After My Brother's Funeral

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.

Proust "In Search of Lost Time", Book 1 ("Swann's Way") Review

Following is an AI generated review of the first book (of 7) of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", considered one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written.  I used the AI as a study guide asking questions, digging into subjects, getting clarification or historical background, then at the end told it to generate a review based on our conversation. 

Note: Translation version is important.  If interested read the Davis one pictured.

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Reading Proust was unlike reading almost anything else. The prose is often beautiful, poetic, and packed with insight, but it can also wander for pages at a time. I found that trying to follow every sentence analytically was exhausting. The better approach was often to let the prose wash over me and allow the accumulation of impressions, observations, and images to build into something larger.

What stayed with me most was not the famous madeleine scene, but Proust's observations about memory, desire, and the symbols we create in our minds. Again and again he shows how people, places, music, and objects become invested with meanings far beyond their reality. The sections on Swann's obsession, jealousy, and eventual disillusionment were particularly powerful, at times feeling surprisingly modern in their understanding of rumination, uncertainty, projection, and self-deception.

Perhaps most remarkable were Proust's psychological insights. Writing before many modern psychological concepts had entered popular consciousness, he describes patterns of thought that feel strikingly contemporary. At various points I found myself recognizing what we might now call rumination, pathological doubt, obsessive thinking, idealization, and the tendency to construct elaborate inner worlds around people and possibilities. More than once I had the feeling that he was describing mental experiences with a precision that would not seem out of place in a modern psychology text.

I was less captivated by some of the lengthy social and aristocratic maneuvering, and there were stretches that required patience. But just when I felt Proust had drifted too far afield, he would produce a paragraph so perceptive that I had to stop and reread it.

More than a novel of events, this is a novel of consciousness. It reminded me how memory reshapes people and places, how we turn others into symbols, and how much of life is spent inhabiting worlds created by our own minds. Proust's greatest subject may not be memory itself, but the distance between reality and the meanings we attach to it. 

Challenging at times, but ultimately a rewarding read and full of insights that linger long after the book is finished.