Introductory Throat Clearing

I'm going to try blogging about my brother.  I don't quite know how it'll go, or what it'll be like, or if it'll help me or anyone else deal with his death or anyone else's, but I'm going to try.

My brother, Joey, died in a freak accident on Independence Day, 2010, in Washington, DC.  If you know the details then you know the details; if you don't, I'm not going to tell you about them here.  Maybe they'll come into focus as the posts get posted.  This is not a blog about how my brother died.  It's a blog about how he - how we - lived.

Joey was 28, four years younger than me, a third-year law student about to head off to Madrid for a semester.  He died two months before my wedding, at which he was to be the best man.  That might give you the impression that we were "best friends," but that's not quite right.  We were brothers, and that's different.  We were friends, but we were also antagonists, rivals, the only ones who knew exactly where to plunge the knife so that it would inflict the most damage.  My brother is the only person I ever beat with a remote control (one of those old metal ones the size of a drugstore paperback).  He's the only person I've ever sent to the emergency room.  He's the only person I ever threw through a window.

Most of the fighting was in our childhood, and it was a product of our closeness and of our similarity: when we weren't fighting, we were usually living together in a fantasy land inhabited by our stuffed animals, whom we called Guys, and which all had distinct names and personalities, right down to their voices and their occupations.  Or we were watching baseball - usually the Braves or the Cubs, because our cable company (somewhat inexplicably for Oklahoma City) carried local stations from both Atlanta and Chicago - unless it was a commercial break, for we designated commercial breaks (of which there are many in baseball) as "scuffling time," a time when we would wrestle around in a friendly way (at first) until somebody came to tears.

We stopped fighting when we got older.  Actually, we stopped fighting when he grew bigger than I was, which was (conveniently) around the time that I went off to college.  Somehow the fun just went out of it for me.

So we were friends, good friends, close friends, but we were brothers, and that's not quite the same thing as friends.  More to the point, Joey was Joey, and I am me, and that meant that we didn't do some of the things that friends do as a central function of their friendship - that I do with my other friends, or that he did (I presume) with his.  We didn't confide in one another, or not much.  We didn't have deep, heart-to-heart talks about how we felt when our parents separated (I was twelve, he was eight), or when they remarried after their divorce, or when, many years later, they both lost their second spouses in sudden, horrible circumstances.  Maybe we did discuss these latter events over beers one night, but the memory hasn't stayed with me.  Joey was notorious for playing things close to his chest, and I've had my tendencies in that direction as well, especially around family.  So we didn't share as much as we might have, at least not verbally, but still we were brothers.

I don't want to anatomize our whole relationship here, at least not now.  I suppose that's partly the purpose of this blog.  My purpose here is simply to give you some sense of how we related to each other.  The title of this blog is taken from the Whitman poem you see over there on the right.  My friend Sara sent it to me shortly after she heard the news of Joey's death.  She had never met him or seen us together, but she had heard me tell stories about our travels, and she may have seen some pictures.  Mainly what she knew was that we had, the previous summer, spent several days driving around the Upper Midwest together searching out the most ridiculous, artery-cloggingest food we could find: butter burgers, pie shakes, fried cheese curds, etc.  She probably saw my eyes sparkle as I told her about the trip, exaggerating the greasy decadence of the cheese curds and praising the ingenuity of the first person to think of putting an entire slice of pie in a blender with some ice cream and milk, and I imagine she could see that Joey was almost the only person in my world with whom such adventures were possible.  So, a couple of days after his death, she found this poem and sent it to me in an email.  Foolishly, I read it in the supermarket on my Blackberry, and I nearly collapsed.

The poem does a better job than I can of conveying to you what I have lost.

This blog is designed primarily for my family and friends.  I hope it will provide a glimpse at how I'm doing and maybe help others find ways to articulate their own grief.  I hope people will post comments and share stories.  I also hope, more selfishly, that this will give me a focus and an outlet for the thoughts - prompted by a book I'm reading, a flash of a memory, or a glimpse of an old man in a seersucker suit - that run through my mind most days.  I've tried keeping a private journal, and that has helped a little, but I feel like it's time to share some of this with others.  A journal is fine for getting the thoughts out, for solidifying them and holding them up in the light, but to survive a loss like this I'm going to need others to pick up these thoughts and turn them over in their own hands.  By the time they show up here, I'll have done all I can with these thoughts - now I want to see what you folks can do with them.

I've considered making this a private blog, but that would involve individual invitations and cumbersome passwords, and I'd like people to be able to send this to their families or friends - people who knew Joey - whose email addresses I don't have.  So I'm making it public.  I have absolutely no interest in advertising my grief, and I'm fully conscious of the difficulties and potential dangers of launching all of this into the ether.  I'll therefore try to avoid identifying details and other things of a too-personal nature, and I'd encourage others to do the same.  But if you're a stranger and you find something here that interests or intrigues or soothes you, then I'm happy to write this blog for you, too.  I only ask that you be respectful.  I intend to do the same.