This page is a tribute to my brother whose bravery and tenacity has filled me with admiration, awe and sadness - admiration as I am not sure that I would ever be able to play the game as well as he did with the cards he was dealt.  Sad, as it is terrible that someone that displayed his love for life in the way he played his hand, while at the same time knowing that he would not be able to win, and who despite the will to live, died.

Piero's death made him great.  His death has taught me more about life than what I have learnt in 35 years, sadly all that seems to make sense at the moment are cliches - time will make it better, when the chips are down you sure know who your friends are, blood is thicker than water (cringe as I teach students every year that blood is not thicker than water).

I am struggling to make sense of life post-Piero, or rather life post-Piero-in-physical-form, as he continues to live in my thoughts, my practices, and he has in dying, changed my perspective on things that I thought no-one would ever be able to change.  Piero will continue to live, as we were bound in an inalienable relationship, not even death can change that relationship.  He will always be my brother, my baby brother, my only brother - and as he died so young, he will be forever young.

I am struggling to function in this liminal state, I cannot accept that his death has resulted in me making a transition from being the eldest child to the only child, and I am not sure that I can deal with this new social position, as ironically, Piero and I always discussed how different only children were from us.  His death has made me one of 'them', an other - that makes me feel alienated from what we were. 

The above two paragraphs contradict each other, I know, but although I'll always tell people that I am the eldest of two, and that my younger brother died, in the rat race in which people serve their instrumental concerns, I am very much an only child - a sad state, as unlike only children that have always been alone, my status is the result of unspeakable loss, a loss which means that I have to now engage socially in relationships dominated by instrumental concerns, and have lost the surity of knowing that there was someone who I could be in a non-instrumental relation with. 

Piero, I love you, I miss you, and I am angry at you for leaving this world and making me 'other'