On right arms, storytelling and my brother, Tom

This one is for you, Aunt Rose. [My Aunt Rose is one of my seven blog fans.]

It’s been just over two weeks since I got the phone call that changed everything, the day my brother Tom died in a skiing accident on a slope in Stowe, Vermont.

Last night was the first night I’ve slept soundly since then, the first morning I didn’t awaken with “he’s gone” as my initial coherent thought. The first night I didn’t toss and turn, wrestling with something I could have said or done that may have eased the grieving of someone around me who loved him. We all have ways of coping, functional and dysfunctional.

Someone dear to both of us said it was as though his right arm had been cut off. It wasn’t until a week after Tom’s passing that I understood that, felt it. Your right arm. The one that is just there, as it should be, day in and day out. Valuable, sure, of course, but something you assume will be there, well, forever.

My brother, 13 months my senior, not quite my Irish twin but close enough, was a brown-eyed, dark-haired Carey boy, cherubic and adorable in every photo. (I was a pale-eyed, near-hairless wonder, fair-skinned, virtually disappearing in every photo. No wonder I was a whiny child.)

He was afraid of clowns, something I was unaware of well into our adulthood. This was made unintentionally funny by the fact that our mom, a burgeoning artist, had proudly displayed her oil painting of a clown in Tom’s room throughout his babydom and childhood. Even to my only mildly-disturbed-by-clowns psyche, that clown was scary.

Beyond the clown thing, Tom was fearless. He had more stitches in his face before puberty than any human I knew. And not from a single incident. No, my brother was the poster child for every childhood facial trauma that adults warned us about. Step on a 2×4 with a nail protruding from the other end? Check. Trip on a sidewalk crack with glass milk bottles? Check. Spun off one of those death-wish metal merry-go-rounds from our youth? Check. One hundred twenty-two stitches, and I think I’ve left a couple incidents out.

Middle-aged, his face was not still not done with being stitched. If you ply me with an adult beverage, I’ll happily tell you about the one involving Canada geese, a concrete bullard, and my brother’s Cro-Magnon forehead. Go ahead, twist my arm.

We went through things together that I wouldn’t wish upon children that age. The tragic loss of our mom in a car accident, the subtle and inextricable changes in our dad from the same, an onslaught of transitions in a childhood that should have felt safe and steady and consistent. Tom and I going through that together was something I never sat and contemplated. He was like my right arm. Just there, a part of it, every moment. We rarely discussed it.

Lest you think we were bonded in idyllic sibling bliss, skipping along and holding hands, um, no. I think it was our cousin Joey who made my brother realize that he could, in fact, hit me. Joey, a delightful bundle of mischief, had discovered his sister Debbie was handy as an object of brotherly energy discharge. It was as though my brother had seen the proverbial light. Game on. (Thanks, Joey.) Never fear, I got my licks in as well. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that not all siblings actually pummeled on one another. Who knew?

When it came to his peers, Tom was not the sort of kid to start a fight, but he was definitely not backing away from one either. Given that he was smaller than most of his classmates, he learned to be scrappy. He also made friends with the biggest guys in his class. I credit Bobby Hay for his survival to adulthood. My school days were punctuated by the sorts of pre-social media word-of-mouth tweets from back in the day, also known as gossip in the hallways – “Hey, I heard your brother is fighting Richie Landers in the courtyard after school today.” He won some, he lost some. He backed down from none.

While our family was not the boating or skiing type, Tom learned these passions from the families of his friends. While I poured every bit of my energy into a singular passion – horses – Tom spread his athleticism into multiple pursuits over the years – football, baseball, water skiing, skiing, diving, swimming, cross-country/track, then lacrosse, and of course, like a good Polish young man, bowling.

Fearless on stage (like everywhere else) and also able to carry a tune, he ended up in musicals and school plays. Mostly talked into it and because it was a good way to spend time with girls, I suspect. He sang loudly and with abandon, and to my annoyance, often on ‘repeat.’ Not just songs from Oliver, or other musicals. My middle-school and teen years were a worn-in-the record-groove playlist of Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Robert Plant, the Rolling Stones and Queen.

When he met Jackie in high school, we were all aware that she was out of his league. When we call Jackie a “saint” it is not a compliment handed out lightly. On the day of their wedding, bridesmaid though I was, I did suggest that it was not too late to change her mind. She went through with it.

I realize now what a catch he was.

Two years at SUNY Morrisville, three years at RIT, a degree as a Manufacturing Engineer. He did that for a while, but Tom found that he was really more into UN-manufacturing. Demolition and remediation and such. Working for other firms, then for himself, then for other companies again, Tom was in his element in managing a project.

