Seventeen years ago tonight, I walked into the saddest moment of my life.
Even now, on occasional evenings when I am driving home, I think about dialing up my brother to relate something funny or unusual that happened, wondering how he would react.
No, I don’t truly wonder about his response. He would react with stoicism. In an extremely loquacious family of seven children and three strongly outgoing adults (including Grandma, who lived with us), my brother, the No. 2 child, was our single mystery member.
Except for Mom, no one else knew what thoughts were rumbling about in his busy but typically undisclosed mind.
Pop called him Sparky, and occasionally a family member would interrupt his own monologue to ask my brother why he was reluctant to speak up. His answer never varied: “You are talking, and so is everyone else.”
He did not want to impose himself on anyone. As the one most like Mom, he probably had the most gifted mind — and the best looks. He was far from the best academic performer in our family, though, because playtime, solo or otherwise, was his preference.
If you had inquired of a stranger, he likely would have replied that my brother was the most courteous of all of us.
Never wracked by global ambitious, he modestly chose to follow a low-key professional life.
Clocks, shmocks. Time seldom was relevant to him. I would call home if I were going to be 2 minutes later than I was told to be back. My brother? Within a few hours was close enough for him. Those gaping guidelines never moved.
On every-Sunday visits to my out-of-town grandparents, a home where unbroken chatter was elevated to the level of the Gold Rush, hardly any of them knew the sound of my brother’s voice. “Everybody else is talking,” he would say.
Even though he was the second of seven children and one of only two boys, my parents regarded him as the most vulnerable. Well into adulthood, they were extraordinarily protective of him. My five sisters and I have had periodically problematic relationships, but all of them were unanimous in their uninterrupted, unblinking affection for my brother.
Twenty-four years ago, he helped me across the roughest patch of my life. Troubling as the following seven years were, my brother constantly was the good cop, always making the worst passages not only tolerable but enjoyable. Not, however, that there was so much dialogue even though we were living together.
The End
On an unsuspecting early spring evening in 1997, I came home to our Venice apartment at 9:30, feeling upbeat because I had just visited with my children.
Strangely, the front door was ajar. No lights were on, but the television was running. The trousers I had asked him to press, were hanging neatly.
No brother. Until I entered the bathroom. He was lying on the floor, on his back, a thankfully doused cigarette in his left hand.
He had been dead for 12 hours. Heart attack, it was said. Broken heart, well-hidden depression, his family concluded. He was born different. Tragically, it was a slightly too tall mountain to scale.