The People We Keep Meeting

The couch was orange.

Not burnt orange. Not rust. Not some color that would eventually come back into fashion and be assigned “color of the year.”

Orange.

It was the 1970s. Apparently people did that to couches.

The couch sat in the Family Room of the house on Manor Circle where my little brother, Jeffrey, and I grew up. At the end of a long hallway, the room was covered in knotty pine paneling from the shag carpet all the way to the ceiling. My dad’s recliner sat in one corner. Through one window were fully mature lilac bushes. Through another was our backyard.

The Family Room was where we lived. Not the den. Not the TV room. The Family Room.

There are photographs of Jeffrey and me sitting together on that orange couch when we were little. In one, he is practically in my lap.

I am three years older than Jeffrey, and I was bigger than he was. I would remain bigger than he was for the rest of our lives.

When we were boys, we wrestled. Not because we were angry with each other or trying to establish some primitive sibling hierarchy. Because wrestling was fun.

Usually, I pinned him. Every once in a while, he pinned me.

And whichever brother ended up on top would sometimes celebrate his victory by putting his knees on the other’s shoulders and farting on him.

We thought farts were funny. We always thought farts were funny.

When you grow up beside someone, you don’t meet them all at once. You meet them over and over again.

I knew the little boy who mispronounced words and refused to accept correction.

“No,” Jeffrey would say. “That’s how I say it.”

I knew the kid who somehow got away with things that would have gotten me killed.

Once, when we were teenagers, my parents went out for the evening with friends. They took my dad’s car. Jeffrey took my mom’s. He did not have his driver’s license, yet.

He drove around with his friends, got the car home before our parents returned, and then shoveled the driveway. My parents came home, saw the freshly shoveled snow, and praised Jeffrey.

I stood there thinking some off-color version of: You have got to be kidding me.

I was the good kid. The rule follower. The student who barely studied and still did exceptionally well.

Jeffrey worked his butt off for C’s.

And because I was his older brother, I occasionally exploited whatever advantage I had with exactly the maturity you would expect.

We had an Atari 2600 and a baseball game we played against each other. I discovered that if I held down the red button and pushed the joystick forward at exactly the right time, I could hit a home run almost every time.

I did not tell Jeffrey. I simply kept hitting home runs. A lot of them.

Eventually, he stopped playing with me. Which, in retrospect, seems entirely reasonable.

For a long time, those were our roles. I was the big brother. Jeffrey was the little brother.

School came easily for me. It didn’t for him.

I followed rules. He tested them.

I was supposed to know more. Except Jeffrey knew something before I did. He knew where he wanted to go.

As a child, Jeffrey hated most foods. For years, he seemed perfectly willing to sustain himself on hot dogs, grilled cheese, French fries, bagels and cookies.

Once, when our family went to Smith Bros. in Port Washington, I ordered a cheeseburger. Jeffrey ordered a grilled cheese.

The waitress told him they didn’t have grilled cheese on the menu.

He looked at her.

• “Do you have buns?”

• Yes.

• “Do you have cheese?”

• Yes.

Then he pointed directly at me. “Then if he can have a cheeseburger, I can have a grilled cheese.” He got his grilled cheese.

That little boy grew up and went to the Culinary Institute of America.

Somewhere between baking cookies with our Grammy and taking his first restaurant job at Pandl’s in Bayside, Jeffrey had figured something out about himself. He wanted to become a chef. Not because it was what he was supposed to do. Because he loved it.

While Jeffrey was moving toward something with remarkable certainty, I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do.

I went to college as a finance major. That didn’t work. I changed to psychology. I transferred from Miami University to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. It took me five years to finish my undergraduate degree. Then I went to law school at Hamline University in Minnesota.

Somewhere along the way, the brother who had struggled to get C’s seemed to know exactly where he was going. And the brother for whom school had always come easily was still figuring it out.

…

Near the end of law school, Jeffrey came to visit me.

I had worked at Champp’s for about two and a half years while attending Hamline. By the time Jeffrey arrived, I had probably worked my final shift a week or two earlier so I could focus on final exams and graduation.

But I wanted to take him there. Very much.

The people at Champp’s had become family to me. I wanted Jeffrey to see the place that had occupied so much of my life and meet the people who had shared it with me.  So we went.

We sat at a high-top near the bar and close to the entrance. From there, we could see people coming and going. We could see that evening’s DJ. The bar was enormous and zig-zagged through the middle of the restaurant. And we could see the expo window. It was an open kitchen, and that pass was where I had spent so many shifts.

