I’m scared to begin.  If I begin, I will have to stop.  I will have to come to a conclusion, as if what I could tell you about my brother is finite.  In the days immediately following his death I wrote down words that came to me as I walked on a path I didn’t have to negotiate because it had neither turns nor corners nor hills, a path out to fields empty and bare, toward hills behind which the sun disappeared, frightening me each time as if it too might not come back.  I would return to my apartment in the growing dark, and after I opened the door, before taking off my jacket or turning on the light, I would write down the words that had come to me.  Later, I would find these words on scraps of paper around the apartment, just as I would find balled Kleenex at the bottom of my wicker wastebasket when I was able to empty it nine months later.  Kleenex worn and shredded and soft, fossils of mourning.
 

I could tell you stories, but I am not sure how to select which will best tell about my brother’s life, or what he means to me.  No quick narration will do it.  No detail.  No single episode.  The words “big brown eyes,” for example, can never say what I see when I write those words:  an eager, innocent expression; pale cheeks; a blue-and-white striped T-shirt; brown corduroys that slip past narrow boy’s hips; childsized cowboy boots; a play holster drooped around his thighs.
 

They also say this:  I have blue eyes.  My mother has blue eyes.  My father has blue eyes.  My brother was adopted, and before he knew the laws of recessive and dominant genes, knew that he looked out of brown eyes into three pairs of blue.

I could tell you that you don’t know what you can bear until you do it.  Until you get through each day, each hour, each minute – and blink, somewhat in awe, to find yourself on the other side.
 

I could tell you that there are places I go that still overwhelm me with pain.  There are moments like last night when pink and white gauze clouds stretch across the perfect blue dome of sky, behind trees shadowed in dusk, moments when the pure anguish of missing him once again becomes unbearable.
 

I’ve tried fighting these moments.  It doesn’t work.  They push everything else out of the way.  They take over.  There will be a time when they come fewer and farther between, but they will still come.
 

I could tell you that grief is not a neat, four-stage process.  It is one step forward, two steps back.  The only way out is through.  It is every cliché about it you’ve ever heard.  It is a box the lid of which will occasionally lift, but the sides will always be too high to climb over.
 

Almost every day, and especially when I am driving alone on the freeway, I think about the day my brother died, and the things I asked for.  I had never been someone to ask for things, but that day I looked at his head swaddled in white gauze, the plastic tube coming out of his mouth, dried blood in his nostrils, disinfectant yellowing his skin, stubble on his jaw, the muscle in his bare arm curving like a huge apostrophe.  I picked up his hand, secured to a red-glowing pulse monitor stint, and felt its clamminess, its lack of response.  I asked the nurse to lower the bed rail.  I kissed my brother’s face and placed my head on his chest, where his warmth came through the waffle-weave blanket.  I asked the nurse to leave my parents and me alone with him.
 

I knew it wasn’t really my brother lying there, since the doctors had told us –although they wouldn’t use these words – that he was brain dead.  I knew that the last time I’d seen him was the week before, when he moved me into a new apartment and stood outside his car after we returned the Ryder truck and said, “Give me a hug, sista.”  I did, and I thought, Boy is he holding me hard.  And then he drove off, and when I pulled out onto the street and looked ahead for his black beat-up Cadillac with the I ♥ TREES sticker on the bumper, it was already gone.  I felt a chill not to see its taillights heading west, a chill that I later termed premonition as I recalled thinking, Well, I’ll see him soon.  We’ll talk soon.
 

My brother died a violent death.  He was shot in the back of the head while driving away after stealing, the police report said, a vial of crack cocaine.  When my father went later to the SFPD to claim his belongings from the car, there were two bullet holes in the driver’s side window.  In the backseat were a skateboard, a small army knapsack with a stenciled Cat in the Hat on its flap, clothes, shoes, and a book listing species of trees.  The knapsack contained (and still contains, in a closet in my parents’ house) an address book with my then-new phone number on the inside front cover, a journal that I later tried to read but could not get past the entry that began “Today was a busy day,” and the AA Big Book.  Everything else he’d sold.  On the car’s back bumper was the sticker he’d placed there:  I ♥ TREES.
 

