A blood brother Lucky to have him as a friend

Guest writer

When I was a child, the last thing I looked at in my daily newspaper was the obituaries section. As I’ve aged, now it’s more often the first. Life doesn’t really prepare you for death. It’s kind of like the lessons you never learned in high school and had to learn on the fly like managing finances or getting married. But death is never far from us.

I’m a bit melancholy these days because death reached out and grabbed one of my closest friends recently. He was only 67 years and 5 months of age and did not make it to the predicted life span of 73.7 years for a male born in 1952. Yet he lived more during his life than many people.

He and I shared a lot of things in common, even though we came from far different places. He was born in June 1952 in Cedar Rapids,

Iowa, and lived in Australia and Texas before migrating to Little Rock in the early ’80s. I was born the same month three years later in Missoula, Mont., and went from there to Mexico before ending up in Little Rock around the same time. I can’t exactly remember when or where we first met, but my memories of him from that point forward are more vivid.

We were both late bloomers in terms of getting through college. I went to UALR and finished my graduate studies in journalism in 1988. He also went to UALR and finished his undergraduate studies in 1987 in speech communication with a minor in writing.

We also shared a love of reading, writing and family—we were both married about the same time, stayed married for the duration and each had two children—him two girls and me a boy and a girl. We were also both left-handed and had the same blood type. We also had close relatives who were killed in Vietnam.

What was most amazing among our many coincidences were our fathers. His had been the only survivor of the sinking of a Dutch merchant ship by a German U-boat in the Atlantic Ocean during World War II. Mine had survived a “suicide” mission, the bombing of Japan in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. Later in our lives, we both repaid some debts to the countries that had impacted or aided our fathers.

He returned to his father’s homeland, the island of Tershelling in the Netherlands, and helped restore a vandalized monument to the sinking of a ship off the island. He also helped a local author publish his book, a history of the island’s inhabitants during the German Occupation.

I traveled to China where my father and the other members of his crew were saved by Chinese fishermen and guerrillas from almost certain capture, torture and possible death by outraged Japanese soldiers searching for them. Three years later, I returned to China to see a memorial hall open in Quzhou, a city in Zhejiang Province, that recognized the members of the Doolittle Raid, of which my father was a part, and the Chinese who helped save them, a project on which I worked with local Chinese officials.

In 2014, my friend was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Somehow, with the assistance of a crack medical team that his daughter, a nurse, helped put together, he survived surgery, radiation and chemotherapy and lived for more than five years, beating the odds, until the disease came back with a vengeance a few months ago.

This time, he was not so fortunate. His body was much weaker than during his previous bout with the disease. Within the span of what seemed like just a few weeks after his second diagnosis, he passed away peacefully at home in hospice care, surrounded by people who adored him.

Yet despite his illness and impending mortality, he remained upbeat and determined, so much so that he finished writing his second book of fiction a few days before his death. He had previously told me he had been working on the book for several years. I was extremely pleased when he gave me the first copy, a typewritten manuscript. Despite the length of the work, some 541 pages, I was determined to also be the first person to read his book and give him some feedback before he died. I managed to finish reading it in less than a week and I visited him shortly afterward. Although he was weaker than I had seen him the previous week, he was still very alert and asked me my impressions. I responded with words of affirmation and amazement at the layers and development of the characters he had weaved throughout the work. He thanked me for finishing the book and for my observations.

That was the last time I saw him alive; he passed away five days later. Since his death, I’ve been thinking a lot about how lucky I was to have had him as a friend for the past 37 years. With all the coincidences we shared, he was like a blood brother to me. And although he was three years my senior, I never felt an age difference.

A little over a week after his death, his family held a remembrance event for him at a local funeral home, which drew a multitude of people. Obviously, he had also impacted many of those folks. On a table at the back of the room sat an urn filled with his ashes and small place cards inscribed with the names of friends he had designated as his “urn unbearers.” Below the inscription for my name on one of the cards were the words “always there.”

As I’ve passed through this journey that we call life, I realize now more than ever that when you develop a deep and meaningful friendship with someone, you need to cherish that because such friendships are rare. We encounter many different people at different stages of our lives, but those we can call true friends can often be counted on the digits of one or both hands.

I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to be friends with my “blood brother” Gerrit.

—–––––❖–––––—