Jeffrey met my people. Pete, Cathy, Carrie, Sandy, and so many more. He was excited to meet them. I was excited for them to meet him.

And at some point, the two of us sat there with cocktails. Nothing remarkable happened. There was no speech. No declaration. Jeffrey had graduated from the Culinary Institute. I was about to graduate with my JD. And somewhere inside that completely ordinary drink, I looked across the table and saw my little brother differently.

He wasn’t simply my little brother anymore. We were two young men. Two emerging professionals. Peers. The hierarchy I had assumed belonged to us as boys no longer made sense.

I admired him. And I knew he admired me. He remained my little brother. He would always be my little brother. But the meaning of those words had changed.

That would happen again.

…

Years later, I visited Jeffrey in Denver before the Pepsi Center opened. He gave me a hard-hat tour. The building was enormous.

And my little brother was the Executive Chef. Of all of it.

I walked through that unfinished arena trying to comprehend the scale of what I was seeing.

Holy cow.

Not because I was surprised Jeffrey was capable of it. Because I was seeing another version of him.

The terrible student had become an accomplished chef. The kid who tested boundaries had become a leader.

And then the spiral turned.

I entered the restaurant industry. I became a restaurant leader. I began consulting before I was entirely willing to call myself a consultant.

Jeffrey had less trouble with that distinction than I did.

When I finally accepted that I needed to create an LLC, I stood in front of a whiteboard covered with twenty or thirty possible names. Naturally, I approached naming it as though civilization itself depended upon the outcome.

Jeffrey stood behind me looking at the board while I considered possibilities and meanings and tried to get everything exactly right.

Finally, he had enough. “Pick a damn name. It doesn’t matter.”

He had business for me. He needed to pay me. I needed to register with the state and get an EIN.

Everything else, in Jeffrey’s estimation, was noise. Pick a damn name.

Eventually I did. Angry Olive Consulting.

Before Angry Olive fully knew what it was going to become, Jeffrey was already sending work my way. He saw something before I had completely claimed it. That happened more than once between us.

…

When my first lease in Denver expired, Jeffrey and Libby invited me to move into their house on Cook Street. By then, we were together so often that moving in didn’t feel particularly dramatic. It felt obvious.

There were two bedrooms upstairs: Jeffrey and Libby’s, and Brooklyn’s. There was a bathroom, kitchen, dining room and a large living room with a fireplace.

Downstairs was another bedroom, bathroom and a large living room. My office was there too.

Downstairs was technically my space. Upstairs was technically theirs. But nobody seemed particularly interested in the distinction. We moved through the whole house. Nothing was off limits. Nobody seemed underfoot.

The backyard had a large tree, room for Brooklyn to play and Libby’s garden taking up roughly a third of it.

Whatever was ready eventually became dinner. Jeffrey usually took the lead.

On Packers Sundays, we grilled brats, cooked onions on the stove and waited for someone from Wisconsin to ship us Secret Stadium Sauce, which is a very real thing and probably requires being from Wisconsin to fully appreciate.

Jeffrey drank Jack Daniel’s and Diet Coke. I adopted the same drink.

We talked about restaurants and food and people and work and family and love. Sometimes, after Brooklyn went to bed, Jeffrey and I sat outside and talked. Sometimes we sat on the couch and said almost nothing.

There are people with whom silence becomes uncomfortable. You start searching for something to say because the empty space feels like something that needs to be filled.

With Jeffrey, it didn’t. He was there. I was there. That was enough.

We always greeted each other with a hug. We talked on the phone frequently. Sometimes several times in the same day.

“Hey Bro.”

Or:

“Hey Bill.”

Bill wasn’t a person. Somehow Jeffrey had distributed the name among a small circle of people close to him until all of us were Bill.

And every phone call ended the same way.

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

We didn’t save those words. We used them.

…

By the summer of 2013, I was living in Portland. I had moved from Denver to become the General Manager of Punch Bowl Social.

And I was falling in love. Her name was Jody. I had hired her to be my Director of Sales.

Before I ever met her, when I first saw her résumé, something struck me with no rational basis whatsoever. I am going to marry this woman.

We met. We interviewed each other. I hired her. We became friends. Eventually, we started dating.

Jeffrey heard about all of it. Of course he did.

