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I am the youngest of ten children and for a good deal of my life I knew four brothers and four sisters, one sister died in infancy long before I was born. Now the time draws near when I shall have no living brothers at all.

There is a fairly decent number of years that separate my youngest brother from myself and as such my childhood is not one where I spent hours with them in roughhousing, or anything approximating sports. Perhaps that is why sports of any kind never really appealed to me. They were, for the most part, already teenagers when I was still very much a child. I am told that two of them used to, when I was something like 4 or 5, take me along so my then exuberant personality could be used to break the ice with girls that they wanted to meet. This I have no memory of; what I do have memory of is drive-in horror movies.

They would want to go to the drive-in and were forced to take me along while promising to see something that was suitable for a young child, a promise that they apparently broke quite often, hence one of my earliest memories is of a Hammer Frankenstein movie in all its glorious color. I don’t recall ever having nightmares about the movies and they did kindle a life-long love of the genre.

It was the summer of 1980 when my first brother died, a victim of being the wrong place at the wrong time and shot to death because someone wanted to kill another person at that poolside table.

The next, after conquering his own alcohol-fueled demons, died from cancer. Another, who never found a way to overcome his substance issues, died from a body that eventually could no longer suffer that treatment.

This week I learned my oldest brother is being released from the hospital into hospice. The end may come in days, weeks, or I am told even possibly months as his aged physique surrenders to the accumulated damage of the years.

I fancy myself a writer, but I have no words that accurately convey the turbulent emotions of this time, yet I am not the first nor the last to suffer them. This is life as much as the happy times and all of it is to be known.