The stranger didn’t know I just watched my brother die. I stepped into the elevator to the neurology critical care unit for the last time. Beside me stood a tall, older man. For a moment, we locked eyes and I recognized in him what I felt in myself—a heavy heart.
“God be with you,” he said as he walked onto the fourth floor—respiratory ICU. “And with you,” I replied, seconds before the elevator doors shut. In the final hours of Barry’s life, I shared the gospel with him (again), prayed for him and held his hand as he entered eternity.
Initially, he went for a routine surgical procedure. Instead, he endured four heart attacks and he coded four times. The doctors successfully resuscitated him. But he lost fourteen minutes of oxygen. Several days later, he suffered a debilitating stroke. After an agonizing month of medical ups and downs, he passed away.
Sibling relationships can often be complicated. Ours was more so than most. Barry had not spoken with me or my other siblings in a few years. In his last weeks, we experienced incredible joy as we reconnected with him and he with us. But what is lost intensifies the grief.
“This isn’t how God created the world to be,” I heard myself say to him at his deathbed. Yet here we were. The truth is these circumstances force me to a universal reality: We are all surrounded by brokenness, pain, sin, and death.
