In a recent Substack entry, I wished my older brother a happy birthday. He’ll be 79 this month, and as the essay says, he’s always been a hero to me in one way or another. To start the piece, I apologized to him for numerous kid-brother goof-ups, shameful ways I embarrassed him to his friends, and generally childish behaviors that even I should have been mortified by.
I mentioned the embarrassing time at age 11 when I took his new fielder’s mitt with me to camp, promptly left it in a porta-potty, and never saw it again. I mentioned a car transaction in which he was ordered by our mother to sell me his banged-up ‘62 Pontiac Tempest for $200.00, when he’d bought the car a year earlier for $400. I apologized to him for the times he wanted desperately to hang with his highly sophisticated chums, and had to drag along his pain-in-the-tuchus younger brother. As I subtitled the essay, The difference between brother and bother ain’t much.
I thanked him for looking out for me all those years, seeing to my needs when I was young and feckless, with no clue about such things. I thanked him for showing me the values he exhibited all his life: honesty, integrity, loyalty, and self-awareness. I thanked him for his phenomenal effort to extend his tour in Vietnam so I wouldn’t have to deploy there. It didn’t work, but the gesture was as ‘brother’s keeper ’ -ish as I’ve ever encountered. If I had to pick a better big brother, I could not have done so.
Since he was to celebrate 79 years very soon, I thought it appropriate to forgo the cutesy birthday card and instead write the aforementioned Substack essay. The post received a moderate number of likes, notices, pings, and a few insightful comments that I’m grateful for.
But there’s more to this story. As difficult as it is to write and to talk about, my older brother, one of my life heroes, is in the throes of dementia. Our now frequent phone sessions are a study in patience as I listen to his stories over and over, the same narrative, same (often wildly inaccurate) details, his misplacing of names, dates, events, etc., all of which are slipping away from him.
The most wrenching part of our conversations is hearing his anguish while attempting to dredge up facts and easily produced family and historical details. At such times, his tears are very close to the surface, and mine are as well.
Do I help him remember? Do I listen as he struggles to produce those details? Do I correct him when his vanishing memory falters and he mentions something that never happened, or happened to someone else?
The reality is that I’m losing my older brother. Losing our shared history. Losing the bond that almost 80 years together has shaped, and that is now slipping from reach. I wrote the essay as a greeting for his 79th year, but there was another purpose in it. Call it memento vivo, a feeble attempt to present events and shared life history that might provide him comfort, remembrance, possibly some crude therapeutic mental stimulation to assist the twice-monthly doses of Aricept that do little more than slow the progress of his illness. Dementia is the thief of memory that’s stripping away his dignity.
I’m sad to say the essay ploy didn’t work. On the phone, I told him of its publication several times. He has not responded. I hope he read the piece and that it gave him joy. I dread the prospect of asking him about it, because…I suspect he will have no memory of it.