By Thanksgiving, I wanted to bring Jody home to Denver. My dad came in from Florida specifically because I told him she would be there. He wanted to meet her too.

We arrived on Wednesday. That night, the six of us ordered Chinese food: Dad, Jeffrey, Libby, Brooklyn, Jody and me. The delivery arrived with several items missing.

Dad wanted to know where the food was.

What happened?

What was missing?

Why was it missing?

So. Many. Questions.

Finally, I raised my voice. “I’ll call them. I’ll call them. It’s not the end of the world. They’ll bring it back out.” Libby still teases me that this is the only time she ever heard me raise my voice in frustration.

The restaurant brought the missing food. It was, in fact, not the end of the world. We ate dinner.

Jody met my dad. She met Libby. She met Brooklyn. And she met Jeffrey. For the first time.

Thanksgiving Day began with football. The Packers played the Lions in Detroit. Aaron Rodgers was hurt. Matt Flynn started. We lost 40–10.

Normally, a Packers loss like that could govern my mood for an embarrassing amount of time. Not that day. We were together.

Hanukkah had fallen early that year, so before dinner we lit the menorah. There is a photograph from that evening of Jeffrey and Brooklyn standing together at the candles.

Then we sat down to eat. I don’t remember a remarkable conversation. Nobody said anything that became family lore. I remember being content.

The next day we walked across City Park to the Denver Zoo. Jeffrey and Libby had a family membership because Brooklyn loved going. Brooklyn also seemed to possess an uncanny knowledge of where every ice cream stand in the zoo was located. If he suddenly developed an urgent interest in seeing the bears, there was a reasonable chance ice cream could be found near the bears. There is a photograph from that day of Brooklyn feeding Jeffrey ice cream.

Saturday night, we gathered at Trent Fox’s house. Trent’s brother Randy, one of Jeffrey’s closest friends, was in town.

I remember watching Jeffrey and Randy together. The ease. The joy.

On Sunday, Jody and I returned to Portland. Dad returned to Florida. There were hugs and kisses all around.

And, as always:

“I love you.”

It had been a wonderful Thanksgiving. The weeks afterward were ordinary. Jeffrey and I kept talking. I told him about Punch Bowl. I told him about Jody. He told me about Libby and Brooklyn and the baby they were expecting.

Meanwhile, I was preoccupied with what seemed like a very serious problem. Jody’s birthday was December 22. It would be the first birthday we spent together. Christmas was three days later. I therefore needed two perfect gifts across three days. This was not negotiable. I spent a ridiculous amount of energy trying to get it right.

I don’t remember the last conversation Jeffrey and I had. I don’t know exactly when it happened. I don’t know what we talked about. But I know how it ended. I know because every conversation ended that way.

“Love you, Brother.”

“Love you too, Brother.”

…

On December 21, 2013, I arrived at Punch Bowl at 9:00 in the morning. I started walking the space. Staffing. Checklists. The usual preparation before people arrived.

My phone rang. Dad. I sent it to voicemail.

He knew I worked Saturdays. He would realize I was busy.

The phone rang again. Dad. Voicemail.

Then a third time. Dad. I answered.

His voice sounded empty. “Andrew, Jeffrey is gone.” I didn’t understand the sentence. “Well, where did he go?”

Jeffrey had felt a little under the weather the night before. Nothing remarkable. The kind of thing that makes you think you might be getting a cold. He went to bed early. Libby stayed up later.

In the morning, he didn’t get up. She let him sleep for a while. Eventually, she went to wake him. She couldn’t. She called 911. The paramedics came.

Jeffrey had died in his sleep. He was forty-three years old.

I had walked onto the back patio while I was talking to Dad. Three stories above the ground. I fell to my knees and sobbed. “No.” “No.” “No.”

I don’t remember the rest of our conversation. I know Dad and I agreed we would meet in Denver.

And I know how that phone call ended. “I love you.”

Then, somehow, I stood up. Punch Bowl was still going to open. People were still coming to work. Guests would still walk through the door. I found my chef. I told him Jeffrey had died. I told him I was leaving and had no idea when I would be back.

Call the hourly shift supervisor.

Get coverage.

Tell the team what happened. Better that they understand why I had disappeared.

I called my boss, who had also worked with Jeffrey at TAG.

Then I left. I drove straight to Jody’s condo. I told her. We sat on her couch and held each other and cried. Eventually, we started walking through the neighborhood. We had cocktails.

