[imcarthur]

It’s been one of those weeks. Monday night one of my cousins called. Now this is a weddings & funerals kind of cousin – if you know what I mean. Sure enough, her mother – my aunt had died. Not unexpected, since she had leukemia & decided she was done with transfusions etc so she unplugged & died peacefully with her family around her at home.

The next morning, my brother called. My brother – 2 yrs older - is one of those individuals who never really fit into society. Never married. No partner visible or mentioned for 25 + years. He had some strange Israeli girlfriends in university but nothing since. Since 1979, he has lived in the same downtown university area boarding house. In the same single room with shared bathroom & kitchen. I have only seen it once & afterwards we gave him a bed since he was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. He is extremely intelligent – really - probably Mensa - but completely incapable of normal human interaction. He has not had a job in 7 – 8 years & even the previous one (for 15 years) was low-paid industry journal writing. It usually takes me about 15 minutes in his company & I want to beat him with a stick. He will berate you with his opinions about whatever his pet subject of the decade might be. I heard about the evil nuclear industry for 10 years. Then it was some weird paranoid thing: the conspiracies of ‘them’ were watching him. Now that was a strange year or two. I could go on & on.

Anyways, he has prostate cancer. It has become his obsession & occupation for the past 8 years or so. He has had radiation. Surgery. Chemo. Self-medication. Oh yeah, a whole lot of that. More radiation. He has read everything written about prostate cancer. Absolutely everything. He can rhyme off every drug – including every drug in clinical trial. He has had most of them. His PSA last week was 1530. That’s right. And you (and I) get scared at a 4 or a 5. He was happy about it since it was 1601 before the latest drug he is currently ingesting.

Anyway . . . he called from the hospital. He had collapsed the day before in a supermarket. Well, not really collapsed, he just had no energy to move. Some terrifically kindly customers talked him into getting into an ambulance that happened to be parked in the lot. They are currently on strike in Toronto as well as garbage men, all municipal staff etc, so they were probably killing donuts.

We went to see him. In Princess Margaret – the local cancer hospital. The diagnosis – at this point – is malnutrition. His weight was down to 146 from 170s (although his natural weight had been 240 or so for years). For the last month, he has been living on Brie cheese, cherry tomatoes & Triskets. He had deduced that everything else fed his cancer. Before that it was tofu & handfuls of some Asian mushroom with Chow Mein or burgers or something on the side. Money is not an issue btw. Most of his inheritance cash is in physical gold & silver sitting in a vault to feed his decade’s old – the world economy is crashing – hoarding obsession. Although he was more than half right on that one . . . but he bought too high . . . he is still waiting for $5K per oz . . .

Anyways, I am off to a funeral tomorrow. 2 ˝ hrs one way. It looks like it will be a beautiful day tomorrow so I will take the Porsche – top down. 2 laning most of the way which is a bonus. And solo too since I (easily) talked my wife out of coming.

And my brother? We will see. He is terrifically stubborn. But I promised my mother that I would look after him as best he would let me.

I’m not really fishing for sympathy here, but just needed to share. Compared to what some other guys here are going through, it’s not much.

But sometimes it sucks to get old & watch those around you crumble.

Ian