My brother

 

  I was six. My mother was giving me a bath. 

"Your Daddy has planted a seed in my tummy and it will grow into a little brother or sister."

I pictured my father with a tiny shovel, hoe, rake and watering can. It would be about three more years before I learned the true method of reproduction.

My brother arrived. I wish I could say we had a wonderful relationship. 

We didn't.

He was a child who ruled by temper tantrum. It wasn't jealously that made me wish he hadn't been born but memories of him knocking me down the stairs, tearing up a six-page term paper, etc. make that impossible. in my junior year of high school I left home and moved in with a girl friend to avoid him. Our parents eventually worked out that I would go home. 

He could probably tell people I did things to him too. I probably did.

My mother was the original helicopter mother 60 years before the term was invented. Where I had believed her when she said, I wasn't to leave the yard to play with the kids across the street, my brother was out and away playing with Stevie, Karl and Todd minutes after leaving our house. It was my job to go and check on him regularly every hour or less in case he'd been kidnapped. It cut into whatever I was doing.

He wanted to visit a friend in Florida so he took my mother's GTO. My best friend's father quipped that GTO stood for Gone to Orlando. He brought the car back unharmed. 

At her wits end. my mother sent him to Hyde School in Maine (Cher's son would later be a student) and he thrived.

My brother had an extremely high IQ. But I always had better grades, although I worked for them. When he went to university in Ohio, he went with the theory that he should be graded on his ability not on what he produced. They suggested he not return.

He then enrolled at my college where he met his first of three wives. They married because she wasn't pregnant. Her very Catholic found birth control pills making it a demi-shotgun wedding. I really liked my first and third sister-in-laws. 

My brother never finished any university, never worked in any profession, but he was always successful in the jobs he took. He managed a service station with no mechanical ability and for years was a much-loved pizza delivery man.

He had a daughter and was a great, loving father.

We didn't see each much of each other. For a time he offered meals to friends and I was included. He was a great cook. There would be some family holidays where we overlapped. 

At one point he called me to ask if I would introduce him to his father, whom he had not seen for 22 years. I was in close contact with my Dad, but our mother had made us choose sides. His potential penalty for breaking her rule was greater than mine and I was able to navigate the mine field of threats for developing an excellent relationship with my father and stepmom. 

The weekend with my father, stepmom and brother was fantastic in emotion, knowledge of the past, good food, and the love from their home.

When my mother was dying of cancer my brother and I worked together to make it easier for her. We shared the clean up afterwards, dividing the necessary chores that death brings. I will always be grateful for that.

As adults about the only thing we had in common was our childhood. I moved to Europe. He seldom left New England. I moved first to France and then to Switzerland. Once in a restaurant on one of my visits home when I spoke French with a French waiter, he barked at me to speak English. We were in America. 

On another trip he wanted his daughter to speak French to me. He was proud of her accomplishments. That's a horrible thing parents do to children who are studying a foreign language. They want their child to show a person from wherever that language is used to show off their skills and the child wants to hide. I usually say in French, Ce n'est pas nécessaire and then we laugh.

He asked me if something happened to him and his wife, would I raise his daughter. I said of course.  

Politically we grew further and further apart. I border on socialism and left the greatest country on the planet according to my brother. He thought George W. was far too liberal.  

I remember a rare Thanksgiving dinner together, when my sister-in-law was still pregnant. There should have been more of them. We didn't mention politics concentrating on the great meal.

Mostly our contact was his birthday when I sent him a Jacquie Lawson internet card. Usually I said something about I wished we could be closer. Some years he acknowledged my birthday a month later. Some years he didn't.

When his step-daughter visited me while she was an exchange student, she told me he'd been divorced five years. I didn't know. So much for closeness.

When I visited my niece, his daughter, in New Hampshire right before Covid, she told me he said, "Hi."

That was the last I heard from him. A few months ago, I had a Facebook message from my niece saying he'd died. She was with him. He had had Guillain Barre Syndrome. I'd never heard of it.

Kurt Vonnegut said, "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, 'it might have been.'"

I wish we could have been closer, done more things together. When someone says that their brothers are their best friends, I feel a loss. I wish I'd done more to bridge the gap, but most of the time, I don't see that the gap could have had a bridge. That makes me ever sadder.