I had never been one to ask for things, but the day my parents and nephew and I went out on a fishing boat from Fisherman’s Wharf to scatter my brother’s ashes at sea, I asked the boat captain to head south, not north, at the Golden Gate.  He’d just told us he usually took people with ashes to Point Bonita, the western tip of the Marin Headlands.  My parents had nodded Okay.  “No,” I said.  “Would you go out from Ocean Beach instead?  Straight out, so we can see the breakers, the beach?”  Yes.  That was where he surfed.  That was where he headed every day he could, where – after he sold his board – certain types of weather made him avoid even a glimpse of a good break that itched too much not to ride.
 

It doesn’t matter how my brother died.  What matters is this:  He is dead. This is a fact my life arranges itself around now.  A fact to which I awaken each morning, a fact that – in the space between bed and the newspaper lying in a patch of sunlight outside the front door – has made me wonder how I can continue to live.
 

I could tell you he was the smartest and funniest person I’ve ever known.  When his IQ was tested, the school counselor would not release the specifics but placed him in an after-school program called MGM, or Mentally Gifted Minors.  He termed it Mentally Gifted Monsters and cut it to ride dirt bikes with his friends, friends who twenty years later would comfort me in bear hugs and let me call them names like Theedy and Blob.  My parents, reprimanding or scolding him, became Stereophonic Maul.  And one day on Twin Peaks, when I was visiting San Francisco during a period in which my brother was driving out to SFO at 2 a.m. dressed in black to pick up packages on the Short-Term Parking roof and seemed to have an overly sufficient collection of VCRs as well as a pseudonym (“Derringer”) on his mailbox, we looked out over the view.  It was a moment taut with anticipation and awkwardness, with avoidance and suspicion and denial and months of unreturned phone calls.  “Well,” he said as we gazed at the heat-hazed bay, the layer of brown guck hovering on the horizon, “someone in Alameda’s got a pretty bad cough.”  Four years later, walking through manzanita and madrone on the hills above a drug treatment facility in Redwood City, he would tell me, in counseling-fueled jargon and honesty, of his humor mask.  Twenty-five that day, he told me he was emotionally only 14 since that was the age he’d started using drugs daily.

I could tell you that each time I go into this essay, I add something new.  I tweak and embellish, eliminate and tighten, expand and explain.  It’s a work in progress, a constant present-tense:  the essay, yes, and the mourning, too.  When I heard that cells of the body replace themselves every seven years, I became disconsolate at the fact that my hand would one day not be covered with the same skin that had touched him.  I could tell you that, earlier this week, I reached those seven years.

I am a lifelong klutz, he a natural athlete.  When I was 17 and he 12, he took me to the top of an expert run at Squaw Valley, where we learned the bowl of bunny slopes where he’d intended to coach my snowplow was closed due to high winds, as was the gondola in which we’d intended to ride down.  He led me across drifts of powder to a snack bar where we ate hot dogs and I, looking out the window at the village way beneath and the mountain’s impossibly steep face, said, “There’s no way.”  “Yes,” he said, “you can,” and led me down, calling out each time I neared a mogul or began to careen out of control, “Fall!”  In that way, we made it down the mountain; forty-five minutes later, in the village, he told my dad how well I’d done.  Your center of gravity, he would later tell me, is somewhere above your forehead.

One of the hardest moments came when I knew he would never read my stories.  Another bad one was when I realized I could not remember the exact brown of his eyes.

I could tell you that I chose his name, Blake, before he was born, when I was five.  I could tell you some of our jokes, the language we shared that now I speak alone.  I could tell you he doctored the urine tests my mother made him take, escaped from a drug treatment program where they’d had to restrain him in a straightjacket upon admittance, and stole repeatedly from our parents, splicing alarm wires, jamming windows, and once slipping his hand beneath our sleeping father’s pillow for his wallet.  I could tell you about the time he fell from a tree as a six-year-old and called for me, how he saved himself and his classmates during a freak spring snowstorm on the John Muir Trail during a tenth-grade backpacking trip with his high school.  Fifteen years later, teaching at the same school, I would dance with his shadow in every hallway.  When, one summer, the “old library” was completely renovated, I felt both sad and relieved.  One day in the teachers’ lounge, when his former adviser and I spoke what had hung unspoken between us for months, I saw on Dan’s face amazement and glee as he told me of the morning he’d driven to work on the Golden Gate Bridge and seen Blake on his Vespa in the far left lane, zip to the far right to pay his toll, and zip back, cutting in front of six lanes of commute traffic both times.  I nodded.  That was my brother, I said.

