I am sorry for your loss Garrison. Your brother sounded like a wonderful man.

Peace to you and your family.

Brian

What Brian said.

Jim

You have many thousands of brothers out here.

I lost my brother last year. He died hanggliding, which, if ever he'd been asked, would probably have been his choice. However, he was only 56. There's no replacing a brother. But such is life.

from my family to yours.

Peace.

thank you so much for doing what you do and sharing it with us.

my wholehearted condolences.

My brother died just after his 39th birthday, in a car wreck. We were less than 2 years apart, survived a difficult childhood by clinging to one another. He was like my other half. It was like losing a leg, or as you say, like being disinherited, and exiled. One learns to walk again, with a limp, and you hope no one notices right off that you're missing half of yourself. But you are. You learn to live with it, but as one learns to live with being inconsolable.

He should have waited to write this. The first few days after a death in the family, you can't be trusted to say anything worth remembering.

Salon does not allow a "letter" without words so again. So so sorry Garrison, it's a shock or I suppose it is.

I am the older sister of two brothers. For 27 years, it's been the two of them and the one of me, and I have watched every so often as they communicated without words, joking that they could have whole conversations with only their eyebrows and no one but them would know what they were saying.

Reading your words, I feel that I know just what they are saying, maybe for the first time.

Bless you for your beautiful words and condolences on your profound loss.

We will all lose someone someday, or be the ones who are lost. Death is a part of life.

Thank you for sharing your experience with the community. The more our society speaks publicly & personally of death & dying, the more gracefully we can accept it when it's our family's turn. That's what I suspect anyway.

So sorry for your loss Garrison, but again - thank you.

Garrison, you often speak for us. You are us. Is there not a metaphor in here somewhere, in the fact that you must suffer a deeply personal loss at a time when society as a whole is facing its own uncertain future? Reflections.

You say your brother could make his feelings known to you without actually speaking them. If you believe in such things, it sounds like this talent of his will remain invaluable to you in the years to come. Be glad you have so many fans, an extended family of millions who consider you their brother. Lean on us.

You are a rightfully highlighted part of our country's collective conscience. In the years to come, many of us look forward to you becoming the wise old grandfather figure to us. We hope you will still be there to adopt us. May there be peace for you in your valley.

I'm so sorry to hear of your loss. I can't imagine losing any of my brothers, even the ones I don't like very much.

Godspeed, Garrison.

Condolences. It seems quite sad. I never had a brother. My mother had a miscarriage when I was five, though. At the time this was happening in the hospital, unbeknownst to me, I tripped and racked my forehead into a corner of my grandmother's piano. A scar remained for years. Long after, I surmised that at that very moment I lost my own potential brother. How life would have been different if he had lived. But then, it all ends more or less the same way. Who's to say which would have been better. Memories die too, and while they remain I'm not sure they do all that much for us anyway. I hope you will be well.

it is with great sorrow I extend compassion to you for your loss.

May the wind remain at your back and may your keel be steady and even. May you and your family be comforted with The Peace That Passes All Understanding.

Words are just stupid at a time like this, are they not?

Know you are loved and thought well of.

You are remembered in our prayers.

that you had each other all these years. I hope your rich trove of memories will be a comfort to you as you try to move forward.

Having lost my sister not long ago, I can imagine how rudderless you must feel right now.

My condolences to you and your family.

I am so sorry for your loss. He sounds like he was quite a decent man.

I am so sorry for your loss Mr. Keillor. I wake up to your voice every day on a podcast and appreciate your work so much. Needless to say you will be in my thoughts and prayers.

Best,

e.m.

Thank you for this piece. My older sister was killed in a freak accident two months ago. I'm still mostly experiencing shock and denial (it's amazing how the psyche protects itself from overwhelming emotion), but I remember those first days after hearing the devastating news -- needing to talk about her a lot, to make sense of her life, to find meaning in her death. So I understand the impetus for this writing.

It will be a long journey of processing this kind of experience, which underscores the tenuousness of lives and the value of treasuring each moment.

I hope you can take some time off if you need to in order to grieve... and I wish for you the comfort that comes from the rich memories of your lives together.

What a moving piece you wrote. I wish I could say it made me want to pick up the phone and call my brother, but unfortunately, we were never close. He is 6 years older than me and left home before I was even a teen, driven out by a homophobic, alcoholic father. In the 40 odd years since then, I've only seen him a handful of times, and not for more than ten years. Now he, and the rest of the family, live 11 thousand miles away. Despite your sadness at your loss, be really, really thankful that you had a brother to whom you were close. I really feel I missed out.