A cold Sunday in late October 1976. Rural Indiana. My brother Darren is twelve, and I’m eight. We’re lying atop a wagonload of soybeans, wearing only flannel shirts despite the twenty-eight-degree weather, and waiting on a neighbor to give us a ride back to the house, where I left our coats. My legs are short, my torso stocky, and my teeth arranged like Stonehenge. Darren is muscular and thin, his smile perfect. I reveal to him that I’ve been getting teased at school: A seventh grader named Keith trips me and calls me Snaggle Tooth. Darren is the only one I’ve told. He grabs my hand, and static electricity snaps between us, as though he is coursing with energy. He blows his hot breath on my frozen fingertips and tells me it’ll be OK.
A week later, when I see Keith in the restroom, he has a black eye and a busted lip and acts like I am not there. I run into Darren in the hallway after school, and he pats me on the back and asks with a wink, “Good day, then?” My big brother pulls me to his side and squeezes as we walk out of school together.
It is July 2024, and our sister Dina is dying. The doctor tells me that scoliosis and other disabilities have left her in a vulnerable state. Ever since a horrible hospital stay as a teen, when doctors tried to straighten her spine with traction and surgery, Dina has avoided all forms of health care, from regular checkups to dental appointments. Now her situation is dire. The nurses insist my other sister Dana and I summon the rest of our siblings and let Dina’s friends know that she’s unlikely to make it. Dina is not giving up, though. Outside, the humidity is stifling: Think of a hot-air balloon, the whooshing flames. Across the desolate parking lot I can see a flat expanse of tasseling corn, the white sun slipping toward the purple horizon. This is Wabash, Indiana, the first electrically lighted city in the world.
In the chill of the hospital room, I sit by my sister’s side. She’s groggy but conscious, and I hold her hand and tell her about my flight from Atlanta. Our oldest brother, Derrick, will arrive from Missouri tomorrow. Dina offers a slight smile, her lips cracked. The bed nearly swallows her up. She’s four feet ten inches tall, and her green eyes look hazy, as if she is indeed slipping away like the doctors say, or perhaps returning from somewhere. She has a systemic infection, untreated diabetes, and congestive heart failure. Her swollen legs look like waterlogged wooden beams. I am trying not to cry.
“When is Darren coming?” Dina asks.
Soon, I tell her. I’ve not seen him in person much over the last decade, but we communicate often through phone calls, FaceTime, and texts. This hospital is only eight years old, and Darren was the electrical contractor for the building. The middle brother, he’s been the de facto head of the family since both our parents passed more than a decade ago. For my entire life he has been the one I turn to, the person who understands me most. He took on the enormous job of helping Dina get on Social Security for her disability, a process that involved countless lawyers, court appearances, and rejections. He’s the reason she was able to buy a tiny house, owning rather than renting for the first time in her life.
Dina falls asleep while I sit and watch a muted soccer game on the TV. It grows dark out, and I drift off, then come to with the odd sensation that someone has left me a gift while I was sleeping. From behind me I hear a shuffle, and I turn to see Darren standing in the doorway.
“Hey, brother,” he says. There’s a resignation, a weariness in his voice that makes it sound faraway. Something is wrong with his gait as he walks in. “How is she?”
When we embrace, he smells, as always, of Polo cologne, the same scent he’s worn for decades, ever since he could afford to buy it in the old-school green bottle. Prior to that our only option was to filch some of our dad’s Old Spice. We sit and chat quietly, sometimes applying a cold cloth to our sister’s forehead while the monitors beep like an arcade game. After a while we begin using our phones to research our sister’s maladies, the bluish light from our screens giving the dark room the look of a movie set where the protagonists are about to break into a secure server. We whisper about prognoses, suggested meds, special diets. Some websites advertise Uber-like apps to request chaplains. It’s getting late. I want to stay here with my brother all night, keep him by my side like when we were children, but he has a long drive home to Fort Wayne, and I’ve booked a room in nearby Huntington. We kiss our sister’s forehead and tell her good night. Out in the hallway, I can see more clearly that my brother is thin and wears several layers of clothing despite the summer heat. He fidgets and won’t look me in the eye.
