When we were little, my mom was often asked if Brian and his brother Timmie were twins. No, she’d reply, they’re 20 months apart.
You’d think, with that small a degree of separation, we would have been a lot alike. But, as it frequently happens in siblings, we were quite different in personality, talents and interests. He drove me nuts, and I know I exasperated him.
That’s not to say we didn’t get along, however, because we did. We played together every day, back on the farm (‘course, there weren’t any other playmates our age in sight!)
And we continued to commit acts together through our teens, like the time our parents were away vacationing, and we chopped down (with an axe) an old apple tree in the yard that our dad had casually mentioned that, someday, he’d get rid of. Our Grandma conspired with us to get a man she knew who had a chain saw to cut off the stump even with the ground. We lived on grape juice and sandwiches: I preferred peanut butter and jelly, but Brian made the same every day: mincemeat baloney, cheese and ketchup in white bread.
Our paths diverged more in high school when Brian first experienced hallucinations, and later heard voices, in what was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia.
As an adult, he battled those same demons, along with depression, anxiety, and unpredictable psychotic episodes in decades of discerning what was truly his reality.
He did take some college courses on writing, which he truly enjoyed, and was an ultimate fan of many old-time movies and science fiction TV shows. And he had a couple of menial jobs, but eventually he could no longer cope well enough to be productive in them.
Under the influence of an arm-length’s list of narcotics to control the nastiness, he often appeared “blank,” without much of a personality. And while there were many long periods of an acceptable status quo, the drugs never cured him, and it became more difficult to determine the cocktail’s exact right proportions to maintain that increasingly slim balance.
But through it all, his mild-mannered personality and good-humored wit would serve him and endear him to those who knew him.
Yet he had more to suffer. On the day of our mother’s 80th birthday party, Brian got lost on a route he knew so well. He drove about the streets of Bethlehem until he ran out of gas, and was able to pull off on a side street to park. Someone asked him if he was ok, and he said no. They called an ambulance for him. There was no room at Muhlenberg Hospital, where he usually went, so they took him to St. Luke’s instead. There, because they didn’t know him, they ran some tests his usual doctors probably wouldn’t have. They found a brain tumor.
Brian celebrated his 50th birthday with the first of three surgeries to counter the cancer’s terrible, inevitable advance.
Despite the harshness of his life, Brian remained a kind soul who complained only of physical pain, but never his lot in life. See My brother Brian: a victorious tragic life.
He remains my example in patient perseverance, and all-around good guy I wish was still with us. But that’s selfish of me; he’s now free of his lifelong afflictions and I’m glad for him. Today would have been his 65th birthday. I miss him, my friend, my only brother.
