Brotherhood
There are few people in this world whose words are capable of stopping me in my tracks. Of saying something that lands with such precise weight that I have to sit with it for a while before I can move on.
My little brother is one of them.
He's 27 now. Old enough to have properly lived, to have developed his own understanding of the world and how it works. But what makes what he says cut through isn't just that he's wise–it's that he knows me. He has watched me from a vantage point that nobody else has, across every phase of my life, and so when he says something it carries both the weight of good judgment and the weight of genuine witness.
That's what siblings offer that nobody else can. The relationship has the familial permanence of your parents, but your sibling is also in the trenches with you. Through childhood, through adolescence, into adulthood. Friends come and go. Your brother is just always there.
In my teenage years, I wasn't the best older brother. I'm not going to go into the reasons–they were real, but they don't exonerate me. What I know is that by the time I was 19 or 20, I was carrying a quiet guilt about it. A sadness about the years I had wasted. About what I hadn't been for him.
When I was living in Vancouver, he and my mom came to visit me for a week. One night after they went to sleep downstairs, I went up to my room and hand-wrote him a letter. Twelve pages or so. I don't entirely remember what it said. The spirit of it was simple: our relationship mattered immensely to me, I hadn't shown him that, and I was going to be a better older brother.
I then spent the next decade doing so.
Somewhere along the way, our dynamic has shifted.
I’m no longer the one giving him guidance. If anything, I find myself on the receiving end of it more often than not. He’s three years younger than me, but the gap in what we know has disappeared. In many ways, he’s wiser than I am. That’s one of the strange, underrated things about having a sibling. The fixed roles of older and younger steadily soften as you meet each other as equals.
He says things to me now that I genuinely have to stop and absorb. Simple, direct observations about life or about me that I didn't see coming. The kind of thing that only lands because the person saying it understands both the world and your particular place in it. My thinking and perspective are always sharpened after spending time with him.
We argue sometimes. We've gone through stretches of distance. But unlike so many of our relationships in life, leaving this one is simply not an option.
I think it comes from all those years of fighting as kids. You get used to breaking things and putting them back together. It makes the reconciliation muscle unusually strong.
You fight, you forgive, and eventually the fighting becomes less necessary because the forgiveness is already assumed.
The permanence of it changes how you hold everything else inside it. The relationship with your sibling isn’t filtered or situational. It's one of the few relationships that actually last.
At some point, you realize that you’re also going to go through the hardest things in life together.
I think about the days ahead sometimes. The ones I don't want to imagine. When we lose our mom, I know it will be the hardest thing I’ll have to go through. It will be the day we lose our emotional anchor, and the foundation of our lives will have to move from our mom to one another.
The day we lose our mom, I’m going to need him. And I know he’ll be there. He has this ability to stay grounded in moments like that–to be steady in a way that I’m not always good at.
There will come a day when he needs the same from me.
That's the thing about having a sibling. You don't have to grieve alone. The same things come for both of you, and you’ll find a way through together.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what constitutes a meaningful life. I so often reach for the obvious things, what I've built, what I've accomplished, great feats and triumphs.
I think drinking beers with my little brother is even better.