I wanted to write about how much Dan knew about nature and antiques and gardening, how much he loved fishing and dogs and music. I wanted to mention that we resembled one another enough that many people guessed we were twins.
I wanted to explore the ways in which the grief I thought I had laid to rest has surfaced in a new way for me. Bereavement, as anyone who has experienced it knows, is not linear. I wanted to mention the eerie feeling I had when I celebrated my 33rd birthday and realized that I was older than my older brother would ever be.
I wanted to share an anecdote about how my brother and I had driven to the North Farm, our father’s birthplace, to check on long-shot fruit. Picking apples there had been a fall family ritual, but as we grew up the trees had grown old, and many died. But one autumn afternoon, Dan and I made the drive across the dusty Iowa gravel roads. Expecting nothing, we found abundance. Growing thickly in clusters almost like grapes, apples bulbous and scarlet dangled against a high September sky.
We plucked bushels, filling the trunk of his car. We amazed other family members with all those apples produced from the decaying mini-orchard. And nobody quite believed or understood when we told them about the tree struck by lightning, split and nearly completely dead save for one branch jubilantly burdened with swan song apples. Dan and I, from uneasiness at the uncanny sight, had laughed and laughed. And we had talked of planting apple saplings.
But we never did.
At the same time last year as I was working on the column for the anniversary of my brother’s death, I learned that John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane was missing. And my first thought was of his sister, Caroline. My heart went out to her; I know what it is to lose a beloved brother to untimely, violent death.
Shortly thereafter, two close friends lost their fathers. At one of the funerals, I physically felt the pains of loved ones passing. Even with steadfast faith that love is stronger than death, loss envelopes the bereft, and grief never entirely goes away. I realized that we never really pay our last respects.
I’m still conjuring up other memories of Dan: concerts we attended together, spotting an osprey fishing the river and seeing rare cedar waxwings at our parents’ house, playing cribbage hours on end. I recollected Danny learning Latin to serve as an altar boy, and the little nudge with the paten he always gave me when I went to receive Communion.
Communion seems sacramental even when spelled with a lowercase “c.” For the Kennedys, I felt some communion along with compassion. John F. Kennedy, Jr. and I both were born in 1960 to extended Irish Catholic Democrat clans fraught with tragedy. I thought about how we both had lost our mothers to cancer at relatively early ages, how we both had named our dogs Friday.
I thought about how we all are connected, even when we’ve never met, even when we’re intentionally distant or sadly estranged.
Autumn, lovely though it may be, always stirs my melancholy soul. After months of tending the gardens, the freeze is just around the corner. Daylight dwindles. The year winds down. I celebrate yet another birthday, knowing life is short, no matter how long. Knowing death can come suddenly, unexpectedly, even in the prime of life — as it did for JFK, Jr., and for my brother Dan. Knowing that such losses leave survivors reeling a long, long while afterwards.
I wanted to confess that I refrained from hugging my brother Dan the last time I saw him. We were among a group of boisterous friends, and as we parted we both looked at one another sheepishly, then waved good-bye without embracing. We did not plant apple trees. We did not hug one last time. I wanted to admit that to this day I live with that regret.
