Conversations With My Dead Brother

The Music and Mah-Johngg Never End at Dave's Place

My only sibling, my brother David, was driving to work at the catering establishment he managed in South Florida in 2004, when his vision got blurry. He pulled over until the blurriness passed, but when he got to work, he had a seizure. At the hospital, the diagnosis was not good; glioblastoma mulitforme, many malignancies in unreachable parts of the brain. The doctors gave David six months. He made it for three years, some in relative remission (though I probably should not have let him drive during one of my many visits to Florida in those years).

He died on August 25, 2007, after 10 days of at-home hospice. He was 54, three years younger than I. When I arrived at the beginning of those 10 days, while he was still lucid, I brought a three-DVD set of Three Stooges tapes. His epitaph, in a mausoleum in Boca Raton-- the promised land for our people!--reads, "For duty and humanity!" from a favorite Stooges episode. We forgave each other's childhood crimes and misdemeanors: me for using …