Eulogy Examples for a Brother

My brother Tom was born two years before me, and he never once let me forget it. 'Older and wiser' was his line, deployed at every family gathering for forty-seven years, usually right before he did something that disproved at least half of it. Tom, I'm finally getting the last word. I hate every part of how I got it.

We grew up sharing the back bedroom of the house on Fenwick Road, with a strip of masking tape down the middle of the floor that he installed when he was ten and I was eight — a border he enforced with the seriousness of a customs agent, except when I had nightmares, when the border quietly stopped existing and I was allowed to drag my sleeping bag to his side until morning. That was Tom in one tape line: full of rules, and full of exceptions, all of them for the people he loved.

Tom grew up to be a paramedic, which surprised exactly no one, because he had been running toward trouble since the day he jumped off the Hendersons' porch roof with a bedsheet parachute. Twenty-two years on the ambulance in this county. There are people alive in this town because my brother went to work. He never talked about the hard calls — he'd come to Sunday dinner and tell us instead about the man who called 911 because his parrot was 'acting smug.' He carried the heavy ones privately and handed us the funny ones. I only understood that this week, when his partner Dave told me what some of those shifts had really been.

He was not easy, my brother. He was a champion grudge-holder against referees, a man who believed his chili could not be improved upon by anyone including professionals, and the single worst person to watch a movie with in the history of cinema — he identified every plot hole out loud in real time. The night before my wedding, when I got cold feet at eleven p.m., he drove forty miles in his pajamas, sat on the curb with me outside the hotel, listened to the whole spiral, and finally said: 'You done? Good. Mike's the best decision you ever made, and tomorrow I'm telling everyone you cried on a curb.' He was right on both counts, and he did tell everyone, for fifteen years.

Tom leaves his wife, Karen, and his kids, Ellie and Sam — and kids, I want you to know something about your dad. He called me every year on the first day of school, your first day, every single year, because he was so proud he had to tell someone who remembered him on his own first day, crying at the bus stop with a Knight Rider lunchbox. He never told you about the crying. Older and wiser, sure, Tom.

I don't know how to be in a world that doesn't have my brother in it. But I know the tape line is gone now, and it was always gone when it mattered. Save my spot on your side, Tom. I'll bring the sleeping bag.

There's a photo at the back of the room of Marcus at seventeen, holding a trophy, with me at eleven standing next to him grinning like I'd won it. That picture is our entire relationship. Marcus achieved things; I stood next to him grinning like I'd helped. He let me. For fifty-one years, my big brother let me stand in the frame.

Marcus was the firstborn of the Reed family and took the job seriously. He was the first to drive, the first to college — first in our whole family — the first to wear a suit to work, and the first to call me, every Sunday night, eight o'clock, for thirty years. If I didn't pick up, he called Mom. It was extortion, honestly. Beautiful, reliable extortion.

I should tell you the truth about my brother, because he was famous for telling it himself, whether or not you had asked. Marcus had a spreadsheet for everything. Vacations had itineraries with buffer time built into the buffer time. He once turned a family barbecue into a 'planning session' with an agenda, printed, in sleeves. We mocked him for it relentlessly — and then when Dad got sick, it was Marcus's spreadsheets that got us through it: every appointment, every medication, every insurance call logged and handled, so the rest of us could just sit with Dad and be his kids. That was the secret of my brother. The spreadsheets were never about control. They were how he carried us.

He could also be maddening. He gave advice you didn't ask for, in the format of questions you couldn't win: 'Have you thought about—' Yes, Marcus. Whatever it is, I had not thought about it, and you knew that. He was right at a rate that, between us, I found genuinely unreasonable. When I started my shop, he reviewed my lease unprompted and found two problems with it. When my first marriage ended, he didn't say one word of advice for once — he just showed up with a truck and moved me out, and at midnight, eating gas station sandwiches on the floor of my empty new apartment, he said, 'You're going to be fine. It's in the spreadsheet.' It was the only time I ever saw him joke about the spreadsheets, and it's the only time I ever cried on his shoulder.

Marcus was a husband to Denise for twenty-eight years and a father to Jordan and Maya, and his proudest spreadsheet — this is real, Denise found it — was a tab tracking every one of their games, recitals, and report cards going back two decades. Column three was labeled 'bragged to.' Every cell was full.

I'm the big brother now, which is a demotion for the family and we all know it. But I'll do it the way he showed me: show up first, call on Sundays, carry what the others can't, and let the little ones stand in the frame. Goodbye, Marcus. Eight o'clock Sunday is yours forever. I'll pick up.