The brothers we needed

If the weather forecast is correct, the day after Christmas in Eagle River, Wis., will bring snow. (Who can forecast anything? How many times must we be taught this?)

Specifically “snow showers,” a phrase familiar to anyone who has wintered in the Midwest. It could be the kind of day when my cousin Pat settled by the window and listened to music. His favorite vinyl, he told me, was the Neil Diamond soundtrack to “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” released in 1973, a few years after the bestselling novella (which, it must be said, is on the cornball side).

“T.C. F.C.-B.,” Pat ended his emails to me. Short for “Take Care, Favorite Cousin-Brother.” He called me the brother he wished he’d had (snickering about the two that he actually did). His sister said yesterday, “I think you both were brothers each needed.”

Yes. From pre-kindergarten on, our parents made sure we had time together. Overnights, weekend picnics, shopping trips organized by my mother. When she bought me Red Ball Jets – the hottest sneaker of the time, a major spend for our family - Pat got Red Ball Jets, too.

We were born exactly six months apart in 1955, me on March 22 and he on September 22. Pat’s birth landed on the autumn equinox; I narrowly missed the spring equinox, showing up one day late. Wanting not to come out, I tell people.

In another symmetry, this one peculiar to Pat, his death took place on the winter solstice. Yesterday. After a second heart attack on the table, with a team of frantic doctors around him. He “put up a hell of a fight,” his son heard later.

Don’t write while grief is fresh, the manuals advise. When I do things on the page that are not recommended, I like to point out, if only to myself, the forbidden nature of the move. So I know I’m on the right track. Very fresh, pre-dawn.

Stringing words in a line is the only way I’ve found to make sense of the world. Or try. And fail. I’m failing in front of you. The flop is posted.

Maybe I’m acting on a kind of instinct. The day Pat died I was reading a book about … well, death. Also the afterlife. It’s by Ptolemy Tompkins, the son of Peter Tompkins, who wrote The Secret Life of Plants, published the same year as the “Seagull” movie’s release.

Among Ptolemy’s ideas is that we can’t stay away from the internet - the “place” where you and me are at the moment, a non-local, relational, instantaneous zone of affect - because we sense a replica of the dimly remembered spirit world that we came from and are headed back to. Credible, I think.

The name of the song from the Neil Diamond album that Pat played over and over is “Be.” He recited part of the lyrics to me on the phone not long ago.

Lost

On a painted sky

Where the clouds are hung

For the poet’s eye

You may find him

If you may find him

“Him” is Jonathan, who in the story has left the earthly dimension to pursue another kind of progress. A few minutes ago I listened for the first time all the way through.

Be

As a page that aches for a word

Which speaks on a theme that is timeless

And the one God will make for your day

Autumn equinox, winter solstice: Pat’s birth in the season when the balance of the globe tips toward darkness. His death when the dark has reached its deepest. When the light begins to return.

T.C.F.C.-B.