Here is the eulogy I delivered for my brother at his memorial on December 27 at Lakewood Chapel in south Minneapolis. I wish it had been better. I couldn't get at how much it hurt and still hurts. I've spent a lifetime writing but I don't have the words. 

In the summer of 1973, our family was out on the east coast for two months—an eternity when you’re a kid—and for much of it we stayed at our grandmother’s house on Cedarhurst Road in Finksburg, Maryland. Yes, it was like it sounds. She lived on a long, long block without sidewalks, and without many people, and definitely no kids. So what did Chris and I do? We set up a Kool-Aid stand. We didn’t understand why nobody came. We weren’t exactly Business 101.

One day Grammie sent us on an errand to the corner grocer. On the way back we were goofing around, swinging the loaf of bread like it was a baseball bat. And in the middle of one swing, the bottom of the cellophane bag ripped open and bread … went … everywhere. We tried to gather up the slices, but they were dirty now, and the bag was torn, and we couldn’t make it right again. I was usually someone who didn’t get into trouble so this was new territory for me, and I began to cry. Chris always got into trouble, he was used to it, so he knew what to do: lie. Remember what awful businessmen we were? Well, we were worse liars. Our lie was: We were walking, and suddenly the bag burst open. Yeah, nobody bought it. A few weeks later, after visiting friends and relatives in other states, we returned to Grammie’s. It was raining—a huge summer downpour. And as we turned onto Cedarhurst Road in Finksburg, Maryland, Chris, with a thick-as-thieves gleam in his eye, whispered to me: “Look out for soggy bread.” 

I’ve read somewhere that the measure of a good sense of humor is the distance between the setup and the punchline. If so, this was world-class. He was 12.

That’s a shared experience, a shared memory, I had w/Chris. Last month, it became singular. I’m sure there are a lot of shared memories in this room that became singular that night.

He was athletic and I was not. He could do handstands and cartwheels. We went to a day camp, and there was archery, and I couldn’t hit the target while Chris won ribbons. I think our parents signed me up for wrestling because he had done so well with it. I lasted one match, about 10 seconds, in second grade. Chris wrestled through high school.

Then there was Evel Knievel. We went to see the biopic starring George Hamilton at the Boulevard, and afterwards Chris was inspired. At first it was enough to catch air on his sting-ray bicycle. Then he jumped over stuffed animals. Soon he got the kids in the neighborhood to lie down on the other side of the ramp and he would jump over them. Until the first parent looked out the window and saw what he was doing. 

He was better at confrontation. He fought bullies for me. At the same time, he seemed to be holding onto parts of his childhood. He wanted the crust cut off the bread until he was …8? He carried around a blanket. It had once been a big blue blanket, but by the time I knew it, it was just this gray rag. All the adults tried to get him to give it up, probably in ways that were not helpful, but he held onto it. He had trouble throwing things away.

By high school we were drifting apart. I was becoming more of an introvert, he an extrovert. He’d always liked performing: Children’s Theater, “The Crucible” at the Guthrie, Shaun Cassidy at Millwheels. He wanted to be a rock star, and sang along to The Who, and Sabbath, and Zeppelin, on our father’s stereo. He got so good at Shaun Cassidy that when we visited our sister and mother—living in Timonium, Maryland, after the divorce—one of Karen’s friends got Chris on the radio where he pretended to be Shaun Cassidy. They got so many calls from teenage girls in Timonium they had to get him back on the line to admit the lie: No, not Shaun; Chris from Minneapolis.

In high school he became a cheerleader. I remember going to a Friday night football game at Parade Stadium—some big rivalry with Washburn. Whoever won the game got to keep this bell for the next year. Washburn won the previous year but they were losing this game. At one point everyone’s attention was fixated on one end of the field, where the action was, and nobody saw students from the other side creep across until they were dragging the bell, clanging, across to their side of the field in celebratory fashion. Woo, we got your bell! Everyone looked, stunned. Everybody but Chris. He tore after them. He reached them midfield and leaped into the pile, fists flying. Seriously, it was cinematic. It was action-hero stuff. He halted their progress. And other Washburn people joined him, and they got the bell back, and they dragged it up and down our sidelines, bell clanging, celebrating. 

And there was me in the stands—swelling with pride, and confused by it.

And then he got kicked off the cheerleading squad for smoking pot. Then he was drinking and getting drunk. He was throwing parties, and passing out in the basement, and I’d have to drive his friends home. “What a jerk” became “Screw you” became “What’s going on with you? Are you OK?” That took 20 years. For most of it, I was not … there. I went to an Alanon meeting in the early 2000s, and most participants were the opposite of me: women trying to distance themselves from the alcoholic loved one. That wasn’t my issue. I’d always been good at distance. I was 2,000 miles away and probably further in my heart, but now I wanted to help.

