Memorabilia & Sentamentality

There’s a baseball cap sitting on my bookshelf that I must have spent 10 minutes staring at last night. It’s a faded blue Cubs hat with a green C embroidered on the front and a clover on the back. To me, that hat is nearly sacred.

I’m not a big fan of baseball. Honestly, I’m not much of sports fan at all. It’s not lucky. It’s not faded because I’ve had it for years. No, it came factory faded because sweet, vintage ball caps just look cooler. There’s no normal reason that this hat should be special to me, except that it belonged to my brother.

Robert was [is?] three years older than me, and he rarely let me forget it. All my life, he was there, playing the older brother. He loved to correct me, instruct me, and generally prove his utter superiority over me, the way older siblings do. Growing up, we were often at odds with each other; Robert had to assert his God-given right to enforce justice and I simply couldn’t abstain from wielding my greatest genetic predisposition – my mother’s stubbornness. Robert and I were as different as two brothers can be. He was the strong, athletic, creative genius and consummate extrovert; I was the shy, quiet, very non-athletic science kid and a total introvert. I could write story after story about our differences, but dear readers, please just take my word for it. Up through high school, Robert and I had a rather antagonistic relationship.

Most of that changed when Robert left home and went to college. With Robert gone, I began to realize that our family just wasn’t the same without him around. Without Robert, I was left to run all the errands and stand up against our mother’s perceived tyranny by myself. Without Robert, no one was around to tell Jimmy (my younger brother) and I which TV shows to watch or how stupid we looked in our school uniforms. Without Robert, life was just different, and not in ways that brought me any sort of joy. By the time he came home for Thanksgiving, I’d had the time to realize that I really missed him. And that, by my estimation, was the beginning of our friendship.

Two years later, I ended up at the same college that Robert and his wife Aimee were attending and there our friendship began in earnest. I spent a lot of time with Robert and Aimee during my first two years at the illustrious New Mexico State University. By the time the couple graduated and moved back home to find gainful employment, they were two of my closest friends. But after that, my relationship with Robert began to drift apart. Later, Robert ended up in Austin working for an advertising agency, being a husband to Aimee and a father to two gorgeous little girls, and hanging out with Jimmy and his wife Megan. I ended up at a small theological school in Kansas City. The physical distance wasn’t the only thing that had tainted our friendship, but that’s not really the point. It is sufficient to say there was a strain in our relationship.

Robert was diagnosed with testicular cancer about two years ago and spent the next 15 months fighting for his life. Part of that struggle involved traveling to Indianapolis for a two-month stint at the IUPUI hospital for high-dose chemotherapy. When Robert left for Indy, his then very pregnant wife wasn’t able to travel with him, so I dropped out of school for a semester to drive halfway across the country with my brother and served him as best I could. That mostly entailed doing Robert’s laundry, supplying him with loads of tea, and getting his film developed. But before the chemo chaos started, Robert and I had some time to kill in the area. We decided it’d be fun to catch a Cubs game in Chicago with Aimee’s brother Josh.

Somehow, we ended up in a hat shop and each picked out a faux-vintage Cubs hat. I picked a cap with a little bear cub in a red C, but Robert told me he’d had his eye on it. I knew that Robert had a dread fear of buying a matching hat, so I offered to pick another. But he insisted that I keep it and made up some tripe about it looking better on me. Eventually, he settled with this hat with the green C.

The next day, we went to Chicago to watch the Cubs play the Phillies. I was my first major league game and though the Cubs lost, it was amazing. The day was perfect – sunny but not oppressively warm. The seats gave us a spectacular view of the ballpark. The company – Josh, Ben, and Robert – was wonderful. Robert, ever the photographer, must have taken a million pictures. We had a great time.

Eight months ago, Robert passed away. He fought hard but the cancer just overpowered him. And last week, Aimee gave me this hat. I doubt she knew that I’d been there when he bought it, but I did. Now it sit on my bookshelf, reminding me of the two months that I was able to spend with my brother and serve him. I couldn’t fight the cancer for him, but I got really good at folding his clothes. And in those two months, something changed. We never talked about our faded friendship, never aired our grievances and discovered all our problems, but something changed and that friendship was restored.

When Robert left for college, I discovered how precious he was to me. But the pain I felt then cannot begin to compare with the pain I feel now. With Robert gone, our family isn’t the same. But he won’t be coming home for the holidays. Though his number is still saved on my phone, he won’t be calling to make sure I’m living my life according to his ever-sagacious standards. There is immense comfort in knowing that, as Christians, I will see him again one day, but it does not change the fact that he’s not here now. And this Cubs hat sits as a reminder of the brother I miss so very much.

It’s difficult to explain the pain one suffers with the loss of a loved one. In my experience, it differs based on the relationship. When my mom passed away, it felt like the ground had disappeared, like the earth had dropped a million miles from my feet. But with Robert, it feels like I’ve lost a limb, like someone cut off my right arm. I can’t get used to that feeling. I think of Robert and I’m confronted with his absence, like reaching for the newspaper and finding you have no hand with which to grasp it at all.

I miss Robert. He was witty, kind, and loving, which I am so often not. If it weren’t for his encouragement, I would have never started writing at all. If you asked, I could tell you a thousand stories about him, but just looking at this Cubs hat reminds me of the friend I’d found in him. Forgive me if I start to cry.

Advertisement