Three months ago, on a work trip to Alberta, Canada, I experienced a sadness like none I had ever encountered. I chalked it up to exhaustion, air travel, time changes—but it persisted. Since then I break down at times, crying without warning, an anxious pang at the center of my being. I feel unmoored, tossed about on cold waves.
In the frigid, antiseptic hallway, the fluorescents flicker above my brother’s face. He glances up disapprovingly, tells me there must be a short somewhere in the circuit. I think I see yellow in the whites of his eyes. When I hug him, he feels slight. He is fifty-nine. In less than a month he will be dead.
It was late September 1978 when Darren and I arrived at the farm of a man named Courter, who took us on a short tour, the cold wind of autumn slicing through our cheap windbreakers.
Darren loved the calf as soon as he laid eyes on him: muscled but petite, auburn with a white blaze on his furry forehead. His mother was a Hereford who had miscarried several times, his sire a massive Simmental with legs like fence posts. Darren paid the breeder and loaded the calf into the trailer to drive home. My fourteen-year-old brother had no driver’s license and had just spent all of his hard-earned school-clothes money on this purchase for a 4-H project.
On the ride back to our rented farm, the calf bellowed and kicked and rammed his head against the metal interior of the trailer. “What do you think of ‘Fireball’ for a name?” my brother said. “You know, because he’s got a lot of energy.”
By spring Fireball had put on nearly two hundred pounds and looked sculpted, with tendons that rippled down his flanks. He was constantly moving his head from side to side, switching his tail, and pawing at the damp ground. Darren had just four months to break Fireball, get him used to a halter, and teach him to obey the commands needed for the show ring. Cattle are usually much easier to break than horses, but Fireball didn’t take to the process. At the touch of a rope, he would throw his head back violently and kick at the air behind him. To calm him, Darren cooed to the steer, patted his side, and slipped him molasses snacks that disappeared like a magic trick. I stood on the fence, work boots shoved through the slats, arms clinging to the top rung. Darren was like a cowboy on one of the TV westerns our father loved to watch anytime a strike gave him time off at the factory or a rainy Sunday kept him out of the cornfields.
To calm Fireball, Darren let him run free every other day in our cobbled paddock, inside a makeshift fence of straw bales and rusted implements. One day Darren opened the sliding barn door, and Fireball, huffing and pawing, barged by him and sprinted into the center of the paddock, where he circled like a bull in the ring, his tail raised like an asp in the cool spring air, an expanse of blue above, the branches of tulip trees along the fence line clicking against the metal posts. “He’s so damn smart,” Darren said. “Yesterday he learned the new feeding time, and today he had his head out the barn window right at seven.”
Darren spit and wiped his mouth with the red kerchief he kept in his back pocket and folded after every use. He had always been meticulous, fastidious like our father, scrubbing his hands twice after chores, making sure every task in the field was performed properly, checking his tillage, his plantings, combining soybeans with the precision of an instructional video. After two of my fingers were mauled in a grain-bin accident, I had to soak my mangled hand in Epsom salts twice a day, and Darren would sit and read to me from Zane Grey novels, looking up and winking whenever a cowboy outsmarted a foe.
Now he winked at me again before walking slowly toward Fireball in the paddock, tutting and telling him everything was going to be OK. Talking softly, Darren bent to pick up the long rope attached to Fireball’s halter and lifted it as if it were a downed wire. The animal, sensing he was about to be controlled, raised his tail and bristled. Instead of backing off, Darren wrapped the rope around his forearm several times. That’s when Fireball ducked his head and rocketed toward the gate in a full sprint, my brother a blur of white T-shirt and cuffed denim behind him. Darren tried planting his feet, but he was no match for the calf, who blasted through the gate, splintered oak flying in all directions. Now free from the paddock, Fireball began to slow, looked over his shoulder at my brother dragging behind, then eased into a trot and finally came to rest under a black walnut tree, where he lowered his head and ripped fescue from the ground, roots and loam dangling from his mouth.
Darren’s back was to me as I ran over. When I reached him, he turned, revealing a bloodied nose, a cut on his bottom lip, and a purple scrape like grape jam etched into his forehead. He smiled, his teeth red with blood, then winked. I was shaking. “Come here,” he said, and he pulled me to his side as Fireball plopped down for a nap in the cool grass. “I’m OK,” he assured me.
