2019-06-27 - 9:26 a.m.

My older brother died last week, and both the Pittsburgh Steelers and a plastic cheap vodka bottle will never be the same.

I recently looked back on some of my writing in here, to see who I used to be, and I saw that I've been worried about him for 15 years.

My mom's destroyed and hates my dad. My dad pretends not to notice. My younger brother and I wrote the obituary and the eulogy. The act of putting words down on paper was soothing. I haven't cried today but will. We saw his body. He was purple and bruised and he was balding more than I'd thought. He was good at every sport he ever played, even the ones he didn't care about. Even disc golf. We had not spoken or texted, not in a real way, for almost a year. His girlfriend of a year or whoever she was spoke at the service and I had to flag the rabbi to get her away from the mike. None of us are Jewish but the Catholic church can suck it. Magan took apart the biggest flower arrangement and made it into four-five bouquets, each in a nice vase. I carried the urn, filled with his ashes, from the car and into my parents' basement. I dropped off his license plates at the MVA. I watched the woman take a fat red marker to the stickers. My older brother drank himself to death. The woman at the cable company winked at me because I wasn't supposed to be able to cancel his account even though I had the box and the remote control and he was dead. And I'm the oldest brother now.

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