Seventeen years. It’s been seventeen years since we lost my brother. He was just 21 years old and my life has never been the same since. Reflecting back on the intervening years, I realized that his way may have been the best way.
Thanksgiving was just four days away that year and it was particularly grim. The dinner was still there, the parade was still on the television, the desserts were laid out, but there was something missing. It’s been the same thing missing every year since that day.
Every year, we surround ourselves with family, but that year there was a gaping hole. Each Thanksgiving, there were fewer and fewer place settings around the table. It’s like Scrooge didn’t mend his ways in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the chair for Tiny Tim was vacant. That was my Thanksgiving.
Over the years, more vacancies have popped up around the family dinner table. In a family as large as mine, there are going to be losses, but each reminds me of this one. A handful of years later, my grandfather passed in his sleep, resting in his favorite chair and the following year my grandmother followed him. In the span of a few years, my world was forever changed.
As the rest of the grandchildren grew up and moved on, the family splintered. This wasn’t due to anything negative, it was just due to life. Many of us moved out of state for university or to pursue careers, some stayed and started families, and some did both. Most of us have fuller lives than we ever have can imagined seventeen years ago.
Looking back with 17 years of reflection, I can say that I’m a better man because of him. He was the “fun” one and I was the “serious” one. The boy I was then, for I was not yet a man regardless of age, wanted nothing more than to grow up. I wanted out of the house of my childhood, I wanted a serious girlfriend, I wanted a career, I wanted to be an adult. Kenny’s activities seemed so juvenile to me then. To me now, I realize that he was embracing life in a way that I didn’t until after his loss. My most crystalline childhood memories involve him.
My earliest memory was when he was brought home from the hospital. I’m not sure if my parents ever explicitly said that I was supposed to watch out for him or protect him, but I did. For the first several year of our lives together I could be found playing with him, showing him things that I liked, and translating for him to my parents. Then life got in the way. It’s probably the same for all children, but school split our attention. There were new friends to be made and relationships to build. There were only so many hours until bedtime and new demands were showing up all the time.
Over the school years we began to drift apart. I saw him as a hassle and I’m sure that he saw me as a consummate bore. We rarely saw eye-to-eye. Our hobbies and passions took us different ways. I was trying to figure out my life plan and he was living his. My high school experience was at a private school where I was dressed up each day in a button down shirt and a tie, while his was at a vocational school in jeans and coveralls. Aside from our parentage, it looked like we had nothing in common. And for many years, it felt like that was true. Here was Kenny under the hood of a car trying to fix something that I would rather pay someone to do and I was behind a keyboard doing the dullest thing that he could ever think of.
I always saw him a childish, but I think he knew more about life than I did at the time. He was following his passions and doing work that he found rewarding. The years leading up to his death were where the bridges were beginning to be mended. We had a handful of adult conversations over those years and I think that we actually started to begin to understand each other. I remember one talk specifically when he asked me how I could do what I did for a job. I told him that I found great satisfaction than programming something on the computer and when I pressed “go” it worked just the way I intended. His face showed how little he comprehended that. Then I asked him how he felt when he fixed a car, turned they key, and it worked. I think he finally started to understand me.
His loss, just as we were beginning to be able to meet again as men was particularly devastating to me. He was never able to meet my wife, or be in my wedding, or make fun of me for moving to Texas. (Regardless of your opinion of Texas, he would have found this laughable.) I was proud of him for never really giving up on being a child inside. He did whatever he did because it was fun. He taught me to live life to the fullest while finding the fun in as many things as possible.
C. S. Lewis said, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” It took the loss of my brother to make me reexamine my outlook on life and embrace the fun. I’d like to think that he would be proud of me and where my life is now.
This is a season for thanks, and I’m thankful for the 21 years that we did have with Ken. In the decades since his loss my life is nowhere near what it was then. I do unusual things for the fun of it. Why am I shooting a longbow on the weekend? Fun. Why did I take a blacksmithing class? Fun. Why do my wife and I go to kids movies? Fun. Why do I travel the world giving presentations for my company? Fun. I’ve made “fun” a part of the decision-making process as much as possible.
So thank you, Ken, for showing your older brother what it truly takes to be a man.
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