This afternoon would have been a milestone birthday for my only brother because it ended in zero. I yearn for him to come back, even for a little while, because so much was left unsaid when he dropped dead of a heart attack 13 years ago last April.
You would have liked Paul, much, much better than me, even though you never met him. He possessed the most desirable qualities of a gentleman, a diplomatic way of saying he and I were as opposite as heat and cold.
Among six siblings, he was the only legitimately quiet and shy one, wandering off alone, noiselessly, un-noticed and unmissed, to inspect nature while his sisters battled for singular superiority. “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” was the middle name of all five of my sisters. They made internecine warfare a suitable replacement for playing with dolls or jacks, and one of them still does.
Paul was a mysterious loner from the start of his life to his final hour, 56 years later. As the oldest, I was in charge of making sure he didn’t run away from our front yard that was not fenced in.
Sparky, Pop called him, because he always seemed on the edge of committing mischief, like running away from home when he was three years old.
He was smarter than any of us and gifted with the best appearance of our brood — but I hardly knew a moment with him when he was not brooding.
An Enigmatic Mystery
All of us came equipped with drawbacks in varying amounts.
But Paul, good natured as he was, took it the hardest. That is what is so mystifying about his life and death. I don’t know exactly what he thought. Never did. He never told me. I arrived at my parents’ home as an open book —calling out the page numbers and my accompanying moods every day.
People said I squelched his growth because of my natural elephantine boisterousness. Quite possibly.
I sailed through newspapers, bouncing from one to another, marriages, relationships with a drum-beating joie de vivre while Paul, the lifelong bachelor, ostensibly contentedly, stood in the background, happy to let a light fall on me and hoping the light would never find him. It didn’t.
For the first seven years after a world-class bitter divorce in 1990, Paul kept me stitched together, cooking, washing, cleaning house, ironing — and being there like Gibraltar when I had squandered a relationship, tangled with a difficult person I was interviewing or kvetching because I was still miles from my passionate objectives.
I believe that he had died of a broken heart on Thursday, April 3, 1997, when I came home and found him on the floor, face up, ever present cigarette in hand, in our Venice apartment. Desperate, I called four friends to come over and be with me, including a girl I had broken up with three nights before. She not only came, she was the last to leave I never saw her again.
I could write a book on Paul, about three pages long. I know so little about him. I am positive he never was loved nearly enough, and that eventually killed him.
It means nothing to say it this afternoon, and I should have said it hundreds of times to his face, which I never did. I love you, Paul. More importantly, I miss you more than anyone who has left my life, and that flock would fill the Coliseum.
