Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [131]
He began selling things, getting rid of the clutter. Within a couple of months, he’d sold both businesses and converted his investments to cash. He sold both his boat and his jeep. He recommitted himself to his family, and when he called me, he explained his reasoning as follows.
“The more you own, the more it owns you, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of having to take care of everything. I’m tired of things breaking and having to fix them. It adds stress, and frankly, I’m giving myself a break.”
In the end, he kept the basics: his house, his car, and his furniture. The sale of his businesses left him with more than enough money to meet his monthly obligations—for years if he had to—and for the next eight months he did nothing that might add unwanted pressure to his life.
In some ways, he reverted to the young man he’d been during his college years. He went camping and hiking, he rafted during the summer, and as soon as snow began falling in the Sierras, he snowboarded. He took a trip to Puerto Vallarta with Christine. He visited Cody and Cole at the ranch. He began exercising regularly again, and joined an indoor soccer league. He also made a point to see me as often as he could. When I had a meeting in Los Angeles, my brother flew down to spend a few days with me. When my tour brought me through Sacramento later that fall, he came with me to the promotional events. In December, six months after my sister passed away, Micah visited me in North Carolina with Christine and his stepdaughter, Alli; Bob also came, along with Cody and Cole. Our three families took a trip to New York and we stood atop the World Trade Center admiring the view, less than nine months before it would be reduced to rubble.
Three weeks after our trip to New York, my brother called me. It was my birthday, and as soon as I answered the phone, he began to sing to me, in the same way my sister always had.
I listened with my eyes closed, remembering it all.
“I guess I’ll have to do this for you now,” he said, when he finished. “It’s a tradition, you know.”
I smiled, missing my sister but thankful for my brother.
“Thanks, Micah.”
“No problem, little brother.”
There was one other way in which my brother changed as well.
While he still went to church, his attendance became sporadic and continued to diminish as time went on. And on those days he did go, he sat in the pew and felt nothing.
With my sister’s death, my brother had lost his faith.
I, too, had suddenly become aware of the fragility of life and the preciousness of time. But as similar as Micah and I were in many ways, my reaction was exactly the opposite.
I came to believe that because life could end at any moment, I had to be prepared for any eventuality. I wanted to make sure my family was taken care of, no matter what might happen in the future. I had goals, and with the clock ticking, I had to hurry up and meet them before the unthinkable occurred. There was suddenly no time to waste. I had to hurry, I had to get things ready, I had to work. I had to go.
Less than two weeks after my sister’s funeral, I began to work on A Bend in the Road, a story inspired by my brother-in-law, Bob. It was the story of a young widower with a child, and I forced myself to sit at the computer for days on end to finish it. That fall, I toured in Europe and the United States to promote The Rescue, and as soon as the edits on A Bend in the Road were completed in early 2001, I began The Guardian, which would eventually become my longest and most challenging book to date. Little by little, work on the novel began to consume me.
I’d become so used to stress in the last eleven years that it