An hour ago, I was lying in bed, and for some reason I thought about the most memorable hug I’ve ever received.

It was in December 1989, and we’d just celebrated an early Christmas because my brother had to be in Minneapolis Dec. 22 to start receiving radiation therapy in preparation for a bone-marrow transplant, using my bone marrow.

He and his wife were leaving my parents’ house, and near the door, Roger gave me a really big hug, one that spoke volumes about all the things that were felt but went unsaid in an atmosphere where we mostly tried to be pleasant and upbeat and optimistic in the face of a emotionally charged situation.

A month later, the possibility I’d mostly denied became a reality. The transplant had been a success, but he’d developed a CMV infection that led to kidney and liver failure. When I last saw him alive that January, he had gained 30 pounds of excess fluid because his kidneys were shutting down, he was in pain despite the morphine, and he was breathing through an oxygen mask, but we still were able to talk to him and he could respond to us. The last word I heard him speak was "tomorrow," after my mom said "We’ll see you tomorrow."

We did, but not alive. We got a call early that morning to come to the hospital (we were staying in a motel nearby) and we knew by the tone of the call that he was either dead or nearly so, and we found out when we arrived that he had died in his sleep. He’d expressed wishes not to be artificially resuscitated.

My parents went in to see him one last time, and then it was my turn. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in there, but I’ve always been glad I did. He was still warm to the touch, but I was able to see him and let it sink in that he was dead, and I got to say a private goodbye and to touch him, kiss him, one last time. It was sad, of course, but there was good in that experience; there was a touch of closure.

In thinking later about his brief bout with leukemia (he’d been diagnosed late that summer), I wished that I’d been less avoidant about the possibility of death. I wished that I had talked with him about it, learned what he felt about it, what his hopes and desires were, what his fears were. But my focus was always on him getting well; my focus was always positive, to a degree of denial.

I did write him letters that had depth to them, but when I was with him in person, I always tried to be upbeat and positive, to try to help him feel good. I’m sure he liked those visits, but I’m also fairly certain that if I’d encouraged him to talk more seriously, he would have. I know he had serious talks with his wife and with some close friends, but we’d never had an expressive brother-sister relationship and I think we both found it awkward to talk about deep stuff, so we stayed as far as we could from it.

If I’d been more accepting of the possibility that he would die, maybe I would have made the effort to talk more, and maybe he would have responded. I think he would have.

But at least I had the opportunity, and while I didn’t take advantage of it as much as I, in retrospect, would have liked to, I think I was able to express to him some of what I wanted to, and I think some of what I didn’t say still got across to him.

Last night, I saw his high school graduation picture just before I went to sleep, and thoughts of him probably seeped through my subconscious as I slept and dreamed, and I awoke with him on my mind.

That, and the thoughts of the accident I saw Friday afternoon near Mentor, in which two vehicles crashed head-on on Highway 2 East. An 86-year-old man, going the wrong way down the highway, and a 22-year-old man in the other vehicle both died.

By the time I drove past, the bodies and one of the vehicles were gone, and police were cleaning up debris. As I saw the remaining vehicle, it struck me right away that I was looking at a vehicle that had to have held a dead person, because the car was crushed so completely that I didn’t see how someone could have survived.

Sometimes a sight like that really makes a fatality hit home; it becomes more than just an accident report and a couple of obituaries. I read the young man’s obituary not long ago, and felt a chill as I realized that he had been married for just six days. How does someone prepare for a loss like that? I don’t think you do. I think you just deal, as best you can, in whatever ways work.

And hopefully, you remember, and you keep the memory of that person alive in various ways. Memories do fade and change over time, but they don’t disappear. For about a year after my brother died, I could summon up that hug – in a hard-to-explain but sort of physical way – whenever I wanted to. I could remember how it felt. That summer I wore his ski vest as a life jacket in the boat, and it felt like that hug.

I have a couple of his embroidered work jackets that I wore on and off for a number of years (he died nearly 11 years ago), and I’ve made an effort to talk about him, not so much about the tragedy of his last months, but about the person he was – the fun-loving, irreverent daredevil with the mop of curly red hair, shock of freckles and twinkly blue eyes. He was no saint, but he liked people and was good to people.

I miss him still. While we never had an emotionally close relationship, we were close enough in age (he was two years younger; my other brothers are seven and 10 years younger) that we shared at least a small bond of common experiences that gave us a certain unspoken closeness that’s hard to describe. We had different lives and different outlooks, but there was a connection between us.

When my brothers and I were being tested to see if we were compatible bone-marrow donors, I had this feeling that it should be me. Partly because I wanted it to be, because I wanted to do something for him, but also partly because of this probably silly insistence inside me that we should match because we both had red hair and freckles.

I doubt that had anything to do with the fact that I was the only match, but it illustrates a piece of the bond. Everyone always knew we were brother and sister, not so much because of our features, but because of the red hair and freckles. I still find that to be an endearing memory.