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It was hard growing up as Steve’s little sister. Eighteen months older than I, he skipped a grade in elementary school because he was so smart. He was artistic and intelligent. Studied Latin, Physics and Art. But we both shared the same teachers’ remarks on the report cards: “If only Steven/Susan would apply him/herself, he/she would do so much better.” He was writing science fiction stories in the eighth grade and introduced me to Asimov and Heinlein when I was eleven.
He played the guitar in local coffee houses and, with a couple of friends, would perform at Hootenannies as a teen. He took classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music in the late 60s. I'll never forget hearing him play The Bells of Rhymney on a twelve string guitar. Eventually guitars became his livelihood. As a youth they were merely something he loved.
In 1967 he broke his foot cross-country skiing the first time he ever tried it. I’m sure that the fact that he was to report for his draft physical the following week had nothing to do with his sudden decision to try this sport. He married shortly after and his wife gave birth to a daughter. It was then that we started to drift apart, as he moved out to the far western suburbs with his new family and I moved down to the Near North Side of Chicago to start my own life.
We ran into each other again when he moved to San Mateo in the late 70s while I was living in San Francisco. Long divorced from his first wife, he had been living in the woods near Snohomish, WA and was now repairing antique slot machines and fabricating the parts that were no longer manufactured.
Years passed and my husband and I finally stopped traveling and settled down in the desert. Steve would come to visit at Thanksgiving and or Christmas for as long as he could handle semi-sobriety. Eight years ago he stopped drinking and learned just how wonderful he was. The bitter, angry shell cracked and the amazing man inside came out.
We became closer, exchanging visits, calls and emails. And when he was laid off of his high paying IT job we helped him financially as he worked to become a luthier. Finally, at age 55 he found what he had been born to do. He worked harder at that than at any other job he ever held. And he loved it. He loved the exotic woods and the sounds that they made. He loved the people he dealt with and the support network they created.
A year and a half ago he qualified for Social Security, which helped a lot. At 62 he was still too young for Medicare. As a male without dependents who made enough money too eat regularly, he didn't qualify for Medicaid. A year earlier he had suffered multiple heart attacks and had to rely on the charity care available at the county hospital. He wrote me an email describing the long day he spent getting a prescription filled. It was heartbreakingly funny.
Last November he complained of pain during the drive down at Thanksgiving. Afraid it might be colon cancer, he sought my advice. To encourage him to go through the ordeal of getting in to see a doctor, I told him that I didn’t think pain was a sign of cancer, and that it could be something as simple as a strangulated hemorrhoid which would require care.
By December 3rd he was seen in the ER at the county hospital; an Xray showed a 3 cm spot on his lung, he was given suppositories and vicodin for the rectal pain and told to make an appointment for a follow up on the lung. The soonest appointment was Feb 25th.
By then he had been admitted through the ER for a cardiac arrhythmia and was in the ICU when we went up to see him on the 12th of Feb. The previous two and a half months had been spent in a futile effort to get a diagnosis and treatment without medical insurance. The following two and a half months are still too painful to write about.
He had cancer in the lung and metastatic cancer in the right buttock that had penetrated into the spine. No wonder he couldn’t stand for more than a few seconds at a time. Not only had the cancer eaten into the bone, it had attacked the nerves in his spinal column.
I held his hand as he drew his last breath, and was there when his palliative care physician sang a farewell at his bedside.
I miss him every day. I hate the thought that he is gone. I hate the thought of how much pain he must have suffered. I hate that he will build no more guitars and that he will be forgotten. As if he had never been here.
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I want one of those squiggly things to put right here so I can add a postscript to share something with others who are grieving their own losses. I wrote this diary some days ago. Last night there was an interview on the news with a sister of one of the flight attendants who was on Flight 11 as it crashed into the World Trade Center. She mentioned that there was one thing her psychiatrist said that had helped get her started on the path to recovery. Her psychiatrist told her that her sister had "only died once." She had been reliving in her imagination those last horrible minutes of her sister's life. Her sister only experienced it once.
I have been reliving the last painful months of my brother's life, the depressing corridors of county nursing home with his nurse who couldn't speak English, the incredible pain he must have felt and his desire, up to the very end, to return to his home. He only went through it once.
Strangely, it helps.