Note: The following 4 part series was written especially for my close family.  It is pretty personal stuff, but, in retrospect, eminently shareable with this readership family. 

Yesterday my big brother passed away.  I write to face it.  I’ve known him all my life – the one person on the planet that I can still say that about.  He was my protector, my friend and in every way, my big brother.

I spent the day talking to his wife, Marcia, his three kids, my own close family – reminiscing, missing, weeping, laughing – a cornucopia of emotions.

It was sudden, unexpected, way too early in life, but true.  Sometimes in this life you’re goin’ down the road and along comes a bend in the road and …

Not sure I’ll ever really understand it, but it happened.  Jim left us to move on.  Was it in any way his decision?  Was it a total surprise to him as well?  We’ll never know.

I’ve spent the last two years creating a CD, an album about just this experience – passing on.  I thought it was to help the world in this transition and instead, it was to help me.

So my brother Jim’s goin’ home and I’m hangin’ out around here for a while more.  Fascinating …

It’s clear to me in these moments that life is.  In no way do I believe that it’s all over for Jim.  He’s just moving on.  I suppose in someone’s or something’s mind it was just time to do so.  This chapter of his experience ended and the next one begins.  I wonder how he felt when he woke up this morning.  I know how I felt.

Perplexed.  These catastrophic moments in life come and go and leave their indelible marks, their searing memories.  “Hello, Pete.  I’ve got some bad news …”

So today I celebrate Jim.  My big brother, my only brother.  I write to his three children – Cindy, Tina and Travis – and his wife, Marcia, and to my family as well – and to all of you.  I write of a man who lived a full life here on Planet Earth and who now moves on to experience whatever, elsewhere.

My first memory of Jim was the day he and two other of his friends (he was five and a half years older than I) shoved me (a frightened 3-year old) into the dark basement of our apartment building, locked the door on me and yelled over and over, “Now the Boogie Man’s gonna getcha!”  I remember the trauma.  I remember screaming my head off until Mom came and let me out.

He was not my protector that day – just my bully big brother, but those types of occurrences didn’t happen very often.

I’m sure, that as a little brother, I was often a pain in the butt to Jim because he was my hero and I trailed after him wherever and whenever he would let me.

As I think back on our childhood, the stories that come to mind are often what people nowadays would call the abusive ones.  But that was never the case with Jim.  He just did things that made me tougher.  That was the purpose of a big brother back then – to show you how much you could really take.  In no way was he ever mean or even mean-spirited.  I’d rather define it as experimental.

Like the time he came home with some chemicals swiped from the lab of his chemistry class at school and nearly blew my head off.  Was he trying to blow my head off?  No.  He was just excited to show me something that he had learned at school.

For more on this story …

Or the time at the close of a softball game on the golf course behind our house he did something that made me mad and so I threw his softball as far as I could across the fairway.  He yelled at me, “Now go get it!”  I, of course, responded, “No way!”  So he knocked me down, grabbed me by both my ankles and dragged me across the golf course on my back to where the ball was.  Then made me pick it up and hand it to him.  Trouble was, my shirt became un-tucked and the dragging on my back created some fine scarlet welts on my back as I screamed bloody murder.

When we got home, I, of course turned up the volume of my crying for maximum effect.  Mom took one look at my back, told Dad and brother Jim definitely got his comeuppance from Dad.  Somehow I always felt that I had won that round.

But Jim was also my hero as well as my executioner.  In the winters when the snows turned the golf course hills white he let me come with him and his friends, Bob McElwee and Phil Martin, and be the lead man (boy) on our 8-man toboggan.  He even bought me a cool pair of red goggles to wear.  The littlest guy (me) had to sit in front and yell the steering commands of “Lean to the left!” or  “Lean to the right!” as we streaked down the Killer Hill on fairway number 9.

At the bottom of that hill was a drop-off cliff of about 10 feet down to a creak bed that cut across the fairway.  There was a wooden bridge that traversed the creak.  I had to steer us to and over that footbridge or otherwise go catapulting off the cliff and into the icy creek.  The seven others behind me on the sled would bail before we hit the bridge or the creek, but all too often I got to stay on the sled through to the gory end.  I was always proud that Jim let me have these great adventures with him and his friends.

Like I said, hanging out with Jim always made me tougher.

We slept in the same bedroom together.  Night after night in the hot/humid St. Louis summers long after Mom had put us to bed we would turn the radio on ever so softly and listen to the finish of the St. Louis Cardinal baseball games together and dream of Stan The Man Musial, and Red Schoendienst, Marty Marion and Rip Ripulski.

Though I’ve become a die-hard NY Yankee fan, I’ll miss talking to Jim about the ups and downs of the Cardinals.  He stayed a Cardinal fan all his life and in my heart, I have too.

One night, while lying in bed, Jim announced that he thought we should do a special project together.  I, of course, was eager to go along with whatever Jim proposed so I agreed to it before I knew the extent of it.  His grand idea, an idea that we not only undertook, but actually accomplished, was to, together, count to a million.

Every night for God knows how long, we would lie there and count softly as fast as we could 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12, etc., etc., etc. until Mom would yell “You boys stop your mumbling in there and go to sleep!”  He could count faster than I, but I did my part night after night and he kept track in a little notebook of both his and my tallies.  He’d add them up each night in our joint effort.

I remember the night we got to nine hundred thousand.  With only a hundred thousand to go Jim thought we should pre-celebrate and so he smuggled two cans of Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer in to the bed room and we both got in the closet, sat there in the dark, popped them open and toasted to the final journey to a million as we swigged down the brew.

I don’t remember the night we hit a million.  We were probably far too exhausted and definitely far too bored by the effort.  We were glad to move on, but both got a lifelong appreciation of what a “million” really meant.

See Part 2 for continuation …