What It’s like to Lose a Brother to the Opioid Epidemic
Unlike a lot of siblings, I was never really that close to brother. The last time I can think of us every actually doing something together was probably somewhere around 6th grade. By middle school (grades 7, 8, and 9 in Ohio) my brother had already started hanging out with the ‘cool kids’ and I became an afterthought.
We simply did not have a connection. While we generally played on the same baseball teams, he usually didn’t pay me any deference whatsoever. He rarely ever admitted that we were related to anyone that didn’t already know us.
During middle school, my brother turned into an incredible athlete. In 8th and 9th grade he was the star running back on the football team and the home run hitter on the baseball team. He was an excellent athlete and it got to the point where people would come up to me and ask me why I couldn’t be more like him.
One small reward I got from his middle school notoriety was that no one ever bullied me the whole time I was in high school. Even though in baseball, where I was the Rod Carew to his Mike Schmidt (it was the 80’s after all), people knew that if they messed with me that that would eventually have to mess with him. None of this was actually spoken. It was all merely implied.
