Ode to my brother
The day I got that call from my stepmother and learned that my brother had esophageal cancer, I was sadly not surprised. When I called him right after I got the news, I realized he wasn’t surprised, either. By then, he was a pack-a-day smoker and a bottle (of vodka)-a-day drinker, and he had no intention of focusing on his health. He was a bon-vivant who was finally ready to exit this world. Not only did he accept his fate, he embraced it. From that point on, our ensuing transatlantic conversations over the next 8 months were light and full of wonderful tales of our shared past. 5 years later, those memories have aged like a fine wine which I uncork and savor as I please. I’d like to share some of them here with you on the anniversary of his transition.
Steve was the third of four older brothers, with the face of an angel that made it hard to believe he could be so full of the devil. One of my very first childhood memories was of me sitting in a sunny waiting room while my brother went to see some sort of therapist. It’s quite fuzzy- I was probably about 4 at the time. I imagine it had something to do with him not behaving in school. Had he been born 30 years later, he would have probably been put on Ritalin. Luckily, he was spared that. He simply decided that his classroom wasn’t going to be a desk, a blackboard and four walls. He learned about life on his own unconventional terms, and I was lucky enough to join him for the ride from time to time.
Steve wasn’t your ordinary kid. Most young boys climb trees, but Steve scaled some of the neighborhood’s tallest pines. All the neighborhood kids rode bikes around the block, but none would pedal 4,200 feet up to the Lick Observatory or along the El Camino Real to San Francisco 50 miles away. Nor would anyone attempt his Chinese circus stunt, which is one of my all-time favorite memories. Taking my banana-seated Schwinn, he’d position his acrobats: one kid sitting in front of him, one behind him, one on the handlebars…and me on his shoulders. It was truly epic and almost impossible to execute today in our overprotected society.
In fact, my early childhood memories often revolved around my brother and bicycles. There was a period when Steve was into fashioning hot air balloons out of dry cleaner bags. He’d build a small fire in a Maxwell’s coffee can, surrounded by the neighborhood kids excitedly counting down the launch. When Steve released the bag, we’d scramble onto our bikes and follow the makeshift balloon…until it got caught in a tree or landed on the freeway. He’d get the rap from the folks, but for me, he was a hero. He was more real than Neil Armstrong, a man who for me was just a black-and-white image on a 24-inch TV screen.
Then there was that time he rode me on his bike all the way to the somewhat seedy San Jose Flea Market. I think I had to have been about 7 at the time. We rode for what seemed like an eternity to the south side of the city- to a world that was so foreign to me but was a second home to my brother. While I was drawn to the massive slide, Steve would go straight to the tables of dusty objects upon which he’d find his treasures. This was where he started cultivating his life-long love for antiques.
Antique collecting was an odd hobby for a teenage boy growing up in the 1970s. Most long-haired teens then were going to rock concerts, exploring free love and experimenting with drugs: Steve was rummaging through attics, yard sales and antique shops. By his late teens, he had an impressive collection of gramophones, fountain pens, brass telescopes, Daguerreotypes and period costumes. His bedroom was a veritable museum, complete with a musty odor. That didn’t stop me from venturing in. I loved taking out my favorite 75 rpm, “Kansas City Kitty”, cranking up the Victrola, and giggling at the silly ditty coming out of the massive bent-wood horn.
My brother was a true renaissance man: throughout his life, Steve nurtured his love for history, arts and the sciences with his unique hands-on approach. Instead of learning about history from books, he’d glean information from his elderly friends. He wrote his observations down in a little notebook he kept in his canvas shoulder bag, chronicling everything with beautiful calligraphy and delicate drawings. He also kept a small conch at his side in case he needed to bellow out to someone. While the surrounding world was morphing from rock and roll into disco, Steve managed to keep himself fully immersed in the past, whether it was at a high society Gatsby weekend in San Francisco or a self-styled anachronistic camping trip. He adored dressing up and acting out; it was an opportunity for him to escape to a world where he truly felt more at home.
Steve’s room reflected another important facet of his being: that of a gifted scientist. The more he collected, the more his room resembled a cabinet of curiosities. Living near the Egyptian museum and being a member of the adjacent Rosicrucian order allowed my brother to cross over seamlessly from history to some of the more esoteric sciences. This is where he began to explore the power of pyramids. He made a beautiful tabletop model that was used by our father to sharpen his razor blades. As remarkable as that was, by far the coolest thing my brother ever made was his Tesla coil, a gorgeous 5-foot-tall copper-wrapped cylinder crowned with a glass orb that really worked! I remember proudly inviting my friends over to watch the electric current dancing on demand. He was in his late teens at this point and yet was considered pretty much a failure in school, which I find so ironic considering what he had learned and achieved on his own.
