A love letter.

Although I have six brothers and sisters in my extended family, all special to me in different ways, there is only one person who qualifies as my true sibling. My big brother by twenty-one months lived the timeline of my childhood with a perspective that no one else in this world shares.

Legend has it that he was none too pleased with the bundle of screaming fury and need that I was in those first few months (years?). A four pound preemie was definitely not what any toddler could have possibly imagined when waiting for his new sister to come home. Add insult to injury, I'd guess this point in time may be the beginning of my mother's descent into the inflexible world of control freak. I was nothing like the happy, sleepy first child she had birthed, but individuality be damned, schedule and routine were just what we all needed to remedy this new "problem."

As the years passed, he must have decided that I was the lesser of the three evils in the house. He became my protector and constant companion. My earliest memory is of my brother leaving me (in the back seat of the VW bug) to go behind a big brown gate where lots of kids were REALLY enjoying themselves. I was stuck with Mom. How could he?! It was his preschool, of course, and two-year olds weren't allowed.


From that point on, I joined in on everything that interested my (idol) brother. No way was I gonna be left behind with my parents. For the most part, he let me tag along. He played with Tonka trucks, I played with Tonkas. He climbed trees, rode big wheels, played pool, listened to disco/rock/country, read science fiction, experimented with smoking and sex at church camp...all activities faithfully mirrored by his little sister.


The last time I remember spending a lot of time together as kids was when my brother contracted mono and was forced into bed rest for about three weeks during the summer. I think we were maybe thirteen and fifteen. By that time we had survived a parent in drug treatment, a bitter divorce, a plunge into poverty, countless moves, and quality weekends with my father. I can still see that couch in the living room pulled out into a bed, my brother lifeless on it all day long and me wishing I could fix it for him. I watched his baby fat melt away as the illness dragged on. I played Deep Purple and Stairway to Heaven trying to cheer him up. I piled his bed with Dune and Farenheit 451 and probably even made cookies, hoping he'd eat.


The mono finally dissipated, but it took something with it. My brother emerged thinner and wiser somehow. He announced that living with his mother wasn't what he needed and he was moving in with Dad. By this point my father had relocated across the country, remarried someone with four kids and seemed to have his addictions under control.


Bye big bro, can I come with? I wanted nothing more. I never asked. It was time for my brother to take care of himself instead of me. I started high school without my anchor, floating free in a world of infinite terror.

I made bad choices. Not the obvious ones. I longed for popularity. I coveted the Guess jeans with the zippers at the ankle. I dutifully cooked and cleaned, trying to please my mother who's attention was focused on my errant brother, even in his absence.

Eventually he returned, but we were now on different paths. He'd picked up some new survival skills while living with Dad. They led to juvenile detention, treatment, banishment from the house, dropping out of school, and finally living hand to mouth on his own by the age of seventeen.

I still wanted to tag along. I didn't know how. I attempted to straddle our two worlds. I started smoking, I drank on the weekends at my friends parent-free houses and eventually found my way to casual drug use. At the same time, I ran track, held down a job and passed my classes without much effort. My brother only acknowledged the good girl. Try as I might, he didn't need me as a companion anymore. Hindsight revealed to me that he never did drop his protector role, but I didn't understand the big picture as well as he did.

Our lives ran somewhat parallel my last year at home. I turned my back on the high school boys who never noticed me and started going out with an "older" man. I met him at work in the suburbs, but it turns out he lived an edgy existence in a loft in downtown Minneapolis. Not only was he every mother's nightmare; experienced, grungy, and working a dead end job, it just so happened that he and my brother were friends. I spent almost a year of my limited free time with a front row seat to my brother's life. I worked hard at destroying my naive image that year but I wasn't very good at it. I wanted baaaad to belong, but the harder drugs and petty crimes of that group of immature twenty-somethings scared me.

At the predetermined time, I chose the path that led to college. I headed out of state, made new friends and struggled with academics for the first time ever. I didn't have the time for, or the access to, my brother's alternative life. We kept in touch, but only superficially. I knew he was trying out everything life had to offer and I lived in dread of the phone call telling me he was hurt or dead.

The call finally came. When I heard my Mom's voice, at the wrong time and in the wrong place, I thought I had lost him. She started with "your brother has been in an accident" but my heart stopped it's free fall when the next words out were something about "alive" and "in hospital."

I'm sure my brother could write a novel about his choices that led to him jumping a moving train that horrific night. I know he misses his foot terribly. I know that losing it did not curtail the risk taking completely. Chapters following include stopping a sixty-foot fall off a mountain with his face, repeatedly illegally bungee jumping off NYC bridges, surviving a head-on collision without a scratch, and much much more.

Things have slowed down a bit now. The next ill-timed phone call will probably be about one of our parents. We are close again, in an easy, casual way. My brother's life has mellowed to more closely parallel mine. On any given day I can assume we both do laundry, pay bills, wile away hours on the internet, cook for our family, struggle to not pick up a cigarette, work out, and any number of other mundane activities.

In my mind he will always be my first great friend and role model. He is the most interesting person I have ever known. He is also the smartest. I will always seek his approval and often be crushed by his honesty. And always, always, I know he's got my back.

I love you, bro'.