Present: something happened while I was basking in a stolen moment of calm sitting with my friend, Yoko, at Lake Merritt. A man in an electric wheelchair came whizzing by but got caught on something that totally derailed his forward movement, twisting him up in the bushes right in front of us. He dropped the leash to his wee dog and was grunting. I hopped up to assist in what I would much later remember a total reflex of mine for years of being the most together and competent member of a family steeped in need.
Past: the last time I saw my brother Bill in person was in February of 2018. It was the month of his 67th birthday and I had planned a trip to Las Vegas for my Aunt Barbara and me to visit him and one of his sons for a birthday weekend. (Las Vegas was where he lived then and he couldn’t travel.) I rented some rooms in one of the hotels so that he would have one last family memory before he left this earth. His health had been steadily dwindling as he was falling prey to the debilitating clutches of advanced stage MS. We didn’t know how long he would be with us, but it was clear from what I was hearing in our bi-weekly phone calls that things were elevated as he had lost control of nearly everything but his breathing and his ability to think. Speaking was difficult, but he managed.
Bill had been living in a wheelchair for the past 12-years at that point as year-by-year, he would lose the ability to move another limb. MS creeps up on you like that, starting with the feet for most people. He was homeless in southern California (Anaheim, I think) when my brother Barry miraculously found him in the early 2000s (I can’t remember exactly when) and took him home to Michigan to live with him and his family to get Bill on track. We had already heard through Mom that he was suffering from something since he could barely walk. Bill called our mom from time-to-time from a payphone somewhere just enough to worry the shit out of her. She would then call Dana to help. I have always been my family rescuer. It started when I was fairly young, but that’s another story for another time. So, this time, someone else saved Bill and I was so relieved. Barry pulled through like a trooper and was amazing in his helping to get Bill back together and on a healthy regimen to at least mitigate the quick advance of MS. In Bill’s case, it was a much faster increase in the spread as compared to most because he had spent a considerable amount of his adult life as a heavy drug user. Crystal meth had been his drug of choice throughout the 1990s and at that time, I was called in to become the Legal Guardian of his 2 sons (then 10 and 13).
Lots more happened with Bill and his living with our two brothers (separately: he ended up in Las Vegas with the eldest around 2011) much of which I have edited out just now. I’d like to spend a day with this starting with my early memories of him when I was a kid before he went to Vietnam in the late 1960s. He passed in September of 2018 nearly 8 years to the day of our mother’s passing in 2010. Yesterday, on the lake, I feel like he rode into mine again briefly. Love you, brother.