cooler near the lake

The hike was a last minute decision, the weather having turned. I lacked, among other things, appropriate shoes.

“Here,” she said.

I shadowed her, lamely, footprints stamped out and hugging the stream, but her trainers, a half size too small, were abusing my feet. Turning back, I wondered which steps could be retraced.

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When it finally happened, I felt as though I was in one of those hospital dramas; everything slowed down, the yelling voices stretched out and muffled, the scene around me surreal and blurred. Although he had a “do not resuscitate” order, my mother pushed me aside when I didn’t respond and slammed the large red button into the wall with force enough to cause collateral damage to both hand and wall. And then somehow the room sped to normal, the rest of my family ushered into the hallway amid the racket of the scene. I was still in there against the wall opposite the bed, ignored by the busy hospital personnel. It was just me and them, and my brother was dead.

Brian and I were never close, not as kids, certainly not as teenagers, and we never had the chance to grow up and become close in adulthood. It really was as simple (and complicated) as that, but his death rocked me more than any other pain in my life could claim. For this reason, I can’t pick out his place in the cemetery, driving down Highway 83 in southeastern Wisconsin toward one relative’s house or that of a friend. I have only visited his grave twice: once before I moved to England, and once when I decided I was moving back to the Midwest. Thirteen years stretch between those visits, wide and accusing.

The everyday defining things are slipping – the sound of his voice, his laugh, or how he looked when he got mad. He was two years older and much taller than me, always skin and bones with sad, wide blue eyes. He dressed in a fringed black leather jacket, stoner rock t-shirts and faded black denim, wearing a head scarf when the chemo stole his pretty brown hair. I didn’t love that leather jacket, it wasn’t remotely my style, but I dragged it around from one city to the next for over a decade, finally giving it to Goodwill before my last move. It no longer smelled like him, or worse, I know longer recalled what his smell was like.

He asked me once, in a rare moment of maturity, why do you only go after the degenerates? It was summer and we were sat on the front porch of our parents’ house, in high school and he was referring to the latest idiot I was involved with, a peripheral friend of his no less. I don’t know I said, to which he replied something about being the champion of lost causes. It took years and distance to grasp the implications of such a weighted statement.

This is the first I have (publicly) written about him, my only brother, Brian Scott Smarella, who pushed me around as a kid giving me more bloody noses, scraped knees and bruised egos than I could ever deal in return. It will likely not be the last. Ours was a relationship complicated and understood by us alone, one I am still working out. His is a flag I will always raise, but will also be the first to tear it down. To say I loved him – love him – is ridiculous, trite. After everything, he was my brother and sometimes you only get the one.

Brian Scott Smarella, September 12, 1974 - April 9, 1997

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