Among the pleas for money, a pile of ads and bills in the mailbox, was a white, size 10 business envelope addressed in pencil and hand-printed in capital letters that were crookedly aligned. Guessing that my seven-year-old granddaughter in France had written it with some coaching from her parents, I smiled, took it inside under the kitchen lights, and was shocked.
It was actually from my brother Rick: the first communication he had initiated with me in several years. Rick and his wife Jane both have dementia. His telephone calls and greeting cards had decreased in frequency while living in a Boston-area Assisted Living facility, but when he and Jane moved into its “Memory Care” unit, those contacts ended. They’d disposed of their possessions, including cell phones. Gifts and letters sent to them at this residence were not acknowledged. Telephoning the reception desk and asking for them was usually unsuccessful. Short spurts of chatter were the best my wife and I could do.
The return address on this letter identified the writer as Richard J Franklin, which told me immediately that the birthday card I’d sent him two weeks before had inspired him to write me back. “Richard J” reflected his awareness that I’d addressed my card’s envelope to him as “Richard James,” which our mother called him whenever he angered her. It was a joking reference I’d used over the years to remind him of our childhood together and his spats with her.
That he’d recognized the humor in my card’s note was heartening. So was his addressing this letter to my wife’s name first, Dolores Franklin, followed by “and Samuel,” no last name. No one but government people called me Samuel. His use of it suggested that his letter would contain his customary teasing attack on my undeserving blind luck at marrying such a wonderful person as Dolores. Playing this affectionate sibling-rivalry, pseudo-insulting game was our decades-long way of reconnecting with each other without expressing our deeper emotions.
Worried about Rick and Jane, my wife and I had flown to Boston from Ohio one weekend two years ago, dined with them one evening with other residents, and in two meetings also at their new “home” found out that Rick was not as lost as his wife. With him, we had several stumbling conversations about old times. His wife was less communicative. Rather than stay with us, she’d leave and sit quietly among other residents. Rick’s memory and awareness seemed better than hers.
Now this letter. I went to the living room rocker, sat and switched on the lamp.
Dolores, who was watching TV, looked over at me. “What’re you doing?”
I said, “Rick wrote us a letter.”
“Really. What’d he say?”
“I’ll let you know in a minute.”
The letter was on one side of a page from a lined 8×11-inch spiral notebook, ragged on the long edge where he’d torn it out. He’d tri-folded the page as everyone would do to fit in the envelope, but then folded it from the ragged edge across the three folds so the envelope humped from the wad he’d put in its middle. The page contained six short paragraphs each separated by a blank line, with 1st lines indented in paragraphs one and two only. The left margin widened line-by-line dropping down, but on the right Rick had ended the lines consistently with a one-inch margin. He’d spaced his words apart clearly, but they rose and fell unevenly above their lines, usually rising onto the line above. Each paragraph contained one or two sentences of cursive writing, but he’d printed one word entirely in caps in the exact center of the page.
The letter’s appearance seemed as messy and rushed as the envelope, but to me this suggested Rick’s struggle to maintain enough control to communicate something important, something he wanted me to understand.
I read the message itself and found it mostly readable. Its cursive letters were small and often so blurrily or inaccurately formed, I had to reread once or more times. In fact, I couldn’t decipher all of the sentences. A few words were muddled or misused, and a word or two necessary for clarity were omitted. Also, near the note’s end, he’d confused my wife with our daughter as the mother of our four granddaughters.
I pulled away from the writing, my eyes moist, and stared at the TV without seeing or hearing it. Rick was conveying to me that he was still with us, living in our world, but on the brink of entering a mental realm from which he could not return. That seemed his motive for writing me now.
“Are you okay?” said Dolores.
“Sure.” But I was elsewhere, remembering Rick.
He was an artist. He had been so persnickety neat we’d joke about it. Rick had worked in oils, charcoal and pencil. He’d festoon his cards and letters to relatives and friends with drawings of something relevant to the contents. Once, as teenagers, I’d watched while he drew an exactly sized Indian Head/Buffalo nickel with a sharpened pencil. Using the pointillist technique, he bent over his subject unaware of everything except what he was doing, seated at our dining table, staring down and back and forth at a real nickel, drawing the male head on a coin. He reacted angrily when I said something. “Shut up! Leave me alone!”
Walking around the house, outside and back inside a few times, I stayed near enough to watch him. The creation of that small drawing took a long time. Finished, abandoned on the table, the real nickel lying on the paper beside the drawing, his creation amazed me. The shading and lines of the drawing and the coin’s metallic profile seemed identical. I couldn’t remember ever telling Rick how impressed I was by his talent.
He was in fact smarter, more successful in high school and more talented than I was. The way he’d done that drawing reminded me of our father, who’d passed away a year before this drawing. We’d both seen our Dad spend over an hour at a time playing the piano, making music in the basement, oblivious to his surroundings.
Rick was meticulous with his art and other parts of his life. Before being drafted, he did drawings for the covers of two poetry chapbooks of mine. Rick served in Vietnam during the war, then moved to Boston away from the rest of his family. I’d married Dolores and stayed in Ohio. My impression was that experiences in the war had displaced him. Also, his interests shifted from art to business. I’d been best man at his third wedding. Its ceremony and reception were in the bar whose facade provided exterior shots of the bar in “Cheers.”
Despite his apparent reluctance to communicate with Dolores and me as his disability worsened, as if he were ashamed and hiding it from us, he’d created this letter. In it he referred to me as “Sammy Joe,” which our mother called me when angry. He wrote that I’d “had little to do with…the production of five beautiful girls.” He said that I was “smart to help…them…continue to be the lovely ladies Dolores has delivered. Period!” Rick insisted that I should not “forget that SHE is the leader and you are dam lucky.”
I wanted to laugh and cry. Rick had always stressed how my presence had negatively impacted his childhood, and I knew he’d had a hard time. Three years younger, he was usually ordered to stay with me and do what I said. I was not always a good big brother. We often felt tense together. I often resented his tagging along with me. We’d fight and I always won. Until finished with high school, he’d had to follow in my footsteps.
He signed this letter in cursive, “Much Love, Ricky F.” He’d also printed the same thing exactly centered on the otherwise blank back of the paper, but he’d penciled it in differently:
MUCH LOVE
Rickie F.
He’d thought this was his last message to me. He’d simply wanted to express his love.
Afraid I was too late I hurried to the kitchen table and wrote back to him.
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Bill Vernon spends time writing, hiking, folk dancing, and babysitting. His novel OLD TOWN (Five Star Mysteries, Thomson-Gale) connects the expulsion of the original inhabitants of southern Ohio to its residents today. Shorter fiction of his has appeared in Synkroniciti Magazine, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, and New Feathers Anthology.
© 2025, Bill Vernon
Halfway Down the Stairs 