The rest of the day exists mostly in fragments.

Libby.

Jeffrey’s business partner.

A flight reservation.

Packing.

Calls.

My boss calling back because he wanted my flight information so he could pick me up in Denver and drive me to Cook Street.

And somewhere inside all of that was Jody’s birthday present. A black Michael Kors handbag with square gold studs and a strap. She didn’t want to accept it. Her birthday was the next day. But giving it to her mattered to me. “It will bring me joy.” So she let me. She still has the handbag.

…

The next morning, Jody drove me to the airport. I flew home. Cook Street still felt like home when I walked inside. That was part of what made everything so strange. My bedroom was still downstairs. My office was still there. I had lived there. I had been there less than a month earlier.

There were hugs. There were tears. And then there was Brooklyn. Three and a half years old. To him, my being in the house required no explanation. Of course Uncle Andrew was there. I had always been there.

I don’t remember some dramatic moment between us. I’m glad I don’t. He may have said something as ordinary as: “Hi Uncle Andrew.”

The hard part for Brooklyn was not understanding why I was there. The hard part was understanding why his father wasn’t. And that understanding did not arrive once. It arrived again. And again. And again. For months.

Dad isn’t here. Dad isn’t coming home tonight. Dad isn’t coming home tomorrow. No, Dad isn’t coming back.

Adults think of death as a single fact. For a three-and-a-half-year-old, permanence had to become really slowly.

Everyone in that house had lost a different Jeffrey. My dad had lost his youngest son. Years earlier, he had lost my mom. He knew the grim logistics that arrive after someone dies. Funeral arrangements. Death certificates. Burial or cremation. But this was his child.

Libby had lost her husband. Brooklyn had lost his dad. I had lost my little brother. My best friend.

The same man. Not the same loss. There was no reason to compare them. There was no purpose.

We needed one another. I knew there were people who would take care of me. And I knew there were people I wanted to take care of. Not because someone assigned me the responsibility. Because I loved them.

I told my employer I planned to use four weeks of accrued vacation. Then I planned another four weeks unpaid.

Eventually, Punch Bowl and I mutually agreed to part ways. The business needed a General Manager who could be there. I needed to be somewhere else.

I went back to Portland to collect my things and my car. Then I returned to Denver.

Jody and I began traveling back and forth. She came to Denver. I went to Portland. Eventually, she moved here too.

…

But first another little boy arrived. Ari was born about three weeks after Jeffrey died. He came early. I was actually in Portland with Jody when he was born.

When I returned to Denver and went to the hospital to meet him, I wore one of Jeffrey’s shirts. The sleeves were too short for me, so I rolled them up. My arms were longer than Jeffrey’s.

I wanted to wear that shirt because the first time I held his son, I wanted my little brother there with me.

Not instead of me. Not as me. With me. I held Ari. My nephew. Jeffrey’s son.

I was never going to become Brooklyn and Ari’s father. They already had one.

I could not replace Jeffrey.

I would never have wanted to.

I was meant to stand next to him.

And then life kept moving. As life does.

…

Brooklyn is sixteen now. Nearly seventeen.

He is about six-foot-two, which is objectively ridiculous when you consider that I am five-foot-eight and his father was five-foot-five.

He is quiet. Self-contained. Introspective.

He doesn’t love school, but I don’t think he dislikes it for the reasons Jeffrey did. Brooklyn is very smart. Sometimes he doesn’t think his teachers ask interesting enough questions. Sometimes he doesn’t think they reach him in the right way.

He gets bored. He wants freedom. He has his driver’s license now.

He fixes motorcycles and resells them, something I would never dream of doing.

Jeffrey would have understood that part of him better than I do. Jeffrey was handy. He once built a pulley system in his garage so he could remove the hard top from his Jeep by himself.

So when I see Brooklyn working on something mechanical, I notice. That’s all. I don’t need to tell him who it makes him like. He gets to decide who he is.

There is still plenty of time for him to decide what comes after high school. Maybe the path will look conventional. Maybe it won’t. What matters to me is that it becomes his.

These days, my relationship with Brooklyn happens less through activities and more through conversations around the family dinner table.

Sometimes we become so absorbed in a conversation that I stop hearing everyone else.

I ask him questions. I try very hard not to hide answers inside them. I want to know what he thinks. What he sees. What interests him. Who he is.

Because Brooklyn does not owe any of us a replica. Not of me. Not of Libby. Not of Jeffrey.

