Content warning: big sads.
Sometimes there comes a point where you can't move backward, and being stuck is worse than moving forward. My brother took that last step forward on Tuesday. There's a sappy, whimsical little part of me that wonders if maybe so many people needed his unique brand of expertise and patience, that he just needed a more ethereal form to watch over all of us. I've been seeing orange stuff pop up everywhere and I'm sure it's all just coincidence, but it's fun to think about him setting traps for me now like he did when I was a kid. Good old popper on a string pinned to my bedroom door...
On the other hand, I bought some heliotrope plants yesterday just because a butterfly with stripes of his favorite color landed on it while I was being indecisive. I later learned heliotrope causes lethal liver toxicity if consumed. Very funny.
December 2018 brought him a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which was nuked pretty good with an assortment of chemotherapies, and ultimately a surgery that removed and rerouted some stuff that seemed to have fixed the pancreas problem. But then wispy little cancer nodes started popping up on his liver, resisted treatment, and finally he decided to retire and spend whatever time he had left at home. The timeline at that point was somewhat unclear, then became short, and then on Monday I drove my parents to Houston for a visit and he slipped away the next day.
Since then I've been quietly reflecting and watching others share photos and stories. I want to hear and see all of them. Erik is inarguably my favorite person, despite us both being hermit crabs to some extent. We're a decade apart, but even though he left for college right as I was developing sentience and personality, he still heavily influenced many aspects of my life. He introduced me to music I would never have heard, left boxes of MAD magazines and Boy Scout guide books behind that I scoured and learned from, and introduced me to DOOM and Final Fantasy 7, which helped me find my path toward my own individual interests and preferences, which I might not have otherwise discovered on my own. He laid down so many bread crumbs for me to follow, without explicitly pushing me toward anything specific.
And his cooking. His culinary adventurousness is life goals. Beef and blue cheese sausages, sweet potato and duck fat tamales, brown rice and feta "stuffing", and countless other incredible obstacle courses for the palate. He had an affinity for capsaicin like no other, and after multiple years not winning the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival, decided he was just going to incinerate the mouths of the judges the next year. A reasonable action. They didn't know what they were missing.
I have so much more to say but honestly I'm exhausted and have to go get some plants into the dirt. I'm going to be intermittently quiet and unresponsive this week, because I'm tired and there's a physical element of this grief that hit me like a truck. A memorial event will happen eventually, but for now just... eat delicious food, walk barefoot on some nice grass, and maybe go fishing.
Sometimes there comes a point where you can't move backward, and being stuck is worse than moving forward. My brother took that last step forward on Tuesday. There's a sappy, whimsical little part of me that wonders if maybe so many people needed his unique brand of expertise and patience, that he just needed a more ethereal form to watch over all of us. I've been seeing orange stuff pop up everywhere and I'm sure it's all just coincidence, but it's fun to think about him setting traps for me now like he did when I was a kid. Good old popper on a string pinned to my bedroom door...
On the other hand, I bought some heliotrope plants yesterday just because a butterfly with stripes of his favorite color landed on it while I was being indecisive. I later learned heliotrope causes lethal liver toxicity if consumed. Very funny.
December 2018 brought him a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which was nuked pretty good with an assortment of chemotherapies, and ultimately a surgery that removed and rerouted some stuff that seemed to have fixed the pancreas problem. But then wispy little cancer nodes started popping up on his liver, resisted treatment, and finally he decided to retire and spend whatever time he had left at home. The timeline at that point was somewhat unclear, then became short, and then on Monday I drove my parents to Houston for a visit and he slipped away the next day.
Since then I've been quietly reflecting and watching others share photos and stories. I want to hear and see all of them. Erik is inarguably my favorite person, despite us both being hermit crabs to some extent. We're a decade apart, but even though he left for college right as I was developing sentience and personality, he still heavily influenced many aspects of my life. He introduced me to music I would never have heard, left boxes of MAD magazines and Boy Scout guide books behind that I scoured and learned from, and introduced me to DOOM and Final Fantasy 7, which helped me find my path toward my own individual interests and preferences, which I might not have otherwise discovered on my own. He laid down so many bread crumbs for me to follow, without explicitly pushing me toward anything specific.
And his cooking. His culinary adventurousness is life goals. Beef and blue cheese sausages, sweet potato and duck fat tamales, brown rice and feta "stuffing", and countless other incredible obstacle courses for the palate. He had an affinity for capsaicin like no other, and after multiple years not winning the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival, decided he was just going to incinerate the mouths of the judges the next year. A reasonable action. They didn't know what they were missing.
I have so much more to say but honestly I'm exhausted and have to go get some plants into the dirt. I'm going to be intermittently quiet and unresponsive this week, because I'm tired and there's a physical element of this grief that hit me like a truck. A memorial event will happen eventually, but for now just... eat delicious food, walk barefoot on some nice grass, and maybe go fishing.