My Brother Bob

Bob playing croquet

LONDON, ONTARIO – I apologize for my silence these last few months. It’s been a summer like no other. The youngest of my three older brothers has died and I’ve been floundering a bit as I try to re-set my bearings. For as long as I’ve been drawing breath, Bob has been reassuringly close to hand; a constant touchstone and marker of who I am and the people I come from and the place in this world where I belong. In our childhood, we usually shared a bedroom. For most of our adulthood, we’ve shared a postal code (four out of six digits); living a block and a half apart in this perfect riverside neighbourhood that we might never have twigged to if Bob hadn’t bought a house here first and rented us an apartment on his main floor for the first four years of our marriage. And though they didn’t live here at the same time, it was also a neighbourhood in which both of our parents – but particularly our mom - had roots; reflecting Bob’s lifelong knack for keeping his loved ones in his loop. It’s a challenge to come up with an adequate analogy for the scale of my disorientation in losing so constant a beacon in my life. In moments of existential panic, I ping between ‘banishment’ and ‘amputation’ as the truer simile for my devastation in being cut off from such a primal fount of shared memory and insight and meaning.

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