Where have you been Billy Boy, Billy Boy, where have you been charming Billy?

My brother died yesterday. My eyes and my heart are heavy. I did not expect it yet, I thought he had another 3-6 months. He had early onset Alzheimer’s, but his death seemed quite sudden, and I am in shock. Maybe I was in denial, but his wife didn’t make it clear to me that he was in these last stages, maybe if I understood what she was trying to tell me I would have gotten it. He was my big brother, the oldest child, enough older than me that he went off to college at Cornell University while I was still in grade school.

Besides being a big mean tease, he had a soft heart. He was the one who made up childhood stories for me about Finn, Gill and Scale (some mythical fishes) who lived in the Pecos River and had small adventures. When I got married he saved his corsage from my wedding and dried it and gave it back to me on our first anniversary. He was smart, witty, kind, a captain of industry and he will be missed sorely by his family and his friends, even though the man that we knew had slipped away some time ago to some other state of consciousness.

Hermana is visiting my Mother now in Carlsbad in her new location at an assisted living home. They went out to my Father’s gravesite yesterday at about the time my brother passed over. Next to my father’s gravesite is the place where my mother is to be buried, and next to that was a canopy covering a place where a grave was to be dug (my brother is not being buried there). He must have died just about the time they visited the grave. It hit a peculiar note with the planned grave so near by.