When I look at the old movies of my brother and me, I see a joyful couple of children running down the dunes, playing at the seashore, visiting a zoo, and dancing in the backyard. When did our relationship become strained?
As our family grew and life took us in different directions, our camaraderie changed. The first tough incident happened when I was six. I went into the hospital to get my tonsils out, and someone gave me a really nice doll. My brother destroyed the doll. Looking back, he was clearly jealous of the attention I was getting at the time.
My brother was a difficult child to raise. He had endless energy, curiosity, and sensitivity. It seems he was labeled at an early age as a "bad boy" because people really didn't know how to handle him. Negative messages followed him from home to school. In grade school I would often see him standing against the wall outside his classroom. That always made me feel bad, and was an important reason that I became a teacher. I didn't like the way my brother was treated. I knew there was a better way to handle children like him.
My dad and mom really tried to work with his high energy in ways that they could. Dad took him on big bike rides and strenuous mountain hikes. Mom helped him with his school work and projects. They also gave him his own room, helped him get a job in high school, contributed to his first car, and supported his efforts to become a union electrician. Yet my brother was never completely at peace until the end of his life.
Many would describe him as wild because he was a daredevil who climbed Mt. Washington in the middle of winter, drove up the highway during a snowstorm in the emergency lane, took off for a few months to live in his camper in Florida, and camped out on the beach many a night. He resisted the norms and conventional life ways seemingly craving adventure all the time.
He loved music and spent a lot of time listening to music and going to concerts. He was industrious with his off beat business pursuits too. Once my dad was so proud of the garden my brother and his friends were tending to behind our house in our neighbor's big yard. My father praised his efforts time and again until he found out that my brother's garden was full of marijuana which was illegal at the time.
My father lectured us about the danger of motorcycles since he knew many who had been hurt or killed riding them. My brother responded by buying a great big motorcycle at an early age. Paul always challenging the status quo.
On the other hand, I fell far to the other end of the continuum--I was a rule follower to a fault always choosing the status quo. Thus Paul and I lived our lives as opposites, and looking back, we both would have done well to move a bit more towards the center. It would have been good for me to not follow the rules mindlessly, but to think a bit more on my own, and it would have been good for Paul to follow a few more rules than he did. Yet we were who we were.
In addition to his amazing sense of adventure and lack of fear, Paul had a big heart. He never outwardly or purposely tried to hurt people and he often was there to help a friend or family member. At the end of his life, diagnosed with a deadly cancer, he settled down a bit after he went on his daring bucket-list motorcycle ride across country with his girlfriend. During that time he spent his last months with those he loved most, his children and grandchildren. Though his life's end in his mid fifties was too young, his ending demonstrated the love he had for his children and grandchildren.
So, in part, to honor my brother's spirit and to show my own love for his children and grandchildren, I'll host a brunch today to celebrate my brother's life and the good lives his children and grandchildren are embarking on. He left the world good people who are carrying on the best of who my brother was. Onward.