Eulogy for my brother

This was originally written in August 2014, after my eldest brother passed away. I saw it in draft status and decided to publish it. I'm sure I wanted to say much, much more.

No one asked me to eulogize my brother. I want to do it, but will probably not get a chance.

I have a lot of things I want to say about my brother and his passing but I am going to start with something that was found among his photographs we searched while looking for pictures of him when he was married and his family was young. We wanted to have some photos of him with his children and what we found was a wallet card, the kind you might buy at a stationary store. It said:

Don't Quit

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
when the road your trudging seems all up hill,
when the funds are low, and the debts are high,
and you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
when care is pressing you down a bit,
rest if you must but don't you quit,

Life is odd with its twists and turns,
as everyone of us sometimes learn,
and many a failure turns about,
when he might have won had he stuck it out,
Don't give up though the pace seems slow
you may succeed with another blow

Success is failure turned inside out
the silver tint of the clouds of doubt
and you can never tell how close you are
It may be near when it seems so far
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit
It's when things seem worse
that you must not quit.

And even before we found this, I had already realized that this sort of thing epitomized my brother. I told him on many occasions about my admiration for this ability of his to keep going in spite of everything that had happened to him, especially in the last 7 years or so. When he lay in hospital, and we all knew he was dying, I repeated to him how I admired him for his tenacity in spite of the odds.

My brother was a pretty humble guy most of the time. He was an ordinary working guy, an organization man, that is until the organization vanished. My brother worked hard and he worked a lot. From my perspective he gave until it hurt. It hurt him, it hurt his family but he was at work a lot and rare was the day he called in sick or went to the doctor. When his work went away, they paid him a few weeks severance, It might have amounted to a month or so of pay. The company certainly wasn't going to pay people like Paul what they deserved after decades of dedicated service and sacrifice. This was the first of many trials and tribulations my brother would have to face in the next 7 years. The lack of full-time employment that paid a living wage, a heart attack, a quadruple by-pass, loss of his home, bankruptcy and finally cancer. I had run out of happy talk for my brother a long time ago, I could see how things were shaping up for him. He had persevered through so many things and did it pretty cheerfully most of the time. Yeah there times he was down, lamenting his misfortunes, but he had always gotten up, dusted himself off and kept on keeping on. What a tremendous example for his children. He was an easygoing guy, made friends easily, was a hard working guy and cared about his family. I told his son Jonathan, that in the end, his children, he in particular, was all that my brother had, it was all he had to live for.