Out of the depths...

It has been almost five months now since my brother, Paul, died.

In our adult life our journeys were often seperate. The life of a minister took me around the country. When Paul moved he literally bought the house across the street. He lived in the suburbs. I chose the city. He navigated corporate waters and I always sailed close to the Church. We each had our friends and the path ahead and behind.

Its popular these days to think of family as whatever you want to make it, a thing to be molded in the shape of your current needs. But the void inside reminds me it is something more. There is something about family that transcends need, and chance, and personal convenience, and legal convention. That something can be stretched, twisted, separated by time and distance, and flower in a thousand ways and yet it still somehow binds.

People who hate thier families still give witness to the bond. Siblings distant from each other by the miles still sense the presence. We may be as different as night at day and yet there is something that says we still belong together. And when the link is temporarily broken by death the absence is felt not so much in the disappearance of the other but of something of ourself.

There is a picture of the three of us brothers, in better days when cares of health and life were far away from our thoughts, on my office wall. No matter where life takes us and who is standing at the end this is the way it will always be.

We're family.