He is becoming more Brooklyn. I get to watch.

…

Ari is twelve. Sweet. Warm. Kind. Sensitive.

He loves cycling and races competitively. He loves baseball.

Recently, when Libby and her fiancé, Brad, went away, Ari stayed with us for part of the time. He was supposed to spend some time somewhere else too. He wasn’t comfortable there. So he asked if he could come back to our house.

Of course he could. I love that he knew he could ask.

That week, Jody and I took him to a batting cage. I bought myself a new glove so we could play catch in the backyard. Later, we took a wiffle ball bat and balls over to George Washington High School.

He hit for a long time. Then he stopped and looked at me.

“Do you want a turn?”

Yes, thank you.

I wanted a turn!

When Jody and I took him to a game at Coors Field, I taught him how to keep score. He picked it up quickly.

Sometimes Jeffrey enters our conversations. Not because I sit Ari down and tell him stories about the father he never met. Something happens. A connection appears.

“My dad was a catcher in Little League?”

He was, Ari.

“Did you play baseball together?”

Yes, we sure did.

Ari rarely asks me what his dad was like. He asks me what his dad did. So I answer what he asks. And if another question comes, I answer that too. That seems right.

…

There is a photograph of Jeffrey and me hanging in our kitchen. Dad took it. We are standing side by side. Jeffrey on the left. Me on the right. Smiling.

It is not displayed as a memorial. It is simply part of the kitchen. Dinner gets cooked in front of it. Someone opens the refrigerator. Someone pours a drink.

Most days, I probably walk past Jeffrey more often than I consciously look at him. And then sometimes I stop.

Nearly thirteen years have passed. Sometimes I still want to call him. Sometimes I want him sitting at our family dinner table in the front room.

Physically. Not represented in a photograph. Not present in a story. Not remembered. There. Jeffrey. My little brother.

But the table I want him sitting at is a table that became what it is after he died. There is no clean way to hold that. Jody and I might not live in Denver if Jeffrey had lived. We might not live five minutes from Libby and the boys. Our family dinners might happen mostly on holidays rather than ordinary Tuesday evenings. Angry Olive might not have become my full-time work.

And Brad would not be sitting at that table as Libby’s fiancé. That one is not a maybe. The life in which Jeffrey remains beside Libby and the life in which Brad becomes the person beside her cannot occupy the same chair.

I cannot reconcile those two worlds. I don’t think I am supposed to.

I cannot and would not say I would choose this life over a life in which Jeffrey lived. I simply wouldn’t. I also have no idea what that other life would contain.

I only know this life. And I love it. I love Jody. I love the life we have built. I love living five minutes from Libby, Brad, and the boys. I love our family dinners. I love watching Brooklyn become more Brooklyn. I love playing baseball with Ari. I love the work I have built.

And I want my little brother at the table.

Those truths do not cancel one another.

So I let them sit beside each other.

Like brothers.

…

Jeffrey never knew me as Jody’s husband. He never stood beside me at our wedding, where he would have been my best man. He never knew this version of Angry Olive. He never knew the Andrew writing these words.

And yet, something about saying Jeffrey did not know this Andrew feels incomplete. Because Jeffrey spent more than forty-three years watching me become. He had watched enough versions of me arrive to understand that another one always could.

If someone had asked him whether I might build a business, marry Jody, change directions again, fail, begin again, or become something neither of us could yet imagine, I don’t think he would have needed much time.

Absolutely. Not because Jeffrey could see the future. Because he had seen me.

And I had seen him. Jeffrey wasn’t finished either. He was about to become a father for the second time. He was going to learn how to be the father of two boys instead of one. He and Libby were going to become another version of themselves together.

Professionally, something else could have come next too. I don’t know what. There would have been successes and mistakes. More laughter. More frustration. New jokes I will never hear. New things he would have shown me. New things I would have seen in him.

I wasn’t finished knowing my little brother. He wasn’t finished knowing me. For most of our lives, becoming was something we witnessed in each other.

Then one of us kept going.

…

But something strange happened. The experiences stopped. The relationship didn’t.

I know things about Jeffrey now that I did not understand while he was alive. I understand his fatherhood differently because I have watched his boys grow. I understand his professional life differently because I have spent more years running my own business. I understand the kid who struggled in school differently because I now understand how little grades can tell us about where someone will eventually find his place. I understand his imperfections differently too.

