The Po Show

Kaz

I really can't go to bed tonight without writing something about my brother Kaz. The stuff that has run through my head since I heard he was in a coma, though, I can't write that. It's all stuff about things he's done in his life, and what a wonderful person he is, and that all sounds like an obituary. And he's alive, damn it. It's way too early to start eulogizing him.

I'll just say I feel like shit for all the times I bitched about him, and all the times I've resented him for not being closer to me. He tried so hard, especially in the last few years, and he changed a lot, became warmer and more demonstrative and really worked to change things in his personality that he felt he should change.

I've been preparing myself for years, since we moved away from southern CA, for the day that I got the call about my mother. She's almost 80, and a cancer survivor, and I've always known that the day would come when someone in my family would call to tell me that she was ill or gone. I guess I thought it would be my brother who would call (he was the one who called me after her operation to remove her colon).

It was what I was expecting to hear when my niece called me at 2:50 this afternoon. Instead, it was my brother who was in the hospital, in a coma. He's not exactly my contemporary, being 15 years older, but he's my sibling. My only brother. The only boy in the family, who had to grow up with three sisters. There I go, eulogizing. Stop it.

I fucking hate being 3000 miles away.

Hang in there, Kaz. I love you.