No More Crazy Goonie Adventures

The last movie I watched before my little brother died was The Goonies. Earlier that morning – July eleventh, 2022 – Ted had updated me on Ian's condition. Basically, he had gone from mere liver failure to renal and pulmonary failure too. We were just waiting now. It might be hours, it might be days, but Ian was leaving soon.

How do you process that information without prior experience? I have two little brothers. And that's the total number of little brothers I ever had. I'm not down to two little brothers. I've never had this happen before. I cried throughout the day because I knew the loss was coming, and when I wasn't crying I painted. And watched The Goonies.

When Ted called that morning, before it actually happened, before we had lost our brother Ian, I was listening to the Violent Femmes. Tragedy struck while I was listening to the Violent Femmes. And I thought about once when I was maybe nineteen, my best friend Steve and I got into a car wreck while we were listening to the Violent Femmes.

This is not a pattern. I have listened to the Violent Femmes thousands of times without getting into car wrecks or killing my little brother, Ian, who I would lose a few hours later. But right now, the only times I could remember ever listening to the Violent Femmes were when the car went off the road and this time. It felt like another car wreck. But nobody died in the car wreck.

Ted called again in the evening, and I immediately forgot everything that had happened since his last call. I knew why he was calling, but I pretended that maybe it was about something else.

It wasn't.

He said: Ian has been there every single day of my life, and tomorrow he won't be. We cried, and we wondered what the loss really meant, because now we weren't just brothers. We were the brothers who are left. Somehow that seemed like a bigger responsibility.

The day after Ian died, I finished my painting and didn't know what to do. So I made a chocolate pie, and realized that I never got to make a pie for Ian, and didn't even know what kind of pie was his favorite. There are a lot of things I didn't know about Ian, like how unhappy he was, and what kind of pie was his favorite, and I wish I had known both of those things before he died. And lots of other things too.

Ian was never going to recommend a cool science fiction or sketch comedy show to me again.

Ian was never going to see the season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Ian was never going to get around to fixing my tablet, the one I sent to him like six years ago.

I guess there are a lot of things we'll never get around to now.

The last time that all three of us were together was when I traveled from Chicago to Oregon for my twenty-year high school reunion. Three weeks from now will be my thirty year high school reunion. We had all been talking about how my route home will carry me through Eugene, where Ian and Ted both lived, and how important it was that we manage to see each other again even if it was just for a few minutes.

Now, my twenty-year high school reunion trip, in 2012, will always be the last time we were together. Somehow it all seems a little more unfair because in a month, if it just happened one month later, then I would always be able to say to myself: at least we got to see each other one last time.

But I probably wouldn't say that. I would say: how could he be gone? I just saw him last week! It seems that human beings are always more surprised by the death of someone they have recently seen, as if the sheer force of memory and proximity could bind them to the mortal plane.

We haven't had much proximity for a really long time. They moved away when I was still in high school. Ian and Ted grew up together, bound in a way that I could never be, and I missed out getting to know them as they became adults. We stayed in touch as a family, but it has been more than three decades since we lived in the same town. The moments when our trio was reunited have been so rare that every one of them is commemorated with a photograph, in a time when you had to use an actual camera.

When I moved back to Oregon eight years ago, it was to the opposite side of the state from where my brothers lived, and I didn't even really want to move. One consolation was that I was closer. Sure, I can't drive a car and they were hundreds of miles away, but it was a lot closer than Chicago so maybe things would be different now. Maybe getting to know my brothers better, as grown-ups, would be the emotional reward for whatever bullshit I was going through in my own life.

In some ways, that's what happened. America (and our mother) took a hard right turn, abandoning all pretense of interest in civil liberties or democracy, and one side effect is that the three of us marveled in horror together. The worse things got, the more we communicated – and not only about my mom posting far-right nonsense online, or my stepfather bombing our inboxes with misinformation and threats of gun violence. My brothers were allies in the face of a looming fascist takeover of America, but also there to talk about comic books and other important matters. I felt less alone, because even though I didn't know my brothers as well as I should, I did know them. They never became people I didn't recognize. They still understood the importance of equality, and justice, and Doctor Who. My partner and I started watching Star Trek Discovery on Ian's recommendation. Ian was going to read Gerard Way's run on Doom Patrol because I told him how good it was and he loved Umbrella Academy. He just needed to renew his library card but now he never will. I think it would have made him happy.

Ian wasn't very happy. About a lot of things. But his joy never dimmed when it came to cool stuff: Star Trek, electronics, letterboxing, and making weird things in his mad scientist lab. What was the last thing my little brother made before he died? What was the last thing he shared with somebody else? Why do those questions matter to me?

The last movie I watched before my little brother died was The Goonies. I don't know the last movie that Ian watched. But in 1989, he watched Willow so many times that I wanted to punch him, so today I'm going to watch Willow. I don't know why, it doesn't really mean anything. He probably hasn't cared about Willow since he was a kid. I sure haven't. But what else am I supposed to do in a world without Ian in it? I really miss my brother. I just don't know how to do it.