I Miss My Brother

(From my memoir, pages 2-3.)

Nicholas John Methot was two years my senior. He had fair skin, covered in freckles, blue eyes, and a head full of reddish-brown curls that tightened with age. He was always a head taller than me, but small for his age, nonetheless. In some ways, we looked alike—in our noses and ears, and thick, often wild heads of hair—but mostly, we were different, in both looks and temperament.

Cross-country ski race at Mountain Top

Nick was quiet and shy, curious, creative, and introverted. He wore glasses as a child and was, in stark contrast to me, well-behaved—a parenting dream for the most part. We were always together—Nick and Nate, to the neighborhood kids—we rode bikes, caught frogs, and found sledding hills in the winter.

I was always the instigator with Nick. If we didn’t have something to do—on a rainy day in the house, torturing our mom with cries of “I’m bored…”—I’d poke the bear. I was such a little asshole. A handful is the polite way to put it. Strong-willed and independent makes me sound like less of a villain.

By the time he went off to college (he attended the University of Vermont [“UVM”] and lived in the dorms), we’d found our own interests. I hardly remember seeing him in the high school hallways. I spent nights and weekends at the family restaurant, bought my own car, and moved my room to the basement. He found a passion in running, hung out at his girlfriend’s, and spent his summers doing almost masochistic levels of physical labor for a small-time contractor. (I worked with him for one day, digging a drainage ditch through clay and mixing bag after bag of cement to repair a foundation. It made days at the restaurant seem like a breeze.)

The four of us were back in the house—a postwar ranch on Dumont Avenue by the Burlington International Airport—after my freshman year at Villanova University. I’d already decided not to return, applied and was accepted to UVM, and had a carefree summer ahead. My parents had finally decided to rip out the brown, poodle-haired wall-to-wall living room carpet and have the hardwood floors refinished throughout the house. My mémère (French Canadian for grandmother) was visiting her sister in Manchester, New Hampshire; we stayed at her house around the corner.

Asleep on the foldout (legendary) blue couch in the sunroom addition at the back of the house, as a clock radio alarm continued its call in the background, I was awoken to screams from the bedrooms. I’d never heard such a sound. In the morning light of Friday, June 6, 2003, we discovered my brother—half slumped off the bed, an open book by his side, his face blue and cold. His heart had stopped beating after the house went dark for the night.