Brother’s Keeper

I’m the firstborn in my family. In this sweet photo, taken at our grandparents’ farm, I’m with my little brother, Robbie. Our grandmother, whom we called Mummu, did the milking—you can see the milk can she’d left to drain, leaning against the house. Our mother liked to tell a story. Robbie didn’t begin to talk as early as most children do. He’d make grunting sounds, in the rhythms and tone of a request. Mom would say, “What do you need, Robbie?” and I would jump in, translating. “He wants a cookie.” Or “He needs a drink of water.” Robbie didn’t have to talk, and he didn’t need to “do.” I saw myself as my brother’s keeper, and I would jump in and help. I had what seems to me, even now, a natural impulse to care for him. The older I’ve gotten, the more complicated that idea has become. Rob and I developed very different adult perspectives and beliefs, leaving me to wonder if I’m still my brother’s keeper.

But let’s step away from my personal story for a moment.

This idea of being your brother’s keeper is at the heart of the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis. You don’t have to be Christian to find wisdom and even history in the pages of the Bible. Scholars see in the Cain and Abel story a reflection of societal struggle, a division between a settled life and nomadic: between tillers of the soil and people who roamed with flocks. (Sort of like the archetypal stories of the American West—cattlemen vs. sheepmen, farmers vs. both.)

Cain and Abel were sons of Adam and Eve. Cain was, according to the King James Bible, “a tiller of the ground.” Abel was “a keeper of sheep.” In brief, the brothers make sacrifices to God from the products of their labors, and God accepts Abel’s offering of sheep but rejects Cain’s offering from his fields. Brotherly jealousy arises, and Cain murders Abel. God comes around, asking Cain where his brother Abel is. Cain says, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” God promptly banishes Cain to wander the earth, leaving the hearer of the story to conclude that the answer is “yes.”

This story I’m telling is not another “Cain and Abel” story.

Rob and I both grew up to be attracted to the arts. He became a trained ballroom dance instructor and in his prime was beautiful to see on a dance floor. My practice of art involves language, ideas ordered on a page. Writing too is a dance, words moving together and against one another, creating their own music. In the stories I have told, I’ve looked to capture truth about what it is to be human.

There’s one sad truth that is hard to miss, being alive in 2025. We humans are not good at love. We seem born to it (look again at the picture of Robbie and me) but eventually ego and self-interest overrule the heart, and then we’re undercutting one another. We argue; we reject. Whether at our kitchen tables, in our neighborhoods, or in matters of discussion at global seats of government, we fail or choose not to see the legitimate concerns behind another’s point of view.

Even siblings have differences, of course. Rob went into the Army after high school. I went straight to college, became a 1970s “flower child.” He’s single, I’m married. I belong to a church community—he would likely call himself agnostic. Politically, Rob leans to the right—I lean to the left. That one fact, of course, could destroy the closeness that the two little ones in the picture have. But Rob and I practice a deliberate care for each other. We stay to the middle, out of love, recognizing the differences we have but putting our relationship, and the solidarity of our family, ahead of them. The family web is even more important, since our parents have died.

The last years have been hard. Rob has had medical challenges, complex and serious ones. Two years ago, he ended up in the ICU on life support. Why he was in that bed isn’t important—it’s that he was in it. I was there for him, alone at first, because our family is geographically spread out, later joined by a sister. The days alone were long and filled with a mix of dread and clarity. What matters becomes clear when life is at stake: people over politics, love over division.

I rely on writing to keep me sane. I’ve processed every difficulty I’ve encountered in life by writing about it—finding my way back to balance. But what happened in that ICU was different. I wanted to write what I’d felt, but how could I? And how could I share it? When Rob was released, finally, from the hospital, I told him I didn’t feel free to write and share what we’d gone through—that it was his story. He smiled, the gentle smile he inherited from our father. “It’s your story too,” he said.

It is my story. What follows, in poetic form, is my experience with Rob in the ICU—what I saw and heard, what I felt and thought. 

***

Churchgoing with the Neighbors

The green electronic line humps
and worries its way across the lighted screen.
Numbers flash, my brother’s numbers,
a shimmering, quixotic numeral here, then there
on the little screen, in the little box, a medical
rainbow of numerals, mysterious—and the water
of life drips and drips into his arm, a staccato beat.
Tubes are twisted together, corded snakes
disappearing down my brother’s throat.

The green line, and the red, how they gather
and hump, and how I worry, Jesus—
are You here? Do You see me, human
and helpless on this little couch beneath
the stark and staring hospital window?

My face is drawn, a shade of green,
no doubt—a sister’s fear and hope twined
together like these tubes of life, tubes
from hell, haloed around and into my brother,
delivering air, cleaning his airway out.
Tubes bound together with a twisty,
not much different from those I use,
unthinking, to close bags of bread.

My brother is ill. Five days now—
tubes, and pumps, the saline drip. A silence
hangs over him, fills the space
between us. This I know.
I am my brother’s keeper. Not mother,
not wife—but conscripted, a lifetime of history.

This busy silence in the room—nurses
padding in and out—is not unlike the expectant
minutes before church. What does my brother see,
there behind the veil of drugs that burn
from his memory all these things I see and hear,
the red lines and the green, the chirping bells
when a number rises, or a number falls.
Does he sleep? Does he think?
Is he thinking now, like me, of the time we
went to church with the neighbors?

