There were four brothers.
They were born in a rural part of Georgia, so poor that the Great Depression did not much change their lives. They were born to work a farm that their father had pieced together by doing anything it took to make money, and were raised to work that farm because it was the only choice. They lived under a grim reality: their mother lost in childbirth; their father was sparing of praise; there was only one school they could attend and it was as poor as they. The future offered little hope, so they would have to make it themselves.
They grew into young men, each in their own way, shaped by the reality of their lives and the individual nature of their personalities. They looked similar, talked the same, but each were as different as their two sisters. They lived as a family in a community of family, down the hill from their grandparents, not far from innumerable cousins, aunts and uncles. It was an insular life, separated from the world by the distance a person could walk, or could ride a mule, in the daylight hours. It was a world in which time itself played a role we today could never understand: a time to plant, a time to harvest; time to sit beside you on a wagon seat, a presence to share the hours riding to town to sell cotton, or butterbeans, or firewood, or whatever it would take to live another day.
They grew up in this world, but after December 1941 they were forced to leave. They each went into the United States Navy, a strange choice for men who had never seen the ocean, but the choice sent them out into the wider world. They served in the Atlantic and they served in the Pacific. They witnessed battles but were untouched by war, and they lived among men who were far different from themselves, with different habits, conflicts and histories. When they left the service, they were all different for this experience: regimented, steady, controlled.
They returned and started families. They lived and made friends. They worked and earned the money they made. They were not perfect, but they all became fathers with families of their own.
The oldest died a few years ago, followed soon after by the youngest. The next youngest, my father, died two years ago. The second oldest died last night.
There were four brothers who lived lives that will not be marked by historians, who made no permanent mark on the world. They were each quietly competent, each quietly different, each tied to a common history, and each of them, in turn, have now passed away.
There were four brothers and now they have gone.
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Postscript - Thanks to all for putting me on the Spotlight. Please be thinking of my cousins Lynn, Lori, Mike and my uncle's only grandchild, Sarah.