For much of my life, I tried very hard to be good. Not good as in kind. Good as in correct. The good son. The good student. The person who followed the rules. The person who got things right.

Jeffrey never seemed especially interested in that project. He made mistakes. He made bad choices. He pushed boundaries. His dear friend Gina, who was also the Human Resources person assigned to deal with him at one point in his career, could accurately describe him as a “Human Resources nightmare.”

And he built a beautiful life. He became an extraordinary chef. A leader people followed because he was right there beside them. An entrepreneur. A husband deeply in love with his wife. A father completely at home on the floor playing with his son. He didn’t have to become perfect first.

I needed a long time to understand that. Jeffrey never sat me down and taught me the lesson. Mostly, he just lived. That was usually how he taught me.

When I couldn’t decide what to name my consulting company, he stood behind me at the whiteboard and told me to “pick a damn name.” When I entered restaurants, he welcomed me into the world he already knew. When my life changed directions, he kept recognizing me inside the change.

He never needed Andrew to become more Jeffrey. He loved Andrew becoming more Andrew.

…

Every Thanksgiving, I make my mother’s stuffing. After Mom died, I asked Dad for the recipe. He gave me a list.

Cornflakes.

Water.

Schmaltz.

Mushrooms.

Green peppers.

Onions.

Salt.

Pepper.

That was it. No measurements. No instructions. No temperature. No explanation of what anything was supposed to look like along the way. It took me three or four years to make the stuffing taste the way I remembered it. Now I make it every Thanksgiving. In fact, Thanksgiving does not exist without it.

For a long time, I might have thought the inheritance was the list. It wasn’t. The list mattered. But the inheritance was also having eaten that stuffing enough times to recognize when I finally got it right.

Memory.

Participation.

Trying again.

Bringing something forward without being able to reproduce it exactly.

Maybe relationships are inherited that way too. There is no recipe for continuing a relationship with someone who is dead.

There are photographs.

A Jack & Diet.

A Packers game.

“Hey Bill.”

The whiteboard.

A nephew asking whether his dad and I played baseball together.

None of those things is Jeffrey. But all of them are places where I still meet him.

Not the same Jeffrey. I couldn’t possibly meet the same Jeffrey. Because I am not the same Andrew.

• The boy on the orange couch knew one version of his little brother.

• The graduating law student sitting across from him at Champp’s knew another.

• The restaurant leader walking through the Pepsi Center in a hard hat knew another.

• The man sitting quietly beside him on the couch at Cook Street knew another.

• The brother who wore his shirt into a hospital room knew another still.

And the Andrew writing these words knows things about Jeffrey that none of those earlier Andrews could have known. Not because Jeffrey changed after he died. Because I did.

I kept living. I kept experiencing. I kept understanding. I kept becoming.

…

And every new version of me has been able to look back at my little brother from somewhere the previous version could not stand. The memories are not sad. They are warmth. Laughter. Comfort. Home.

They have marked the time.

And the life that has continued since December 21, 2013, has not moved me farther away from Jeffrey. In some ways, it has allowed me to keep meeting him.

I still miss him. Of course I do. Every day.

There are days I want to pick up the phone.

There are dinners where I want one more chair occupied.

There are things I want to tell him.

There are things I want him to tell me.

I want him to see Brooklyn now.

I want him to know Ari.

I want him to meet the man I have become.

But maybe that last one is the easiest for me to carry.

Because Jeffrey had more than forty-three years of evidence. He didn’t know this Andrew. But he knew there could always be another Andrew. He believed there was more of me possible without needing to decide what that more had to look like.

Perhaps that is one of the rarest ways another person can love us. Not by knowing who we will become. Not by telling us who we should become. By knowing us deeply enough to believe in the becoming itself.

Jeffrey gave me that.

…

And when I ask myself where, after all these years, I have become more like my little brother, I keep arriving at an answer that sounds backward until it doesn’t. I have become more like Jeffrey by continuing to become more Andrew. I think he would recognize that. He always did.

The greatest inheritance someone leaves us may not be a part of themselves we are expected to preserve. It may be the freedom they gave us to keep becoming ourselves.

So I keep going.

Still imperfect.

Still changing.

Still walking past that photograph in the kitchen.

Still occasionally wanting to pick up the phone.

Still loving my little brother.

And still becoming more Andrew.

A Question To Carry With You:

Who do you understand differently now because you are no longer the person you were when you knew them?