B is for Brother—and All Those PB&J Adventures

After I picked writing about my brother as my second April A to Z blog topic, I searched my archives to see what I’d already said about him. What I thought might take fifteen minutes took half the morning. He appears in fourteen posts, with six of them devoted entirely to him. I was shocked, but it also sparked an idea for a gift I might make for my nieces and nephew. If I gather everything I’ve written about him into one place, add a few photos and a handful of bridge‑paragraphs, I could turn those memories into a short soft‑cover book. At Blurb Publishing, twenty‑five pages keeps you under the price break for small runs, which means I could print enough copies to give one to my great and great‑great nieces and nephews, too, who are old enough to remember their great and great‑great grandfather. (Is there a prize for how many times you can use the word great in a sentence? There should be. Figuring out the lineage was not easy for an old brain like mine.)

My brother and I started life during WWII, and some of the antics we grew up with—think Happy Days episodes—might seem ho‑hum to others who lived through the 40s and 50s. But in an age of helicopter parents, some of the things our parents allowed would seem extreme or even akin to child neglect. For example, several years before I was even a teenager, we could pack peanut‑butter‑and‑jelly sandwiches, grab bottles of pop, tell my mom we were going to walk around the entire lake, and she’d simply say, “Be home before dark.” What didn’t dawn on me until adulthood was that she could probably see us from the shoreline of our cottage as we made our way through alternating cow pastures and woods. Not that it would have helped if we’d gotten into real trouble. Few housewives of the era had cars while their husbands were at work, so the quickest way she could have reached us was by rowboat—assuming it wasn’t too windy. This was long before cell phones or even a landline at the cottage. When we weren’t circling the lake, we were walking five miles to the nearest store for ice‑cream cones or playing at a fort we’d built on the far side of the woods behind our cottage.

As kids, my brother and I were close, but as adults we drifted. Jerry married young—too young—and I went to college. They had the kind of marriage a lot of people have when they marry right out of high school, where both partners eventually look around and wonder if they’re missing something. Nineteen years later, they divorced.

One conversation from my mid‑twenties stands out. Jerry was trying to figure out why I seemed to have no interest in getting married. Most girls in that era listed marriage as their number‑one goal. So did I, if I’m honest, but I was stubborn and wouldn’t have admitted it short of being waterboarded. I’d had a few serious relationships, and he couldn’t understand what was “wrong” with me for not taking the next step. I didn’t tell him the first guy turned out to be an in‑the‑closet gal‑guy. And the second — well, that’s a story too long for this post, not to mention it took me a decade to figure out why exactly that relationship fell apart. 

In the last two years of his life, when Jerry moved into my continuum‑care community, we grew close again. Even though he was in the Memory Care building and I’m in Independent Living, I could see him a couple of times a week and most of the time we could still talk about our childhood, our parents, our marriage and his children. We understood each other in that way only siblings can. He had a good sense of humor, loved his kids and our parents fiercely, wrote great poetry, and was a dedicated caregiver to his second wife, who had early‑onset Alzheimer’s and didn’t make it easy.

And I still miss him because some people leave a space that never quite closes, and maybe that’s how you know they mattered. ©