting to be saying any time soon, potentially never for a younger brother. He joins a growing list of dead family members that include my parents, nearly all my aunts and uncles (two left at 90), several cousins. Like I wrote before, those pictures of family gatherings from not that long ago now have few living people in them, and in many of them I am the only one left in a big group.
The thing about a sibling is that they are one of the few people who remember your opening chapters. Friends arrive later. Spouses arrive later. Even your own children only know an adult, curated version of you. But a brother remembers the house, the parents, the fights, the vacations, the embarrassments, and the family myths that nobody else quite understands, which is why this loss will be different from anyone else.