Endings/Beginnings, part four (see parts one and two and three)

Some of you will remember the short piece I wrote about one of my brothers a couple of years ago. It is difficult to add to that, but I could begin with the fact that he is now collecting a disability pension and doing some under-the-table taxi dispatching work. He has unpaid bills all over town, but people are still civil to him. After all, he is a celebrity, if a minor one. How many people can say that they know a man who weighs 400 pounds?

The most amazing thing about my brother is that he is still alive. He should be dead. Somehow, his body remembers to function. His heart still goes and his lungs, battered by thousands of cigarettes, still work. He continues to use the cane, but now he has a reason. In high school, he walked with one frequently, arguing that it relived the pain of ambulating with hemorrhoids. His wife, the one he married after the mother of his children was imprisoned and the kids swept away into foster care (it never crossed his mind to take them in and be a father to them) has been placed in long term care with early-onset Alzheimer's. She is in her fifties.

I suppose I should point put that she is much older than he. If you ask me, his attraction to this woman was based solely on the fact that she had daughters that were nearly his age. It was another thing that made him freakish, another thing for people to talk about behind his back. He had no other way of making any sort of impact, so he went for freakish acts, like force-feeding himself into obesity and, if he can manage it, an early death. Some day, he will be found prostate on the ground in his motel room, a half-eaten doughnut protruding from his mouth.

Yes, I see a bad end for my brother, but I believe that he hopes he will look down on his enormous body from above, just as we normal people believe that one day we might observe our own funerals, and delight in the fact that he lived out his childhood fantasy and become the man in the wicker chair.