I could tell you that one morning I broke those years of estrangement and awkwardness by phoning him from the lobby of the Random House building on East 50^th street in Manhattan to ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing.  Calm down, hon, he said, but I kept yelling.  (I’d gone to the lobby, well out of earshot of my 5^th-floor office neighbors, for that purpose; the lobby doorman would stare at me as I emerged from the phone booth five minutes later.)  Why was he stealing from the people who loved him and tried to help him?  Why didn’t he go rob from the corner grocery store instead of from his parents?  And, why, I asked, didn’t he just shoot himself and save a lot of trouble?  Eight years of silence and numbness exploded, but I felt little release.  I got results, though—my mother would phone me, three days later, to tell me tearily that I’d gotten through to him; he was in jail, having turned himself in for help.  And later the same night the phone rang again and it was he, and I sat on the kitchen floor holding the receiver, listening to my brother come back.  For the next nine months, during which I returned to California and he entered a Twelve-Step live-in program, we talked regularly and openly.

I could tell you that the week after he died, men who’d known him in drug rehab called, sobbing, to tell me Blake had saved their lives.  I could tell you that no one has ever made me laugh harder, and that no one has ever made me more angry.  I could tell you that he was the love of my life.

My friend Linda came to sit with me the day after he died.  She kept a box of Kleenex on her lap, answered the phone, held me as I told person after person that my brother had been killed, and later that afternoon, when I had to get away from the phone, took me to Ocean Beach and watched as I dragged my heel into the hard, wet sand and dug letters six feet tall to write BLAKE  1967-1994.  I did not know if I believed in heaven, but that afternoon, as I watched the sun drop into the horizon and its light flatten out on the broad sea, I believed this:  The sun winked at me.

The night of the day my brother died, I went with my father to bring pajamas to my nephew, who was three years old and staying with a friend.  As we drove down California Street, busy with Saturday evening traffic, I felt my body tuck into itself, move away from the car door.  I was disturbed by the other vehicles, frightened by the faces of strangers on the sidewalk.  How could anybody be going anywhere?  How could the world go on?
 

Earlier that day, my father had gone upstairs to take a nap.  The hospital’s first call, telling my parents their son had been shot and was being operated on, had come at eleven-thirty the night before.  They had not gone back to sleep. When I went to wake my father from his nap, I stared at his face, marveled at the fact that he was sleeping, and said, “Daddy, Daddy,” at least five times.  He slept on his side, arms bent.  I watched his breathing raise and lower his stomach.  I looked at the lines around his closed eyes, so exposed without glasses, at his hands curled in front of his face, and I let him sleep.
 

My parents amazed me, knowing what to do.  My mother bent over, pulled the heavy Yellow Pages from the shelf beneath the phone, and flipped to Mortuaries.  Together they looked for the name they knew, Halstead N. Gray, and finding it, my father dialed the number and explained that his son had died that afternoon at San Francisco General and that they would like his body cremated.  I sat and listened, and thought, How do they know what to do?  And then I thought:  Someday they will die and I will be the one who knows what to do.
 

I ate because food was placed in front of me.  I carried a box of Kleenex everywhere I went.  I learned that nothing dirties eyeglasses more quickly and thoroughly than tears.  (It’s the salt, my mother pointed out.)  I threw myself on tabletops.  I crumpled in heaps.  I leaned against walls and slid down them until I landed on the floor.  I learned this, too:  Grief will wear you out more than anything you’ve ever known.
 

I could tell you that the son he left is a boy whose resemblance to his father, oft-cited by others, has never struck me until the morning I wake him in a hotel room.  My brother has been dead for six years, and our father and I are taking his son to a new school.  We were up late the night before, reading Harry Potter and giggling, and it is difficult to wake his sleep-heavy body.  I shake him gently, and he rolls toward me.  There, in my nephew’s familiar sleep-swollen face, is my brother’s puffy upper lip.  I am eight years old again in a vacation room in Hawaii, my bare feet on cool linoleum across which geckos scurry, hovering over my sleeping brother as a tropical breeze flutters the blue curtains, lifting the paper-thin skin of his eyelids to watch his eyeballs move.  My nephew stirs, wakes, and is himself again.
 