For the next half hour Darren made me feel like I was part of the great taming of Fireball, allowing me to brush the steer’s coat and showing me how to rub his temples to calm him. At one point Darren left me with Fireball and jogged to an old Ford sedan he was fixing up. Plucking a cold Old Milwaukee from a cooler there, he slugged back the beer, compacted the can with one stomp, and tossed it in the trunk.
“See,” he said when he returned, tousling my hair, “you did great.” Darren sat down in the grass next to his sleeping steer. On his arm, where the rope had burned away layers of skin, a clear fluid seeped and beaded over the reddened surface. “I’ll get him tamed,” he said.
Darren did manage to tame Fireball, earning a runner-up ribbon in the livestock contest at the Wabash County Fairgrounds. My brother was proud, yet ready to move on to a new challenge. He was already studying in his spare time to become an electrician, learning all the terms. He would say each one out loud, then define it, in a kind of conversation with himself: “Biased relay. A relay in which the characteristics are modified, and which are usually in opposition.”
Two years later my brother was back at the fairgrounds to test his swine-judging skills, a task he approached with characteristic focus. He studied breed charts, meat cuts, genetics, and all things husbandry. At sixteen he had secured a leadership position in the local chapter of the Future Farmers of America (FFA). On that cold spring afternoon he and his friends did well in the judging competitions, coming in second. Afterward they were walking through the empty livestock barns, jostling and ribbing each other, when my brother spotted a cattle chute—a ramp used to load livestock onto a truck—sticking out from the hardwood eaves. He took off in a sprint, yelling over his shoulder that he was about to fly like Superman. Darren raced up the chute and leapt off the top, but his head hit a solid oak beam in midair, and he landed hard, hands cupped over his head. When his friends helped him up, blood gushed from his hairline, trailing down his face and neck and staining his white Hanes T-shirt scarlet.
He was rushed to the ER, where he received hundreds of stitches to close the massive gash on his skull. The doctors sent him home with no follow-up care, just tips to keep the wound clean. Although my brother struggled to remember things he should have known, the phrase “brain injury” was never used. Our folks were simply happy he was alive. Darren made a rapid recovery, going from not recognizing swine breeds to regaining all his previous knowledge within a month. He learned to drive and button his pearl-snap shirt again. Still, there was a vacant, almost ethereal look in his eyes that scared me. My older brother had never appeared vulnerable before.
After the accident Darren continued to pursue his fascination with electricity, checking out engineering books from the library and reading them in our bedroom until the early-morning hours while I feigned sleep. He would sit at a desk he had assembled from plywood and cinder blocks, lay the books open under a small desk lamp he’d found in the dump and rewired, and take copious notes on a yellow legal pad, repeating terms to himself in a whisper, as if cramming for a test. He flipped pages back and forth, cross-referencing, the ink pen sliding across the paper. His shiny auburn hair had grown back wavy over the rigid scar that stretched nearly from ear to ear. Every five minutes or so, he’d take his eyes from the page long enough to reach down, pluck a beer from the floor, and throw back a large gulp, then a smaller one. I would drift off at some point, and by the time I woke, my brother would already be up, back at his books, drinking black coffee, a pleased expression on his face.
Darren was president of his FFA chapter and traveled on the weekends to judge livestock contests in all parts of the state: Shipshewana, Muncie, Bloomington. After a long day of judging swine in the town of Culver, my brother met a guy who went to a high school a county over from ours. His name was Harland, and they became best friends. Harland was a lot like Darren: smart, determined, unafraid—all traits I did not possess. Still, Darren allowed me to go cruising with them, and to the drive-in, where they sipped Pabst while I drank red pop from a paper cup with pellet ice.
One day, when Darren and Harland picked me up in my brother’s Ford sedan, they seemed different, quiet. I assumed they had suffered an FFA loss. Darren drove in silence down county roads that wove like onyx ribbons through the cornfields while I tried to read a Robert Frost poem in the back seat for English class. Finally we dropped Harland off at his place, a pristine white farmhouse with red barns perched behind it, as perfect as toys. Darren walked Harland to the door—something I’d never seen him do. When he returned, he took hold of the steering wheel and said, “Let’s go to the prairie.”
The prairie was a section of Wabash County where dark, rich loam spread out across flat, fertile acres. Darren parked there and stared out the windshield. His reddish hair had grown long and touched the collar of his blue corduroy jacket. “Harland has cancer,” he said, and he turned to look at me, eyes glassy, bottom lip quivering.
