I talked to Marc Cherry, my brother’s guitar teacher and friend, last week. And while I was talking to him I had a flashback to the day of my brother’s funeral.

This week, I got an envelope in the mail from a family friend with an old article about Ted in it from Time magazine. The headline (I don’t have it in front of me at the moment) was something like Ted’s Little World. Which, knowing him, and being a journalist myself, i.e. someone who’s tasked with grasping the reality of a story, grates a bit.

I’ve got rule breaking on my mind today.

This morning my dad texted me to tell me that someone named Jay Freireich had died. It was not unexpected, as my dad said. He was in his early nineties…either ninety-three or ninety-four. And yet. Age doesn’t really matter (as my brother has proven) does it? What matters is the impact you made on people while you were here, I think. If you make an impact, that means that the people you leave in your wake feel it deeply, whatever your age, whether your demise is expected, or not.

One of the things about being a kid in a tough situation, a gritty, adult, children-shouldn’t-have-to-experience this situation, is that people, i.e. adults, don’t tell them things.

My brother’s name (Theodore) was eminently nickname-able. He went through a few versions of it before settling on Ted, and then woe be it unto you if you called him Teddy.

His friend Norm was similar, except that Norm (presumably short for Norman…I was a kid, I never asked) preferred to go by a completely different name: Kevin James.

There’s a thing I do when I’m working on a new project…I “collect” books and movies that are relevant, in some ways. For example, when I was writing The Empty Room, I read tons of memoirs that, even peripherally, mentioned sibling loss. Same for movies. They help me think and process. I have a list going for Finding Ted, too.

One of the memorable events every year, in my brother’s world, were his New Year’s parties. They were never actually on New Year’s, because people tended to have other, outside world, plans on that day. Instead, they were scheduled a week or so later, to make sure that the select list of invitees could come.

In 2008, Seth Godin published a book called Tribes which I have, full disclosure, not yet read. That said, it was talked about a lot at the time, this idea of finding your group of like-minded people, and it stuck with me. It stuck with a lot of people, and for good reason. Aren’t we all looking for people who resonate with us? Who feel like extended family? Who feel, somehow, connected?

I was walking down the street somewhere recently in New York City, and suddenly spied a branch adorned with some hard looking, dark green, geometrical leaves and a spray of small orange berries poking through a black wrought iron fence. It immediately took me back….