To lay me down / In silence easy*: saying goodbye to my oldest brother

I hope to someday learn something from these trees, but first, to sit and to take the time to actually listen. “You can do your yoga out there,” my brother said yesterday, pointing out the window to a public patio beneath the trees. “That’s a good idea,” I smiled. “I just may do that.”

“The Birch Trees,” imagineabird blog, June 13, 2024

I did listen, as it turns out, though I never once practiced yoga on the public patio.

Living with family, the listening and, in turn, the learning, were somewhat irregular acts over the past 17 months but I grew to detect opportunities suspended in unscheduled moments:

when sky-gazing on night walks with my cat cozied up in his pet stroller;

the rare times when the TV was turned off for my brother and sister-in-law’s quiet conversations on a weekend morning;

and watching my brother watch those birch trees from his wheelchair near the window. “That one looks pretty thirsty,” he observed over the summer, pointing to a young birch in particular, “Can you give it some extra water?”

Everything seems to circle back toward the simplistic: nature, the heaviness of silence, and observation. How many layers of noticing is possible, a seeing of someone seeing of someone seeing, a mobius strip of witnesses? If only.

~~~

He is gone.

My brother finally succumbed to decades of the progressive form of the disease, Multiple Sclerosis. He lived from 1951 to October 15, 2025.

He was 73 years old, an admirer of the stars, once a photographer and poet himself, a woodworker, guitar player, music lover. His music and writing were fiercely private pastimes. He never performed, though he was happy to offer advice when asked. (In my phone, a treasured audio note of my brother offering gentle wisdom and encouragement last year after hearing my first effort at songwriting on my cheap guitar.)

~~~

At the funeral three days after his death, I thought of my poetry friends, my creative and close-to-the-Earth friends, as I stood and read his eulogy. His coffin was just behind me. Scanning the faces of the attendees and working my way through the piece unhurriedly, I read, dry-eyed, with seeming confidence.

However, I realized afterwards that I had been gripping, for dear life, the sides of the lectern. I wouldn’t have been able to stand up by myself without its support. My god, what a metaphor for all of you, for poetry communities: loving listeners and fellow oral poets up in Eugene, back in Albuquerque, down in Oaxaca City, across the ocean in the U.K., and here in northern California… You had no idea how you carried me through that day. Thank you.

~~~

This is a time of grieving, for certain. Perhaps I speak for all of us here when I say my brain understood he was nearing the end across the past few months, but my heart absolutely refused to believe it. His absence is a glaring chasm. After all my past complaints of the noise in this house, it’s far too quiet now. I am still reeling.

The rough plan is to get through the holidays, continue to memorialize my brother while nurturing his wife’s grief in conjunction with my own. By January, is it possible to turn my attention back to my own life? Where to, next?

Time will offer realizations. Nature, I trust, will continue to stand on her podium for soft lectures. Silence will be confronted, however shakingly. Though vision may be blurred, there’ll be no stopping the surge of light through the cornea and pupil, onward to the brain’s keen filmmaking of the optic nerve’s signals.

I will continue to watch.

*“To lay me down / In silence easy” are lyrics from “Astral Weeks,” a 1968 song by Van Morrison. This album, and many others of Morrison’s, were beloved by me and my brother.