Adam

Last night we hosted 10 of our nearest and dearest for Thanksgiving. The food was fantastic, the wine flowed freely, and the conversation was scintillating. I enjoyed myself, but through it all, I was harboring an undercurrent of sadness. While we were celebrating, my much younger brother was 2,500 miles away in a hospital in Boston, losing his battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He passed away today, three weeks before his 27th birthday.

There are no reassuring words when a young person dies. There is no consolation that they leave behind a family who will carry on their legacy, or that they made some great contribution to society. There was no time for that. There is only that he was here, and now he is not. And there is nothing anyone could have done to change that.

Adam and I were not close. I was 16 when he was born, and lived in a different state. The next year I went off to school, and by the time he was just six I was living on the opposite coast, building a life with dpaul. We saw each other only a handful of times over the years, the last few times for our father's (fourth and final) wedding, to see him in his last days, and at his memorial service. I saw Adam one last time in October, when Sylvia, our father's widow, and I flew to Boston to see him in the hospital. Things had turned for the worse, and we knew this would probably be our last opportunity. The picture above is us with our sister Abigail during that visit.

We didn't have much in common, but I enjoyed his often surprising wit. While visiting in the hospital, I had a brief banter with his Sicilian mother in Italian, after which she blurted incredulously, "we just had a conversation in Italian!" To which he replied, "Sean and I can converse in Scotch." We'll played, Adam.

Even though we didn't spend much time together, I'll miss him just the same. He's a part of me, and that part is hollow now. But at least now our father has a golf partner in the great beyond.

Posted with Blogsy