The Brother

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2005. Some years can’t end too soon. If I could have seen in advance where 2004 would lead, I wouldn’t have wanted to go there.

A year before, the contract for my next book, Run Right Now, had just come together. Writing any book is an endurance test, and this one, at 300-plus pages, would be my biggest solo effort. From planning through publication it would take the full year.

I thought this work would be the toughest part of 2004. Instead it became a welcome everyday escape from the much tougher realities of life.

A week before last Christmas a new editor at Runner’s World, a man I’d never met and never before talked to by phone, called to say that my job of 33 years was ending. I thought this forced retirement, with publication of my last piece there in early 2004, would be the worst news that could come all year. It would become a footnote to the events that followed.

In February my wife Barbara was diagnosed with breast cancer. Subduing this invader would require a three-barreled medical assault – chemo, surgery and radiation – lasting much of the year.

In April my mother Virginia passed on. She was almost 87 and no longer her real self because of Alzheimer’s. But no matter the age or infirmity, we’re never ready for a parent to leave us.

This is not a woe-is-me tale. It’s a reminder that life itself can sometimes be an endurance test, for all of us.

We lose jobs, lose health, lose loved ones, though we hope not all of these happen in the same year. We get through these trials as best we can, hoping that the next year will be happier.

Bad years can lead to better ones. Apparent ends often mark new beginnings. This would happen for me in the first week of 2005, but not before I suffered the most shocking loss of all in the last days of 2004.

You never know which visit with a close relative will be the last. Mine with my brother Mike came at the 2004 Des Moines Marathon.

Seldom had I seen him happier and more relaxed. My last live image shows him laughing.

Two months later our brother-in-law Elliott Evans called. “I have awful news,” he said. “It’s about your brother Mike.”

Mike and I didn’t look or exercise alike, eat or sleep alike. He was two years older, but in middle age he looked a decade my senior, not because I’m youthful but because he aged faster. He outweighed me by almost 100 pounds, not because I’m thin but because his food intake far outran his activity.

Yet Mike and I were more alike than anyone would have guessed at first glance. Most of all we shared a lifelong devotion to sports – one sport for me, all of them for him.

He worked two jobs at once – one for pay as information director for an Iowa high school athletic association, the other voluntary for anyone who wanted his statistical services for sports in his home state. His greatest athletic love was the Drake Relays, which he served for 40 years.

Mike wasn’t programmed to live a long time, and didn’t. He gave himself so fully to – what was it? not a job or a career, but a calling and a passion – that his work habits might have cut his life short. While recording the triumphs of healthy youngsters, he neglected his own health.

He smoked for 30 years before a health crisis scared that habit out of him in the mid-1990s. This brother who had never shown any self-discipline in physical matters went from burning through several packs a day to never lighting up again. I was never prouder of him.

Never, that is, until the day-to-day care for our mother in her last years fell to him. No one was ever less prepared for that duty than Mike, yet he carried through to her end.

The smoking had left his lungs damaged. In the end they failed him.

Later. Now the family’s oldest, I wrote a eulogy and spoke at the funeral. There I repeated words from brother-in-law Elliott: “Mike packed 126 years of living into his 63 by sleeping so little and doing two or three things at once.”

I spoke mainly about a part of Mike that few knew. Despite never marrying or fathering children, despite working nights and sleeping days (or not at all), he was far from alone and lonely.

His service came on the worst day of an Iowa winter. An ice storm had closed many of the state’s roads. Yet 300 of his family and friends still turned out to honor him.

They came to the Drake University basketball arena, which the school freely made available. A lone chair, his chair, sat at the scorer’s table (and would remain there, empty, all season).

“Mike had a big family that he got together with regularly and happily,” I said. “Mike’s family members who are here today, please stand up so the others can see who you are. It’s okay to clap for them, because what would have an event been in his world without applause?”

Two dozen of us stood. Another dozen would have been there if weather had allowed.

“Mike, in his own sometimes odd ways, touched thousands of lives,” I added. “All of you here knew who he was and appreciated what he did for you. Thanks from all of us to all of you for coming, and thanks, Mike, for bringing us all together today.”

This brought something you don’t often see or hear at funerals: a standing ovation.

(Photo: One of the last photos of Mike with me and our sisters Anne and Emily.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]