A Private Sadness

My dilemma is around privacy ... do I want it and if so, how much? Do I not want it that much and willing to be more public?

Today I'll go past what I might ordinarily do in that regard and speak more personally than I usually do. I hope you're okay with this.

My brother died yesterday at 66 while in hospice. Alcohol was his guiding force and not a very beneficial guide as you can imagine. It killed him.

He never ... never ... ever ... stood up and took charge of his own life. Only once in the past 40 years did I hear him sober and I didn't recognize him when he called. He squandered a profession that saw him at the top of his game. You see, he was the exterior designer of the original HP 35 calculator ... the first one. The insides were designed but not the external package, keys and displays. This was a genius design and one that sent him to the top of Hewlett Packard Advanced Design. But he never made that work.

I had a 35 and still use an HP 12-C every day. Brilliant designer, he was.

Well, he once admitted that he drank from the time he was 13 ... but in those days who talked about such things, even if we had known? That was the beginning of "not listening."

I stopped listening to my brother a long, long time ago. The very skill I use every day was useless to me. I am not proud of myself here. I make no excuses for this but I truly never understood why he never sought an end to his prison. Many times he would call to tell me he was going into rehab but he never stayed a day in any. If alcoholism is an illness then he surely had it and was disabled by it at an early age.

There are times in life when one does not or cannot listen to another person. It gives me no pleasure or solace to say that frankly I had no influence on my brother and so it seems I lost all interest in truly listening to him. What a sad commentary on how I gave up caring. May he rest in peace.