But then a familiar cycle: proffered hand, betrayal; proffered hand, betrayal. I patted him on the back once during this period and he felt so …. Insubstantial. Like straw. Eventually, as a family, we decided no more proffered hands.

Chris’ recovery, beginning August 19, 2013, wasn’t exactly smooth. It’s not like he stopped drinking and life became amazing. Life, as it’s very good at doing, kept tossing stumbling blocks in his way. It gave him every excuse to go back to drinking.

He moved in with our mother—who still drank. Then she had a stroke and lost her voice. We lost her in 2019. Chris lost all of his teeth, a result of the alcoholism, and the dentures never fit right. He had trouble finding work. He had trouble getting credit. He was trying to begin grownup life at 52 rather than 22. It’s hard enough at 22. Try it in your 50s with no credit and no teeth.

We had a worldwide pandemic that isolated us all, and many, including me, used this as an excuse to drink. Not Chris. He quit smoking, he found work, he found better work. He became very methodical. I think he liked staying within the confines of his routines: going to AA every Saturday morning, then taking the bus to visit our mother at the nursing home; calling my father every Sunday at 11 AM. He was playing guitar, lifting weights, taking trips.

One of the things he hated about his alcoholic life was the impotence of not being able to pay for things. So sober Chris was always paying for things. No, I’ll pay for me. No, I’ll pay for Dad’s tickets to the Twins game. He hated not having money for Christmas gifts, so he wound up giving some of the most thoughtful gifts.

He still held onto things. There’s a bit of a hoarder mentality in our family. A common refrain from me during the last 10 years was “You still got that?” He had this blue felt Peanuts banner from the early 1970s: Snoopy on his doghouse, and the words: THE SECRET OF LIFE IS TO REDUCE YOUR WORRIES TO A MINIMUM. It was a bit ragged along the edges but for blue felt it was in pretty good shape. I thought of him, and those words, this past week when our family was going through our various COVID crises. When I got depressed about how we were screwing up Chris’s memorial, or COVID was, I’d think of Chris’ reaction. A shrug. A joke. He has a Maya Angelou quote taped to his refrigerator: “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” He lived that. Lose your teeth? Call your dentures “chompers.” Your mother is in a nursing home unable to speak? Visit her every Saturday and make her laugh. Bring the tuna fish sandwiches she misses and that you can eat without teeth. Take two buses to work, greet people enthusiastically. He was small but entered rooms big.

For some reason, October became the month he came out to see me in Seattle. In 2019 I took him to the local sites. We went on a hike up Tiger Mountain. This October we expanded it: The ferry over to Port Townsend. Paradise trail on Mount Rainier. It was early October and he was already buying Christmas presents.

When I hugged him goodbye at SeaTac Airport, just 2 ½ months ago, his back was firm and strong again, and we talked about the next steps on our journey. San Juan Islands? Oregon Coast? Taiwan maybe? I’d lived there for several years and he’d never been to Asia. I liked the idea of it. If I’m honest, even into his sober stage, there was an element of indulgence in us. Who’s going to pick up Chris, who’s going to drive Chris? Where’s Chris going to spend Christmas Eve? Eventually it was like, “No, I’ll go get him. No, I’ll ride with him.” He’d become one of my favorite people. Every day, he was overcoming something bigger than anything I’d ever overcome in my life, and he was doing it with a joke and a smile. I swelled with pride and this time I wasn’t confused by it.

One more story. My wife says she could always tell when it was Chris I was talking to because of the timbre of my laughter. It was the soggy bread line. It was the trip down to Albert Lea the summer before last. This was for another memorial—Eric’s mom, Reggie—and on the way we saw a billboard for a casino: a pair of dice and in big letters the words: LIVE CRAPS. I nodded toward it and said, “That could really be misinterpretted.” Chris started riffing off that, imagining a guy who’s disappointed when he finds out it’s just gambling. He kept riffing off it, and I kept laughing. I laughed so much my stomach began to hurt and I worried I wouldn’t be right for the memorial. When I tried to relay the story to the rest of the family that night, I couldn’t even get the words out I was laughing so hard.

My shared memories with Chris are singular now, but it was nice sharing them with all of you. If anyone here has memories of Chris they’d like to share, please. Stand, sit, come to the podium, whatever you’re comfortable with. We would love to hear them.