Theirs was a faith that preached
no meat, no milk, no cheese—not even
the shiny smelt our father netted
one spring and our Lutheran mother carried
over in a coffee can, worried for
their rice paper children, who appeared
each day among our playmates.

For the sake of Bibles
that would be given away, pretty books
in cases of sweet-smelling cedar,
she agreed to our attending their church
with them. For several evenings in a row,
a traveling preacher shared a Scripture story,
drew the scene in sensuous chalk:
one night, a crook-holding shepherd,
then a bare-hilled panorama of the Holy Land,
on the last night the quiet of a garden.

When each picture was complete,
the artist brushed the chalk from his hands,
the sanctuary lights went down,
and bright light came up behind the easel.
Something hidden was revealed:
A lamb in the Shepherd’s arms, two at His knees.
Throngs scattered across the hillside, listening
to the Teacher at the crest. On the last night,
Jesus, heavy with sorrow and praying
in Gethsemane. The pale colors bloomed
ethereal, and more real for it.

Does my brother remember—tethered,
as he is, to these moving lines of red
and green, this brother who in his waking life
won’t pass beneath the lintel of a church?
Day seven now, and still the tube breathes for him.
Still he does not stir or speak.
Does he hear me, talking in his stead to Jesus,
asking sweet Jesus to stand beside me
at his bed—pleading for myself,
as much as for him.

Because this too I know:
The last night, churchgoing with the neighbors,
the traveling preacher asked that all come forward
if they loved Jesus.
How he wanted to go, my bright eyed
brother, face aglow beneath his crew-cut, half-rising
from the pew. But I, older,
and in the know about doctrine and differences,
held him back, broke the spell—broke it all
too well. Mea culpa.                              

So I pray. And the green line humps and worries its
way across the hospital screen. Numbers
flash, my brother’s numbers, a now hopeful lighted
numeral here, then there, that rainbow
of numerals, mysterious—
and the water of Life drips, and drips
into his arm.

***

Many have been in this situation, keeping watch when keeping watch is all you can do. Such moments seem to be crossroads, looking simultaneously forward and back. I prayed—I thought—I remembered. What I was feeling as I sat there helpless and fearful became wrapped around that childhood memory of churchgoing with our neighbors—remembering how I’d pulled Rob back into the pew. Did I deny him, in having done that, spiritual comfort in these hours?

When I told Rob that I was working on this piece, he said it needs to include his experience of those days. He remembers little, because the meds given when someone has tubes down their throat wipe out memory. But he remembers two things clearly: First, he felt our grandmother there, who’d passed away more than forty years ago. Mummu was at times in the room with him. Second, he experienced something he says was not a dream, but an out-of-body experience.

He found himself walking along in the evening hours. It was dark, and he was in formal attire, as if going to a dance. He moved with a group of similarly dressed people toward the entrance of a building. The entryway was surrounded by large windows or walls of glass. The entry seemed to him a portal. Once he had moved inside, he was greeted by a very elderly man wearing a tux. They talked, moving toward a staircase, at the bottom of which the man introduced his equally elderly lady friend. Rob describes her as bright, or light. She was wearing a long, white gown.

They proceeded up the stairs, first straight, then curving to the left. At the top they moved into a room in which Rob could see a glass display case across the way. He took a step toward it, curious to see what it contained, but the elderly gentleman stepped in between and stopped him. Rob then noticed a long hallway, at the end of which were double doors. There was a gate at the near end of the hallway, a place of checking in. Rob tried to move toward it, but the woman of light intervened. “No,” she said. “You can’t go. You have to go back.” Suddenly, he was back in his hospital bed.

Rob wants people to know what he saw, what he felt. It was spiritual—he describes it in a tone of wonder. He and I were on different sides of a veil in that hospital room, and what was happening with him was as active as what was happening with me. It raises a question, of course: was what happened to him real, or drug-induced? If real, it comforts me to think that, even on that other side, there were people keeping watch. If his beautiful, surreal experience of being guided by that elderly couple was induced by medication, I’m still comforted. It adds weight to my thought that the human impulse to help may be built into us. When the mind is altered, the essence of what we are comes out. It gives me hope that most will come together, finally, for everyone’s good.

I’ve wanted to write in narrative form about those terrible hours, waiting in that ICU, ever since I lived them. But when I started to tell this story, I struggled to find understanding. It was only when Rob gave his blessing to my effort, only when he’d gifted me with permission to tell his side, that a sort of peace descended, and I could see that we’d been on opposite sides of a transformative event. As miserable as those hours were (I’d leave the hospital, get into my car, and before I’d closed the car door, be weeping) as awful as they were, what I was seeing and feeling was only what I was seeing and feeling. Rob unquestionably had the harder part, but he came out of it telling a story of mystery and hope, however hard this life might continue to be.

I wondered at the beginning of this piece if I’m still my brother’s keeper. Of course. But my brother is everyone, not limited by gender or borders or whether or not we share every belief and sentiment. If I learned anything from those eight hard days when Rob was surrounded by a halo of lights and tubes, it’s that our personal perspective is only that. Our perspective. We need other eyes, other hearts alongside us.

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