THE DAY MY BROTHER DIED 2022/09/16
David, my younger brother, born 13 years after me, of a different mother, was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2014. I went to visit him that year. He was a gentle soul, and an incompetent parent of his two children. Not surprising really, given he lived with my father all of his life, even after he got married, except for the last six months of Dad’s life. And my father was not a kind man, nor generous with love and approval.
David no clue how to parent, even though he loved his children, maybe because shortly after he came into the world, his mother became rapidly disabled with an aggressive form of arthritis, and was unable to really be the parent she wanted to be. His early life must have been impacted by the considerable pain his mother was in. I reckon he wanted everyone to not feel that pain.
When David was diagnosed with cancer, he decided to go the chemo route. That sort of worked in that the cancer shrank, but then, on the second round of chemo, he had a reaction to the treatment, and he rapidly got worse. The last year of his life, he essentially stayed in bed, leaving Rosemary, his wife, to manage the house, the kids, the finances, the grief.
The day he died, Tuesday, November 6, 2018, I was an election judge in the church of Saint Bernards 1, in East Saint Paul. (I’d begun volunteering to do this since I became a citizen in 1998. Before that I had been collecting the vote numbers from the fire station around the corner from my house, and would phone them in to the League of Woman Voters 2).
The day was quiet, with a slow but constant trickle of voters, many of them from other countries, now citizens, now voting, some for the first time.
Early that afternoon, around 2:45, Fiona phoned me, telling me Rosemary had called her saying that David was going to die within the next 24 hours. I got permission from the head judge to leave to go home so I could talk with her.
When I called, Rosemary with Chris and Kat, their adult children, were at the hospital. I could hear David in the background, the rattling noises in his lungs as he struggled to breathe, unevenly, effortfully, demanding my attention. I knew he was in the last stages of life. He calmed down as he heard my voice. The rattles decreased a little. I talked to him, affirmed him, told him he was a good brother, a treasure in my life, that I would miss him greatly, that I knew he had to go, to die in peace. He died 15 minutes later.
It is a source of wonder to me, and gratitude, that I was in that hospital room with him, in all the ways I could, except for my physical body which was 3000 miles away. He in Portsmouth, England. Me, in Saint Paul, Minnesota in the United States.
I miss him still. He had stories from the couple of years when I was living with him, and my father and stepmother in Cobham, a village south of London, in the house named Midway on the road called Between Streets (my dad’s humor—straight out of Much Binding in the Marsh 3, The Goon Show 4 and Monty Python’s Flying Circus 5). He told me about him watching me standing on my bed, chewing gum, and letting the gum stretch from my mouth to the floor. Needless to say, chewing gum, in the house, was not something my father would have allowed. We were both doing something forbidden!
He also told me about the bailiffs coming to the front door and my stepmother having to deal with them. This, when my father had money in his account. He just didn’t pay the bills, and kept the cut-off notices hidden in his desk. David’s response to this experience was to pay his accounts ways ahead of time, and to worry, continually, about his ability to manage money.
He died two years after his diagnosis. After the second chemo did not work, and caused such distress to his family, when we talked, he said he wished he hadn’t done it, that he ignored his poor health at the time, was oblivious to it. And he regretted causing Rosemary, his wife, such pain. He fought to the end. I wish his dying had been peaceful and accepted.
It wasn’t.
1 https://saintpaulhistorical.com/items/show/107
2 https://www.lwv.org/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh
4 https://goonshow.org/goonshow/a-short-history/
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Flying_Circus
The photo is of David holding Chris, his eldest, at few months old. Photographer unknown.