I had a brother.

I know only snippets of him, and they are so rare they are like treasure to me.

I know he was tall and strapping.  His silhouette will always define masculine to me.  His broad shoulders and thick hair and piercing eyes call out to me across the years that have frayed my fragile memory.

I know him only in pictures.  Though I’m certain I spent time with him, I cannot recall any of it.  Instead, the few photographs I have in my possession have created a mental slideshow that forms the only visual narrative of him I ever experience.  Thus, he is iconic to me, reduced to frozen images, most of them black and white, all of them faded, in truth and in subjectivity.

He was born in 1947, and I, 15 years later.  Not long thereafter, he left for Vietnam, truncating my first chance to know him.

Instead, I got to know of him, through the words of my mother and sisters and grandmother, all of whom adored this only son of ours and who always called him by his little-boy name, Markie.

Then he came home, by way of a long stay at a veteran’s hospital in California.  He later made his way back to Oklahoma where he took a wife, who brought with her a son and a daughter, and they settled, though not nearby.  The wife and children survive in my recollection, but he is again gone, as no memory of this domestic arrangement graces me with its presence.

Then he died.  It wasn’t, I suppose, just like that, but it seemed just like that.  He was 26.  I do not understand why, and I have never talked of it, but his wife called my mother on the phone to say he was gone.  Just like that -- truncating my last chance to know him.

Though I cannot remember his presence, I cannot forget his absence, or my mother’s inhuman wailing as she hung up the phone, and mine as I begged her to stop.  I learned that day the immense danger of grief, and I spent years protecting myself from it, allowing my heart to sidestep my soul whenever possible.  I’m still doing that with these people -- especially my sisters -- though I yearn to stop.

So now, I go through the photographs, one by one, and imagine again how their memories must be so much richer than mine, filled as they are with actual recollections, personal experiences, technicolor interchanges that transcend my faded, one-dimensional notion of a brother -- a notion so flimsy as to be a ghost, really.

But I don’t speak of it, because I so rarely speak to them as to make it untenable.  I could say our relationships are complicated.  That’s polite language, code for decades of emotion too thick and coagulated to traverse.

I’ve never been very good at traversing the thick undergrowth of the heart, so fearful am I of tripping and falling into the briars, where I observe my mother lives with her memories of Markie.  A place where her daughters, each in their own way, never dare step.