I still cannot, and likely will never think of my little brother as no longer alive and well. In part that is because, I know, we seldom saw one another. I left my parents' house at age 18, when my husband and I married. Relations between me and my mother in particular were always somewhat fraught to put it mildly, leading to infrequent visits.

When my youngest brother was born, the fourth child in the family, I was already thirteen years old, and in another year's time I would meet my future husband. In his infant years, since I was the oldest child, it fell to me to help my mother with the new baby. I hardly knew whether to feel more proud than put-upon. I recall accompanying my mother on foot to a doctor's office for my baby brother's first medical appointment.

Our family was a poor one, among the many who struggled to get on, in inner-city Toronto. We hadn't a carriage for my brother. My mother, after the medical appointment, had to go on elsewhere. She placed the baby in my arms with instructions to carry him home with me. I wasn't a large child but I was robust enough; even so carrying the baby through street after street, I dimly recall, was a burden.

But taking care of my brother, diapering him, feeding him, minding him, did go a far way in giving me confidence not too many years later, in my ability to more than adequately care for my own children as they entered the world, one after the other in a relatively short space of time. Married for five years by then, their arrival challenged my husband and me to their nurturance, though we found it no challenge to extend our love for one another to three small dependants.

On occasion my brother would visit with us, at age 11, 12, then we eventually saw less of him as he matured and grew into his adulthood. When he graduated from University of Toronto as a biologist he took a teaching position with Dalhousie University and left only when he reached 65 years of age, when he retired, and was given the diagnosis of inoperable stomach cancer. In the years between his graduation, his marriage and his retirement, he would visit on occasion when he was attending a conference, or passing through to another destination.

Which explains why it is that I still cannot fathom that he is dead; we saw one another too infrequently for his absence from life to strike with its finality, since we were effectively absent from one another's lives in the general scheme of the way our lives unfolded. Grief only floods in when I convince myself that his death was real.