O brother, where art thou?

Once, almost a lifetime ago, I had a golden brother.
He was late and unexpected, the twilight child of older parents
already drowning in a sea of unruly daughters.
He was sturdy and fiesty and we spent our days together
while time swept the sagebrush fields of our youth.
Years later, on a hot summer night, after our father was dead
and we were all older and scattered apart,
my brother climbed onto his bike.
He rode down a hill, just a block from his house,
and I never saw him again.

There were some newspaper stories,
a lawsuit of sorts, and medical bills that long ago
soared beyond the 2 million dollar mark.
But what remains of my brother
are some basic facts
that illuminate a stranger I once knew:
41 year old male with severe closed head injury.
Left-side hemiparesis. Speech and vision impaired.
Extreme short-term memory loss, concrete thinking, perseveration.
IQ well below normal.

I went to his house yesterday;
struggling as usual to walk that fine line
between sister and mother, case worker and friend.
Does it matter if he has 37 jugs of water sitting on his kitchen floor?
Who's it hurting if the drawers of Dad's rolltop desk have split from the weight
of the useless paper compulsively stuffed into them?
Strange food rots in the fridge next to fresh squeezed juice and yams.
Thirteen boxes of herbal tea sit in a row in the cupboard,
each one the same and each one purchased mindless of the ones that came before.
Yet, his bed is made and his houseplants thrive and in the midst of a spat,
he sings me a snippet of the theme from the Brady Bunch.
Everywhere, everywhere are contradictions,
and opportunities to collide with the past.

D. tells me often that my brother doesn't necessarily carry the
same sorrows and burdens that I do. He says that I worry too much.
Maybe so.

Right before I left yesterday, I picked up a notebook
that was lying under the kitchen table.
Scrawled across the top page was a journal entry of sorts;
a message perhaps to those of us who worry - and those who do not.
It read, in part:
"The odds are AGAINST YOU! You live here too.
just remember, a neurologic injury cuts the wire -
& it NEVER NEVER NEVER comes back."