My Little Brother in ICU

I sit with my little brother in ICU. On monitors around his bed, lights blink and alarms beep. The infection causes his body to convulse and the bed to shake.

I am taken back almost six decades. He’s a baby in a carriage. It is my job to jiggle him to sleep. And what a job!

He was a high-gear baby, his motor stuck in fast. And so alert that he missed nothing. A wrinkle in his diaper, the flick of a light switch, the scrape of a chair across a floor in the next room, a dog barking in the next block—any of these could jerk him back from the brink of sleep.

If I got the jiggle wrong, his fists clenched and his back arched. And what came from his mouth was more than a cry. It was an urgent demand. It was as if he was announcing to the world that he was going to be a handful.

And he was. A delightful handful.

One of the joys of my childhood was to teach my little brother to read. It wasn’t hard. Being a teacher, I decided, as we bent together over Dick and Jane books, would be easy and fun.

Perhaps he led me into my life-long fascination with how people learn. His mind seemed to be in a constant firestorm of mental activity. Already as a toddler, he showed early signs of his ability to think rigorously and skillfully. And this propensity to actively question every step of the thinking process turned him later into an editor, and still later into a professor.

Tomorrow, surgeons will open my little brother’s infected heart. They aim to clean it of infection and rebuild the parts infection has destroyed.

But now, infection shakes his body. I wish I could pick him up and wrap him tight. I wish I could put him into a baby carriage and jiggle him, just right. And help him into a peaceful, healing sleep.

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Postscript: My little brother’s surgery is complete. His heart is repaired. Now for the difficult healing.