Over the next three years, Harland would be in and out of the hospital, his life a series of chemo and doctor appointments. Even as he lost his hair and struggled to keep food down, he kept his sense of humor. Once, he drew eyes, a mouth, and a nose on the back of his bald head and walked backward up to the fast-food counter to order. He and Darren went to school dances and found time to cruise. And when he was in the hospital in Fort Wayne, Darren would visit him often.
Harland died in December 1988. Darren had recently started a job in the warehouse of an electrical-supply company, and I was in my second year of college in Muncie. About six months later Darren visited me in my tiny, awful off-campus apartment. “Please tell me this is not really where you live,” he said when I answered the door, and we hugged—a sustained embrace. Then I heard my brother’s sobs.
That weekend we went to keg parties and cooked inexpensive meals bought at the LoBill’s. On Sunday afternoon I walked Darren to his used Jeep, which he’d recently purchased after getting promoted into sales. With his sunglasses on and the breeze lifting his hair, Darren looked like John Cougar Mellencamp. He got behind the wheel, but before he sped away down the wide, empty street, he stopped, removed his sunglasses, and looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “You two were my best friends,” he said.
Back inside my shitty apartment, I found an envelope with a note that read, “You’re gonna be the first college graduate in our family!” and a $100 bill my brother had drawn a heart on. For my four years at the university, he would regularly send care packages with money, food, and notes of encouragement. Without his kindness, I believe I never would have graduated. When I did, he threw me a party that rivaled Mardi Gras.
Darren and I both married young and had daughters—Kennedy (mine) and Madison (his)—less than a year apart in the mid-1990s. On our first Christmas as dads, I traveled from Georgia to spend the holidays at his house. I was recently divorced, and Darren’s wife ceded the night to us by going to bed early so we could share our new fatherhoods. Holding my brother’s daughter in my arms was nothing less than a spiritual experience. Together we rocked our babies, prepped their food, bathed them, and tucked them in.
On the last night of my visit, a gorgeous snow began to fall. Darren poked at the fire, then went to check on the girls, adjusting blankets that didn’t need it. I had tried many times to find a way to thank my brother for all he’d done for me, but whenever I began to express my gratitude, I could see him wishing it would end. That night I tried again: “Brother, I want you to know how thankful I am to have you . . .” I couldn’t form any more words. Darren patted my back and told me he knew.
As the fire died down, we stood in his darkened living room and watched the snow fall beneath the security light in the yard. “You know,” Darren said, “we should start planning trips together with our girls.” I told my brother I couldn’t think of a better idea. We stayed up planning, laughing, and sipping beers, then changed the babies one last time before we turned in.
“Hey,” I said, “want to make a pallet on the floor like when we were kids?” Darren smiled that perfect grin of his and went to get a stack of blankets.
When I woke, my brother was already dressed and had coffee and toast and eggs ready for us, and bottles for the girls. After breakfast Darren followed me, coffee mug in hand, to my rental car. The snow was pristine and glimmering. I put my sleeping daughter into her car seat, and Darren ducked into the car to kiss her forehead. When I went to hug him, I could smell liquor in his mug. “God, I love you,” he said.
Our first father-daughter trip didn’t occur until about ten years later, in the spring of 2004. We settled on a place called Blood Mountain, the highest peak on Georgia’s portion of the Appalachian Trail. It was early April and cold, but the girls decided to swim in the lake and badgered me to join them. Darren egged me on but balked at jumping in himself. Finally I yielded. When I hit the water, my body went stiff, and my chest seemed to seize, and I burst from the surface to find my brother laughing and clapping. Shivering, I followed the girls back to the sand, and the four of us sat there in the cold, the mountains rising above us, tight green buds on the maple trees.
My first book, a childhood memoir, was coming out that fall. In it I had described how Darren cared for me after the accident that mauled my fingers. I told him now that my book tour had scheduled a stop near Butler University in Indiana. I wanted him to come.
“Of course, brother,” he said. “Give me the date and time, and I’ll be there to heckle you.”
“No,” I said, “I want you to help me with the reading.”
He told me he’d do anything for me.