My mother poured her grief into phoning.  She could not keep still, had to return every phone call.  The phone did not stop ringing for days, for weeks.  I sat with her when she called the Neptune Society, and when I heard her say “We’d like a private boat,” I had a flash of Blake, there in the room with me, lifting his eyebrows and grinning at me, how we would get mileage out of that for years, how he would imitate her tone, how he would embellish it over the years to become “Well of course a private boat.”  I think I even smiled.
 

I still have the corner of the armchair foot that broke off during my move to my new apartment.  Blake told me how to glue it back, how to wrap it with a rubber band tightly to secure it while it dried.  He said to watch for lateral stability, and when I looked skeptically at him, wobbled the chair from side to side.  He flirted with the manager’s teenaged daughter, who was cleaning the oven.  He backed up the Ryder truck to the path, aligning the rear end with the curb so the ramp rolled down straight into the gap.  He looked out my living room window at trees he said were Italian pines, the only kind of pines he liked.  I have moved five times since that day, each time wrapping the corner of the armchair foot in bubble wrap and tucking it in a corner of a box.  It sits now with its bent nail on a bookshelf.  I have never fixed the chair.  It hasn’t wobbled once.
 

I write at a desk next to a window that looks out over Kezar Stadium, Golden Gate Park, St. Ignatius, and before the dead-ivy-covered wall of the next-door building blocks the view, the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.  My brother climbed that tower at sixteen, running up the cables until he was above the reach of headlights and could take his time.  For a while it made me sad to look at the placid red tower, to drive past the metal cables as thick as a man’s thighs, and now it comforts me.

I could tell you that no one in my family has tried to find out the identity of my brother’s killer.  We feel no desire for revenge.  What happened to him that night, in a bad part of town, in a neighborhood none of us would willingly visit, in a place I used to think about going to visit – just to see, you understand, what he last saw; just to have in mind some stark clean lines to shape the confused mass of detail and imaginings – is unknowable beyond certain facts:  It was dark (just before midnight), and his car made a loud crunch as it hit a telephone pole.  The first bullet missed him and in the space before the second, he told his girlfriend, Teresa, to get on the floor of the car, that she would be okay.  The next bullet entered behind his ear and lodged behind the eye.  I have imagined its diagonal trajectory, its embedment in a pocket of smooth, white bone.  The prospect of hearing my brother’s killer’s name, of seeing his face, of knowing whether or not he will ever be tried for the crime of murder, brings me neither justice nor peace.
 

When we were children, I talked up my brother’s hijinks, parlayed his adventurousness – “He climbed out of his crib at six months!”  “He buttered his ice cubes!” (and, later, “He climbed the bridge!”) – to my own ends, as if his daring and humor could rub off on me, the good girl, the dutiful older daughter.  Now, I carry my grief and connection to the disastrous war on drugs, the allure and destruction of crack cocaine, like a hidden pack that leeches into my blood strength, resolve, and, sometimes, greasy pride.  On dates, I have watched men’s eyes sparkle with interest at the “colorful” details of my brother’s life (“Soul Train” blaring through the receiver of a pay phone in the lobby of a Twelve-Step residence, late-night exchanges of contraband on airport rooftops) and felt the dramatic power of saying, in a flat voice, “My brother was shot.”  I have taken shameful, secret pleasure in frowning at newspaper headlines in which the words “guns” “crack cocaine” or “victims’ families” appear, as if to say to those who share the subway or bus stop with me, Look!  I am a professional, educated white woman, a reader of the New Yorker and a subscriber to public radio, a woman at home at the symphony.   I will subvert your expectations.  I will surprise you.  I have, afterward, felt soiled, angry, and abandoned.
 

I was walking across my bedroom floor, making the bed, when I realized this:  One day I will turn 59, and my years without him will tip past my years with.
 

He had a sticker on his car:  I ♥ TREES.
 

When I walked down the bike path in the days following his death, I touched the bark of the walnut trees to feel under my fingers what he’d felt under his as he did the last work of his life.
 

My brother never stayed in any job for long.  He had worked as a car salesman, a drug dealer, a bicycle messenger, an importer of Balinese jackets that converted into knapsacks, a back-hoe driver for a septic-tank operation, and a house painter.  When he found work as a tree surgeon, he told my mother it was the perfect job because it took skill and strength and satisfied his adrenaline jones.  Compared to crack, hanging thirty feet off the ground from a belt attached to a tree bough while wielding a chain saw was the safest thing he could do.
 

