They buried my brother last Monday.
He came to live with us in the summer of 1978. He was the son of the man my mother married when I was two-years-old (the man I consider to be my father) – one of two children from his first marriage. His daughter had already arrived four years earlier.
He was 16-years-old, hair a little long, clothes worse for wear, most of his worldly belongings in a duffle bag.
Our little 1200 square foot house was already full with two parents and three girls, so Daddy framed out a bedroom – just big enough for a twin bed and a dresser – out of a corner of the garage. My brother would call that home until our parents moved into a new house three years later.
We were two years apart in age, but only a year apart in school. That school year would be my sophomore year in high school, his junior. I was awkward and geeky, a disabled child with a 4.0 GPA. He was good-looking and easygoing, no matter where he went – a friendly, never-met-a-stranger sort of kid. All of my girlfriends wanted to date him.
He was a dare-devil at heart. My parents caught him one time putting the picnic benches – stacked on top of each other – stacked on top of the picnic table so he could climb up on the corner of the house to dive into the swimming pool. He would later go on to pursue “anything on the water” activities with a vengeance. He taught me to water ski at summer church camp and how to sail a Hobie Cat 16’. We would run a Hobie Cat rental business with our younger sister several years later, when he and I were both in college. Our favorite time to sail would be just before a storm. We’d throw the “CLOSED” sign on the rental stand, and he and I would hit the Gulf waters, him at the tiller, me on the trapeze. We even raced once or twice.
When he was in high school, he worked as a bag boy at the local Piggily Wiggly, back in the day when they all earned tips. He was such a people person and knew just how to handle the little old ladies. “Good Evening Mrs. Jones. How is your grandson Johnny doing? Is he enjoying Little League baseball? How is his team the Tigers doing this season?” He made a fortune in tips!
He was present for many “firsts” in my life, actually responsible for some.
Once, a package of cigars got broken open in the store, and the damaged package was some how acquired by my brother and his best friend, who also worked as a bag boy. One of my friends and I joined them in the Piggily Wiggly parking lot after they got off work that Saturday night, where we all smoked our first (and for me, my last) cigar.
When I was in college, I bought a 5-speed Toyota Tercel – even though I did not/could not have a license – that my roommate could drive so that we would had wheels. . Our family home was near an old abandoned airport with miles of open pavement, so while we were home on break, he took me up to the old airport and taught me how to drive the stick shift. We would have gotten away with it, except we had our little sister in the back seat at the time. Mom was not pleased.
We attended different colleges – him, Auburn University; me, Florida State. Our football teams would meet on the grid iron once during our college years, and my friends and I drove to Auburn for the game weekend to hang out with my brother and his friends.
ROTC through high school and college, he would go on to join the Army, and I would later fly to Germany where he was stationed in 1987, where we would travel all around Europe, including Oktoberfest in Munich (another first).
The following year, he met and married his wife of 36 years. By that time, I had moved to New Jersey, and we began to grow apart, as life began to take us in different directions.
He would go on to leave the Army; attend seminary; start a family; pastor a small Baptist church; return to the Army as a chaplain; move around the country; eventually retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2013.
I would return home to Alabama to open a gift shop; move to Washington state to work for Microsoft; get married to a man with full custody of five children from his first marriage; and raise a family of my own.
There wasn’t one thing that caused a rift, but rather life and geography happened. We would continue to see each other at family holiday gatherings, and we would instantly pick up right where we had left off, just as if no time had passed since our last encounter.
My mother – his step-mother – passed away in 2001, and I hadn’t realized until then, how central she had been to all of our lives and our family gatherings.
I lived on the west coast; my father and his new wife and all of my siblings lived on the east coast, and relationships didn’t survive demands of daily family life and the distance of 2,000 miles, though he and I would text periodically – holidays and birthdays; marriages of children and births of grandchildren; chats about Daddy, his medical issues and deteriorating cognitive health; different projects and adventures on both sides. Though relationships with all of my siblings would change, he was the one that stayed most in touch over the years.
I saw him in-person for the last time in May of 2015, when we met him and his wife and their youngest son for Sunday dinner at a great little restaurant on the river front in Columbus, Georgia where they lived. We had traveled back east for our youngest daughter’s college graduation from Mississippi State University and were making the rounds of family visits while we were there.
In 2020, my brother was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). He would undergo numerous rounds of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and much more over the next five years, the leukemia returning for a third and final time in late 2024.
He went home to be with His Lord and Savior in mid-March, and he was buried last Monday with full military honors.
His obituary is a beautiful testament of who he was and what he was all about.
His “primary goal in life was to glorify the Lord and serve His people.” And he “definitely considered his days, and spent them well.” Beautifully encapsulate the heart of who he was and how he lived his life.
It goes on to share that he is survived by his wife, his mother and father, his children, his three siblings, his grandchildren, and his two dogs.
I am not mentioned.
That’s okay. I don’t need an obituary to define our relationship. From the day he arrived at our doorstep in 1978, through high school and college, through our first cigar to our final in-person visit, to all of our sailing and travel adventures, to all of the random texts about family and life and about nothing at all, he is survived by a sister in Idaho who loved him very much.
Until we meet again, Love Mauldy