At the event in Indiana, my brother signed more books than I did, which was not surprising. He was gregarious and tipsy, the two of us having had a couple of beers beforehand. That night we shared a hotel room in downtown Indianapolis and laughed ourselves to sleep in the dark.
In 2008 Darren and I planned another father-daughter trip. This time we splurged on a hotel near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. By then Darren had been promoted to vice president of sales. Though he didn’t have a college degree, his self-taught knowledge of electrical systems was deep, and he could almost always remedy customers’ issues. The girls were twelve and thirteen, and when Darren and I were alone, we talked about fathering teenagers. “I hope what I’m doing is right,” he said, which surprised me; Darren was an attentive father, present and supportive. It was a relief to know he, too, had doubts about his parenting skills.
At dinner the girls sat close together, whispering and rolling their eyes whenever we said something, more like siblings than cousins. We ordered a pizza as big as a wagon wheel, and as we dug in, I asked Madison if her dad had ever told her the story of Fireball. No? I explained how, when he was close to her age, her father had spent all his school-clothes money on a steer for 4-H. The girls seemed to find the story interesting. Why would someone want to lead a cow around a ring? Kennedy asked if 4-H still existed, as if we were talking about something from the 1880s instead of the 1980s.
That winter the four of us met up in downtown Indianapolis for the Indiana Historical Society’s Holiday Author Fair. At the hotel, Kennedy and Madison were planning to play some pranks on Darren, who had always been naive in the best of ways: open, curious, authentic. Before the trip, I’d taken Kennedy to a magic shop in Georgia, where she’d picked out a real-looking cigarette in an ash pile, fake vomit that even smelled bad, and bubble gum wads that could adhere anywhere. Soon after we got to our rooms, the girls brought to Darren’s attention the gum stuck on the dresser and side tables, the mashed-out cigarette on the AC unit, and the vomit in the tub. He was about to call the front desk when the girls began laughing and revealed their deception, mimicking his response.
The next morning, we ordered from room service and ate breakfast in bed while watching Disturbia, a movie the girls had chosen. Feeling wholly and utterly grateful for my family, I got up to use the restroom. Darren’s shaving kit was on the counter, and I peeked inside it, curious to see if he still used an old-fashioned brush and silver bowl. He did. Also in the bag were a few mini bottles of liquor. I told myself I would bring it up with him. Even now, I can’t say why I failed to do so.
Our mother passed in 2011, and our dad died three years later. Darren, who had cared for our father for several years, was the one who found him sitting in his recliner in his one-bedroom apartment. My brother told me how he struggled with the experience, but at the funeral he seemed healthy, even vigorous. He had taken up running, he said, and spent lots of time hiking and walking his beloved dogs. I saw him again at our niece’s wedding in 2017. (I would learn after my brother’s death that his primary-care physician had found a lesion on his liver that same year.) By that time, Kennedy and Madison had graduated from state universities and were both headed on to graduate programs.
Then, during the pandemic, Darren was let go at the electrical-supply company where he’d worked for nearly thirty-five years. At first he seemed energized by the thought of starting a new chapter in his life, and he applied for jobs in the green sector and construction, at animal rescues and lumberyards. But at the age of fifty-seven, he encountered a labor market that didn’t recognize his talents, and he seemed adrift. I wasn’t concerned about his finances—he had funded his retirement accounts well. Still, one afternoon in 2023, I called him to check in. Darren told me he had finally found a job but wasn’t sure he was going to take it. I asked why. “I think I may have tinnitus. I get dizzy when I walk the dogs. I can’t jog without feeling nauseous.” I decided to travel to Indiana to see him and our sister Dina, whose own health issues were getting serious.
I was not prepared for the sight of my brother when we met at a café in Fort Wayne. He appeared frail and was dragging one leg. My whole life Darren had had a smile that was simply unmatchable, but now when he grinned at me, there was something missing. He struggled to sit down in the booth, saying, “Getting old sucks.” His skin was mottled, his big brown eyes watery. When he refused food, I felt gut punched. I listened to him recount his doctor’s appointments and the diagnostics he was getting. He thought his condition could be related to Parkinson’s. I had planned for the two of us to visit Dina in nearby Wabash, to try to convince her to see a doctor, but I realized Darren would not be able to ride there with me. We hugged in the parking lot, and I smelled again the Polo cologne from our youth.