My Dad and I were both in the safety field, and my brother was in in a field more known for creative methodology. Anyone in construction knows that these demolition guys are a breed apart. This made for engaging holiday discussion about OSHA regulations and the practicalities of safety in the real world, and lead exposure and fall protection. He reinforced and echoed my belief that there’s a difference between safety and compliance. He was the sort of get-dirty, problem-solving, and watch-out-for-my-crew sort of supervisor that was my favorite to work with.

The opposite of what could be called a “carpet engineer.” [Google that.]

I’ve told and re-told the story of how he hired riggers — “Nine fingers, they’ve learned a lesson, I’ll hire them. Eight or fewer, I’ll take a pass, they’re slow to learn.” How he painstakingly adjusted the rigging on loads of demolition debris. How he’d handle torch work when the calculus just wasn’t working on a structure to come down. He hired me to do 10-Hour Construction Training for his guys because he knew I would “spare them the bullshit.” For Tom, I did a 30-Hour Construction Course, one-on-one, one or two hours at a time at my kitchen table; I learned as much from him, or more, than he did from me.

He was known to say that I was the smartest person in the room. A compliment or a dig? Both, I suspect. I was a voracious reader and anything that involved words, like spelling, came easily to me. This was a source of annoyance for Tom, but I suspect he forgets how mightily I struggled with calculus and physics, which came as naturally to him as breathing. We just had a different wheelhouse of smart.

He was an excellent verbal sparring partner, but a terrible story-teller. His favorite way to tell a tale was to hit you with a punch line, start in the middle, make his way back to the end of the story, and then, peppered by your confused questions, he’d finally take you back to the beginning. And like any good Irishman’s story, one should assume some facts were somewhat loosely based on reality.

Tom and Jackie’s daughters, Alexandra, Samantha and Grace, each came about two years apart.

 

I recall watching them in a toddleresque scuffle at the ages of 7, 5 and 3, then turning to my brother with gleeful doom – “Imagine what life will be like in ten years when they are TEENAGERS!”

Each of the girls so different, but they all had one thing in common. Their dad was wrapped around their collective little fingers. He’d swing for the fences as a hard ass, then be making sandwiches on demand.

He taught them to swim, be a member of a team, bike, waterski, show up for work, and coached them on their Ski Club downhill race teams. There are countless images of Tom, guiding, instructing. Not just his own three girls, but dozens of other kids. Our mom’s teaching DNA did not skip a generation.

We’d laugh and commiserate about the girls over the years. His worry was the quiet sort, internalized. Mine was full of words, of course. In the end, they’d find their way. They do. They will continue to do so.

Tom didn’t always sleep well. But he could nap anywhere.

He was an adventurer. If there was a mission, a project, a road trip, a clay bird shoot, a camping adventure, a reason to take out the boat, an opportunity for fun, Tom was all in. If it involved beer, and laughter, all the better.

He pumped water for the horses at our endurance ride, even the day after creative use of a chainsaw left him with dozens of stitches in his thigh. His daughters tied all the surveyor tape to clothespins to mark the trail (quid pro quo in exchange for takeout Chinese, and a sleepover with Rice Krispie treats.) Jackie was there to feed everyone and then, with leftover anything, to “make it all go away.” For years, my Dad and Uncle Pat, then Patrick served as in-timers.

It was a family affair.

The only person to wear his Allegany Shut Up and Ride hoodies more than me was my brother.

And he always wore an undershirt. (Yes. There’s a story behind that.)

He was the friend you’d call to bury a body.  I’d called him to do so myself. A horse, mind you, but I suspect –I know– that other bodies were not off limits had I asked.

It was that sort of loyalty, that willingness to show up, to work, to tinker on a broken thing, that made Tom such an extraordinary friend, such an exceptional brother, husband, boss, father, coach, co-worker, and human being.

 

 

Simple, really. Like your right arm. Just there, like always, dependably attached, no need to evaluate or reflect on it too much, if at all.

One of the tragedies of a life that ends so prematurely, so suddenly, is that the life becomes defined by its end. In some ways, that happened to our mother.

That will not happen on my watch when it comes to my brother. Tom lived with almost pathological gusto, with tap-dancing happy feet, working hard and playing hard. Those whose lives were touched by his have stories, and it is those stories, just like all those I shared here, with creative license encouraged, that keep his memory alive.

Stories told badly, as a nod to Tom. Go ahead, start with the punchline, then jump right into the middle.

I hope Tom’s family and friends, in all the walks of his life, will continue to tell all the Tom stories, sing the Tom songs, dance the Tom dances, quote the Tom quotes, and occasionally indulge in Tom’s favorite beer – “cold, free.”

Aunt Rose, that blog you liked from fourteen years ago, the one I wrote about grieving? It had a quote from my brother.

“You know, Patti, it’s not being related to someone that makes them family.”

Tom’s ‘family’ was left with a massive hole, and I suspect we will fill it by showing up, going on adventures, pitching in, singing and dancing and skiing and boating and laughing, and telling Tom stories.

Join me?