It’s hard to believe, looking at the old movie footage rolling past, that my brother was ever not fit and trim. Even in the footage his outward appearance belies an inner ugliness fraught with turmoil and recklessness. After what had happened to him in Louisiana, no one would deny he was broken. Yet those who knew him before “the accident” know he was broken from the very beginning, and that troubles me because, as close as I was all through the years, I didn’t see it until recently.
I know now that the mowing, the energy exerted on an almost daily basis, was his way of distracting himself from the reality of having to be cared for. He wanted to show the world that he was strong and useful and able to take care of himself. But then he’d go off and find Khalid, his friend who sold him hashish, pills, and whatever else. It was fun, Roger claimed. He wasn’t laughing the night he stopped breathing. I woke up to the flashing lights outside and voices in the hall saying, “not responding.”
Roger came back to life some hours later at the hospital. Not on his own, of course, as he was already gone…again. Some quirk of fate, all the medical knowledge in the world, or divine intervention? Whatever it was, instead of leaving him humbled and feeling lucky to be alive, it simply reinforced his feeling of lucky, an attitude he’s had since the beginning.