Watching him drive away, my throat so tight I couldn’t swallow, I thought: Late-stage alcoholism. I felt foolish, but I wasn’t angry with my brother, just heartbroken. Also guilty. I feared I had let him down, that I had not been there for him when he’d needed me the most, that I had failed as a brother.
Later in July 2024, it appears Dina has saved herself. She still has rehabilitation ahead, and lots of health issues, including the awful prospect of losing both of her legs, but her appetite is strong. I sit with her and watch Titanic while she takes bites of mashed potatoes. When I tell her I’ve never seen the movie, she says, without missing a beat, “It sinks.” And I break into a deep, joyful laugh.
When Darren returns to the hospital for Dina’s discharge, he is using a cane. He dotes on our sister, tells her he will be dancing with her at the VFW in no time. Watching from a distance as he bends to whisper something in her ear, I’m reminded that he is not just my brother, that he and Dina, only eighteen months apart, were playmates before I came along. Darren puts balm on her lips, brushes her bangs back from her eyes. Her survival feels like a good omen.
Darren doesn’t follow the hospital ambulance north to South Bend, where Dina will get physical therapy. So it’s just me, passing green fields of corn and soybeans, a pain in my chest that feels like it will kill me. I stay for a few days with my sister, and while I’m there, Darren and I talk on the phone and agree to hang out the next time I’m in town, when he’s better.
On Sunday, August 4, Madison calls to tell me that she and her mother are taking Darren to the ER. He’s fallen in the bathroom and hasn’t eaten in days. I immediately book a flight and find a hotel just a half mile from the hospital in Fort Wayne. The medical complex looms large beside the highway, and to get to it I have to cross over a walkway where the air from passing vehicles whips at my clothing. I can see the massive electrical lines supporting miles of wires, swaying over the fields below. I’m scared to see my brother. The very notion that this might be goodbye makes me feel sick. I’ve been told he is yellow all over and cannot speak, and last night I stayed up late googling whether I could donate a portion of my liver to him. (A nurse will shake her head when I ask about the possibility.)
When I get to Darren’s room, he winks at me from the hospital bed, and I want to rip out my liver and hand it to him right there. Instead I sit with him as he goes in and out of a fitful sleep, breath rattling in his chest. His upper body is dark purple from the fall. I hold his swollen hand and kiss it, remembering the electric typewriter he bought me in high school when he could barely afford gas because he knew I wanted to be a writer. I think of the many times in college when I took all the change from his car’s cupholder, only to find out later he would go to the credit union and get rolls of quarters to fill it before he visited me. I recall how he helped Dina pick out clothes for a court appearance when she was fighting to get on disability, the concert tickets he bought her regularly, the expression on his face when Dina finally moved into her little house. I see Darren and me on a tractor in the autumn cold and him taking off his coat and draping it over my shoulders, even though I already wore one.
A kind nurse comes in and tells me what a gentleman my brother is. I don’t even try to hide how much her comment wrecks me.
I spend long days with him, applying wet cloths to his forehead and using a swab to moisten his mouth. (He’s thirsty all the time but cannot have liquids.) There are moments when something savage and angry seizes me, and I want to cradle him in my arms and walk out of the hospital and into the green fields of our youth, where we can shuck off our Hanes T-shirts and sun ourselves, munching soft white-bread sandwiches from our lunch buckets. I want to carry him to the past, where I’m not a fool and he’s getting help. What I don’t want is to say goodbye. I can’t. When I finally have to leave, all I can manage to say is that I will look after his daughter.
Darren Wayne Crandell passes three days later, having just turned sixty. Writing his obituary, I decide this is why I was so sad on that trip to Canada back in April: the universe’s energy—which is to say my brother’s energy—was prepping me for a loss. I enter a grief so heavy that at times I feel I might not make it. I want to be with my brother again, to see him and hug him. His wishes were for no ceremony, only cremation.
In the middle of the night I wake up and think I hear Brother? in the dark, a subtle snap of static filling the room. Weeks after his death, I speak with Madison, who has gotten a notice from the organ-donor organization that they will notify us if any of the recipients of Darren’s organs wish to meet. We cry over the phone. I imagine meeting the people he has helped even after his death, and seeing his electric soul alive in them.
