The call in the night

After my happy reunion with my sister in San Francisco, I immediately e-mailed our brother Joe in Indiana. I knew he would feast on the details.

Days passed yet he didn’t respond. Even more strange, two earlier e-mails from the previous month had gone unanswered.

My best explanation: Joe was scrambling to get his construction business humming after being hobbled for several months by foot surgery and back pain.

Still, the silence was unsettling. I considered calling him, but that’s not how we bros do things. A call would have been too much in his face.

My relationship with Joe has always been special. We were Mom’s first two children. Growing up the same sex, two years apart, powerful bonds were forged. Before I was a husband, father, reporter, I was Joe’s big brother.

As we were going to bed last Saturday night the phone rang. Cheryl picked up. It was Joe.

When Cheryl said his name, my heart skipped a beat. I calculated the time in Indiana. It was after midnight. Was this one of those dreaded calls in the night?

“We were worried about you,” Cheryl said, then handed the phone to me.

Joe’s voice was almost unrecognizable. Weak and raspy.

He was in the hospital, he said. Three days earlier doctors had found the source of his back pain. Bone cancer. Multiple myeloma.

Our phone connection suddenly broke up. Two brothers were sobbing.

Composing himself, Joe talked an emotional blue streak. His back pain had become excruciating in recent weeks. Twice he was lifted out of his house on sheets by paramedics. Unable to get a diagnosis or relief, he had thought of suicide.

Now he had his diagnosis. At age 58, he was staring at the limits of his mortality.

While multiple myeloma isn’t curable, it is treatable, Joe said. He had started a new chemo drug that might knock the cancer back on its heels.

Joe told of breaking the news to his kids, the youngest of whom is in elementary school. The older ones reacted beautifully, he said. Parent-child grievances faded. Flood gates of tears and love opened.

I was bereft of words. How could this be happening? My younger brother was such a powerfully built man, with a life force to match.

A week later, I’m still reeling. I think of Joe in the middle of the night, driving to work, at council meetings. In entirely inappropriate situations, I dab at tears.

I can’t overstate Joe’s importance to me. We emerged from the same childhood caldron. Ours was a special strain of Courtney cultural DNA.

Although we’ve seen each other only occasionally since childhood, these gaps never alarmed me. I always knew we would cycle around as we did last summer when we joined his new family for a beach vacation.

But now this nasty cancer. I’m stunned that it’s happening not only to Joe but to our generation. We’re the still youthful baby boomers. Aren’t we?

When time came for us Courtney siblings to confront eternity, I’d always assumed that I, the first-born, would be first again. Joe’s situation seemed a perversion of the natural order.

Joe doesn’t yet have a prognosis. Cheryl has friends in medical circles who say there is reason for optimism. Plenty of people with multiple myeloma are in remission. If the drug is going to work, we should know soon enough.

Be optimistic, Cheryl says. Joe could have many more years. We should focus on the best outcome.

I appreciate what she is saying, but I don’t have it in me to be optimistic right now. I feel only misery.

I’m afraid for Joe. I ache for his family. I ache for me.