One of his greatest passions was astronomy- I remember the pinhole viewers he’d fashion out of shoeboxes to watch partial eclipses. He joined the Astronomical Society of the Pacific as a young adult, a time when most people his age were joining health clubs and going to fern bars. With this illustrious group, Steve was able to hunt down total eclipses, jetting off to the Caribbean, South Africa and Transylvania. This quirky pastime was something that my brother will always be remembered for, and yet it still doesn’t completely define him.
He loved being creative in the kitchen, with most of his recipes involving copious quantities of butter, garlic and black pepper. Even when he no longer lived at our folks’ place, the minute he walked in, he’d start rummaging through the refrigerator, helping himself to doggie bags and whatever orphaned food he could find to experiment with, engaging in a practice he called “consolidating the fridge”. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought about him while doing this myself in my own home. I often dedicate my successful zero-waste mash-ups to Steve.
All this said, my brother wasn’t an easy person to be around: at any moment, he could be exuberant, silly, angry, and sensitive to the point of being maudlin. His emotions were often on high and sometimes enhanced with alcohol. He was the person who grieved the hardest and who reminisced the most. He was the hoarder of the family, coveting family pictures and artifacts that he would cling to for the memories they held. Because of this, he was an untapped source of wealth for our incomplete family tree that we survivors are now left to piece together.
Had Steve grown up in a different world where education was not a form of indoctrination, where being different was cherished, and where active curiosity was not considered unruly behavior, perhaps he would have been another Tesla or another DaVinci. But alas, that wasn’t the world he was born into, and it was hard for him to cope with that. He drank, he smoked, he let himself go. He was a loose cannon: he wanted to draw the family close to him, but he ended up pushing everyone away. And when I felt it was finally the time for my children to get to know their uncle, he decided to check out.
I don’t think anyone has ever embraced their death sentence with as much zeal as my brother did. This was his moment, and he wanted to call the shots. I learned from some of those notebooks he kept that he had planned his departure years before he knew he was going to die. His enlarged heart and damaged kidneys prevented him from undergoing any cancer treatment, so there was nothing to delay his farewell tour. One thing he wanted most of all was to get the whole family together for one last reunion. He held court in his fleeting kingdom, a rare spat-free moment where all the sibs were in one place sharing childhood stories, laughing and providing comfort. In spite of being weak and in obvious pain, he was so happy being there as the person of honor surrounded by those he cherished. It really was what he wanted the most.
His next task was to deal with his estate, which had become a formidable mountain of objects of varying sentimental and real value. While he had written down some of the items he wished to bequeath, he really wanted us to tell him what we’d like to have. It was a symbolic way he could share himself with us and perhaps get some sort of validation for his lifestyle. I don’t think any of us sibs felt comfortable asking for anything as it made us feel like vultures, but I knew that it meant the world to Steve. So I put in my request for his conches, a gramophone, an autographed napkin from Nikola Tesla, a small brass telescope, a straw hat and some fountain pens. A year after his death, I went through a big box of unclaimed notes, drawings and photos to complete the shrine to my brother.
The last thing he had planned was his sending-off. He wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the four compass points of his cherished observatory atop Mt Hamilton. Steve and I had talked about this during our many conversations, so I tasked myself with the scattering. Then I got the ashes. I wasn’t quite expecting to receive such a large, heavy container and had a hard time imagining dumping so much ash at once like that. I ended up taking half of the ashes up the mountain with one of my brothers and a couple of his best friends and had a small sunset ceremony that involved several comical attempts at blowing into a conch. When we got home, I spooned the remaining ashes into small baggies like a drug dealer, giving some of them to his best friends and keeping a few for me and the family. I told those who took a bag of ashes to find a place that had special meaning for them and Steve for their own scattering. Everyone there agreed that doing this was in the spirit of my brother- sentimental, symbolic and a tad mischievous.
It wasn’t hard for me to compile a long list of “scattering places” that were close to my brother’s heart: he was enthralled by both natural and man-made beauty. Over the past 5 years, I have assisted my brother in making his final terrestrial tour: the Rosicrucian museum, the pine tree he climbed as a boy, his beloved Eiffel tower and Sacré Coeur, the cathedral in Metz (aptly named St Stephen’s), San Francisco bay… But by far, the most moving moment I had sending my brother off was during the 2017 solar eclipse in the Grand Tetons. I had never fully understood my brother’s obsession with eclipses until I experienced one myself. The added symbolism of scattering right at that moment when the earth was cast in a silvery light filled me with emotion. My 13-year-old son, who had only met his uncle once, broke into sobs. We were able to connect with my brother celestially, and it was powerful.
Postscript: The last of my brother’s ashes found a home on a frozen lake under the Northern Lights in Finland. My eldest daughter, a Nikola Tesla groupie herself, trekked up to Lapland to scatter his ashes 7 years after he received his initial diagnosis. It was a perfect final commemoration of a person who was truly out of this world.
