“This heart, of a city and a school, was broken, but held within it the kind of love that comes from struggle and hurt and survival, from trying and failing and sometimes succeeding...”

The heart of Newark, a place that everywhere bears the scars of its complicated and often violent past, was my brother’s home for almost 40 years. The students he taught bore scars as well, mostly hidden deep within their own hearts. This heart, of a city and a school, was broken, but held within it the kind of love that comes from struggle and hurt and survival, from trying and failing and sometimes succeeding; a harsh, demanding, powerful love. This is what held my brother there and formed the foundation of his life’s work. I didn’t understand most of this until he was ill, until time with him gave me the gift of seeing beyond the grit, beyond my own narrow view of what the mission he served encompassed.

I visited him often after his diagnosis of dementia. I drove my rented black Escalade from my hotel in Hoboken into the center of Newark. I had been to the city many, many times over the decades, previously arriving by subway and bus, then walking the 7 blocks from the station to the school. But now I was older, and often alone, and I suppose the choice of car (which amused him) was a concession to the fears of a little, now old, woman grown wary by decades of living in the heart of Portland, Oregon, a city with a relatively new and untested heart.

Our visits had a rhythm to them. I was buzzed into the front door of the school, a weathered, pockmarked, proud building, standing strong since 1868. He arrived, accompanied by one of his brother monks. He smiled, we embraced. We walked and talked and, as time went by, we simply sat, side by side, in silence.

It was summer, the last summer he would see all the way through, though neither of us would know that then. We walked through the school, our destination the track, where the grammar school children who so loved him would be enjoying morning recess. He was almost blind by then, his sight disappearing into his brain, but he had walked this path so many times that he did it effortlessly.

They always swarmed him, the 1st and 2nd graders, vying to hold is hand, to walk a while with him, to tell him some of their stories. When he tired, they led him to where I sat, and cheerfully ran back to play. On this particular day, I didn’t speak, afraid that the tears pressing against my lids would, against my will, spill forth. He was silent as well, but smiling.

There we were, siblings for 63 years, sharing an experience, but responding to it a world apart. I was losing him, he was losing himself;I found both thoughts unbearable. He lifted his arm, reached over and patted my knee, a signature brotherly gesture of his. “Do not feel sorry for me” he said, simply and tenderly, but also firmly.

My big brother taught me many things, though few as powerful as that moment. He did not see brokenness— his own, his students’, his family’s, his city’s—as a burden. He saw it as a symbol of a full life of service, as a gateway to joy, as a path to the kind of love that never dies.

Do not feel sorry for me. This is how my brother lived, and how he died, and how he invited me to do the same, that summer day, on a bench, beside the track.