My Brother's Keeper

Janice and I went to see the movie, My Sister's Keeper, as part of our 15th anniversary date night. In the film, based on a Jodi Picout novel by the same name, a young girl sues her parents to earn medical emancipation in order to prevent them from further using her to help their leukemia-stricken daughter (her sister) stay alive. Just trying to understand the previous sentence may give you an idea of the complexity of the moral dilemma the film/novel addresses.
The film left me wondering about a number of things, among them my brother, Tom, who died of cancer in 2001. Tom was just 13 months older than me.
As kids we played and fought with exuberance. I had a shorter fuse than Tom (not necessarily an attribute), but he could easily overpower me with his superior size and strength, when he chose to do so. I was lucky (and in hindsight, grateful) that he exhibited amazing restraint, even during our most heated battles. Well, if you ask a few of our neighborhood friends about a particular time when they witnessed me being slammed mightily against a wall by my gentle giant of a brother, then you would know that Tom wasn't always capable of restraint.
Our duels often started with a blow or a flurry of punches thrown by me, followed by me hightailing it out of his reach, our house, the yard and sometimes our neighborhood. I was the fast one, you see, the hare. Tom was the tortoise, the slower one, but the one with endurance. Most of us remember how the story of the tortoise and the hare turned out. Sort of a strange comparison to make when I consider that I am the brother who is still here, alive, yet Tom has left this race.
Anyway, our battles often ended the same way, with me being subdued and held by Tom until he was sure I surrendered the fight.
In later years, our love for one another became more evident and calmed the adversarial nature of our personalities and brotherhood. I once heard a joke about a Norwegian husband (Norwegians are known for their understated demeanors) who calmly stated that he loved his wife so much that he almost told her once. I see a lot of Tom in that statement. He loved me, and his whole family, with a quiet ferocity.
Getting back to the movie and its connection to my brother, when Tom first died, I couldn't get him out of my mind and emotions if I tried. He was everywhere, often uninvited, a bittersweet presence. Now, it has been 8 years since he died, and in that time I have created both an evening length dance and a short film about him, published a website to honor his relationships with others, and I highlight his birthday on the family calendar I make each year. In other words, I have made several attempts to commemorate him, grieve, process his loss, and I guess just keep his memory alive. I realized, after viewing the movie, that I feel the intensity of his loss less deeply than I used to. And that sometimes I feel sad about that as well.