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A TRIBUTE TO MY BROTHER The music you hear in the background is Bach’s “Farewell To A Brother.” It starts off as a strange and rather lightweight goodbye, then grows in richness and complexity and sadness and majesty. It moves on, becomes a reprise of fond memories and endings and beginnings. What started out as light and irritating becomes joyful, with a thread of sadness surfacing for a quick view from time to time—a tapestry of a relationship. It fits my brother Isaac like a glove and sings exactly what I am here trying to say. Between the words and the music, hopefully, I can dress my brother with more than a threadbare cloak of thought for an elegy. I don’t want to just regret and remember his passing; I want to create a landmark, erect a tribute, that people surfing through might stop and reflect a moment or two, and decide that Ike was worth the knowing. Ike was my boon companion as a child, a fellow adventurer in childhood fantasy and play and family outing. We would play–talk many a night (we had a room together from early on and no TV to put us to sleep and separate us), talking out adventures sometimes, sometimes just recreating the day, mostly having fun. We went on fishing/camping trips with my Dad and Granddad in the Northern California mountains. I remember, although he swore he never did, being pushed into a cold mountain stream—the shock of that cold water still with me to this day, some 55 years later. I remember ice-skating with Ike, playing in the snow with Ike, playing in our barn in Michigan, jumping from the hayloft ladder into the hay below—Ike was always a part of that. Somewhere in my teens I became aware of how much smarter I was than Ike—smarter than most everyone, really. After that, Ike was someone to avoid, at first, in the blush of callow manhood. Later, in somewhat more maturity, he was someone to pity and tolerate. That was the whole of a diminishing relationship for many years as we moved on with our lives. When we got together, which was seldom, Ike irritated me with his grab bag of knowledge about everything, his entirely too eager willingness to comment on subjects he knew little or nothing about. Thankfully, praise God, that changed. Not that Ike changed so much, but that I did. Ike developed colon cancer, which soon spread to his liver. There followed in fairly short order, chemotherapy, Hospice and death. During the interim, Ike soldiered through, managing to deal with life and pain in the fashion of a good strong man. The cancer overtook him around Thanksgiving of last year, and he finally, reluctantly, let go. I couldn’t avoid seeing that with enhanced vision and respect. Here was a man who had lived a life of work and family in a true way as he saw it. He kept a path and ran a race that he never deviated from. He married a good woman and raised a good daughter. His wife commented about him after he died, that one of the aspects of his life that pleased him most was the ability to pay his way, wherever he went. “I’ve got it covered,” was his favorite phrase. There is so much, much more I could say about him, but that was Ike in one proud nutshell. Goodbye, Ike. I've got you covered, but I’ll miss you terribly. |