Brother in Arms

Fortunate Son and I have been close since we met. The fact that I didn’t kill him for making an extremely rude joke at my expense is proof that he, like me, lives a unique and charmed life – full of people who want to laugh at your side and be there for you for no reason other than who you are. People who confess to not having a solid reason to like you at first, but after a short while in, have a laundry list that makes you blush.

Now, while I have my list of admirers, I’ve also got my share of people who think I’m an asshole. Thankfully, the former is longer than the latter. I can think of perhaps two people who have spent more than 5 minutes with Fortunate Son who don’t like him. And both of them are ex-girlfriends. He’s that guy. All your best stories from college involve him in some way. He laughs are the most real and the most infectious, not to mention he always gets yours. He’s the guy with that sense of humor that’s bawdy enough to get along with Joe Six-Pack, smart enough to be clever for the Wine crowd and he’s got more than enough geek cred to pull off movie quotes and not be cheesy.

Add to that, he’s the luckiest SOB I know on the planet. If you and all your friends sign up for a beta-test, he’s the one picked. Random drawing at a store, he gets it. You and a handful of guys go to a casino on a whim, he’s up $1000 while you’re happy with breaking even.

On top of it all, we’ve always had this strange bond. We’re both adopted and our families are from NY, even though mine moved when I was young. Adoptive parents are both an Irish-Italian marriage (although the genders are reserved). Both allergic to the same meds. Same blood type. If you see pictures of us as kids, we look almost identical. For the first year and half of college, I swear that he was somehow transmitting his hangovers to me. He’d drink far beyond what his 5′7″, 165 pound body could handle but wake up shiny. Having been the responsible one and carried people home the night before or simply stayed in with my girlfriend, I’d awake to find every inch of my body screaming in protest.

As we’ve gotten older and seemingly wiser, our friendship has become a brotherly connection. When he calls me Brother, I know he means it. His wife, IT Goddess, has teased about getting us tested to see if we do share a father (since I know my biological mother and he’s got no clue about his family), but I think we’re okay just knowing that in a moment’s notice, we’d rush to the other’s side.

I may be doing just that very soon, now that the most fucked up similarity between us has moved to the top of a hill most of us have to cross in our lives. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer about 3 years ago, two years after The Death and just after they found the cancer in my Ma. Hardship bringing people closer together is a truism that you becoming wed to the more you go through with people. Anyone who knows me knows I have a history of being the excitable one. Historically, not the best in a crisis. Probably because most of the ones I dealt with I was vastly unprepared for mixing in with my overactive imagination. Since dealing with the mortality of my own parents, I know I’ve been more adult (it would be amazing to be less) when it comes to dealing with Bad Things.

I remember an bizarre calm coming over me while talking to F.S. about her being ill. A blend of focus and terror, muted by it not being directed at me, but still aching as my brother began to know suffering I understood.

Just as I’ve seen him become a man I’m honored to know in the decade plus I’ve know him, I watched as hope and reality do battle in him since that time. Hope that she’d get better. Reality that they needed to move up their wedding date when the cancer moved from her breast to her brain.

When I said that he and IT Goddess telling me that they were pregnant was one of the best things I’ve heard in the last year, I absolutely meant it. It meant they’d begun on the family they both wanted so much. Her new job meant that they’d be moving back to NY, a place that had always been more home to them than anywhere else. That he was finally free to get out of his current industry and go down his true path, as a teacher.

Cake’s “The Distance” sounded on my cell phone just after 5 p.m. on Friday evening, and I smiled ruefully. My attempts to reach him were about to bare bitter fruit, and I knew it before I picked up the phone. He went through the good news like a patient himself – telling me as much reminding himself of that his unborn baby was just fine and his wife’s new job was good – and I confirmed all that was good as he drew breath on the other end. Even as he did, I felt the switch flip in my head – I know have to be that person for my brother. That person on the other end who listens to all the bad things he has to talk about.

We went through all the things recited to him from the Doctor’s Bad News Playbook: The treatment didn’t work as we had hoped; There’s nothing else we can do for her at the hospital anymore; The best thing we can do is make her comfortable and see what happens.

I listened and responded where I could when he cracked jokes or took a moment to pause. It wasn’t a long conversation – he kept getting calls on the other line from friends and family, but he held off as long as he could. When his Mom’s doctor showed up on the caller id, I hustled him off the phone, telling him to call when he has a moment or when he needs to talk.

He knows I’m here, just as so many others that love him dearly are waiting and able to respond. I don’t know if he’ll call before the next bad news he’ll have to deliver, but that won’t stop me from wishing I was there. Not that I can offer some great wisdom. Watching someone you love die doesn’t impart great wisdom, so as I’ve found. There’s no breakthrough. The loss is its own meaning. The life no longer there. But death is something you can deal with because it is that realization of what it feels like, even if you can’t verbalize it, you feel it.

Waiting. Watching. Alternately forcing yourself not to think about what it will be like and then having to think about nothing but what it will do to you is agony.

I can’t spare him that agony, even as I understand each part of it.

The best I can do is remind my brother that he isn’t alone.

In the worst times, the simple truths are a comfort.