When I saw his death certificate, a year after he died, the words that hurt the most were not Homicide or Gunshot wound to head.  Those said nothing about my brother.  The word that haunted me was typed in the space for OCCUPATION:  Arborist.  In it is gentleness, love of nature, hope.  It is, like the word brother, pure.
 

With his head wrapped in white swaddling, his forehead was visible in a way I had not seen since he’d shaved his head during his punk rocker phase at age fourteen, and my parents and I marveled at the noble brow, the beautiful sweep of eyebrows over eyes, the smoothness of his skin.
 

I worry sometimes that in my grief I might idealize him, remember him as less than he was, erase in sorrow his anger, his deviousness, my rage.  As I write, some words make tears run down my face.  And others make me get up from the chair and lie down on the floor to sleep.
 

Walking on Ocean Beach a few months after he died, I saw a dead cat washed up on the sand.  It was horrible, stiff, its limbs extended with rigor mortis, its fur hardened by salt water, its eyes open:  the stuff of a nightmare.  I watched the surfers that day – like preternatural creatures, their small dark sleek heads bobbing on the waves, and then standing, graceful, incredible, to ride boards down walls of water that, curling, chased them out of the way.  I noticed each man’s measure against the backdrop of uplifted gray water, and I marveled at how they – and once, he – rode waves.

           
When my mother called to tell me she had bad news, I thought It can’t be Blake, she sounds so calm.  And when she said it was Blake, there’d been an accident and he was in the hospital, I thought I’d better sit down.  And when I asked what kind of accident, she asked, “How much are you prepared to hear?”  There is no way to prepare for the moment in which your life changes, for shock and grief and what someday you will understand as what Emily Dickinson meant by the letting go.  My mother told me:  He’d been shot the night before.  It rained the entire seventy-five miles from my apartment to San Francisco, my friend Janet driving exactly 55 miles an hour, and I could not think beyond what my mother had told me the doctors had said:  They were going to operate to relieve the pressure on the brain.  There was a bullet lodged behind his eye.  There was a good deal of swelling.  When my parents and I arrived at the hospital, the doctors said nothing but nodded grimly and shepherded us into a conference room.  We sat down, and then my mother said, “My God, tell us.  Is he still alive?”  “Oh, yes,” they said.  And then they explained.  Severe neurological damage.  His pupils do not respond to light.  “Brain dead,” I said.  “We prefer,” one of the surgeons said, “not to use that term.”  My brother, the smartest person I’ve ever known, was brain dead.

           
My parents and I did not have to discuss it; we knew what to do.  When we went in to see him, his hand was clammy, so I touched his neck, where the skin above the peach waffle-weave blanket was warm.  I kissed his forehead and put my head on his chest.  My father could not bear to stay, and so we went home.  I ate a turkey sandwich I did not taste.  My mother said over and over, “I can’t believe this is happening.”  We touched each other a lot.  I was on the street, lifting my face to the drizzle and waiting for a cab to take me back to the hospital, when the surgeon phoned.  My father came out on the deck and called to me, and I walked to the gate, and he walked down the steps to meet me and said “He’s gone.”
 

A year later, at the dinner table on the night of the first anniversary, the day of the storms that flooded most of Northern California, my mother said that what she remembered most vividly from that day was my scream.  I remember it as my father’s.  I suppose it was both.
 

 In that moment in which I rested my forehead on his chest, rising and lowering from the respirator, I felt the strongest love that I have ever known.  Everything that had ever passed between us – every childhood joke, every peal of laughter, every argument, every insult, every instance of protectiveness and hurt – was in the room with us, on that bed, in that moment when I bent my head.  We left each other in forgiveness, so that in the time it took me to breathe in his body’s warmth, to close my eyes, to say good-bye, I felt, even as my heart was breaking, incredible peace.
 

I could tell you that I still touch the bark of trees.  I could tell you that when we were children, I pricked my index finger and then his, and rubbed the bright-red drops together as if our blood might flow in one another’s veins.  I could tell you some of the words I first wrote down, words I have repeated to myself:  It scares me when the sun is gone, but then I know:  Although I can’t see it, it lights the sky still.  I could tell you that I will never come to the end, but you already know that.