How do you comfort the dying if you are uncomfortable with death? I don’t know, because from recent experience, I couldn’t.

I have been reading quite a lot about loss and grief and this question always comes up. I have found none of it convincing. I could not tell you what makes a “good death,” but there are plenty of others who seem more than willing.

My brother died about a year and half ago. My overwhelming pain at the time was one of regret. It still is.

It was a long struggle for my brother from the day he was diagnosed with lymphoma and was told that it was incurable; but it could be treated. The cancer could be pushed into remission. If he was lucky, in a very warped way, he might die of a heart attack in twenty years time before the cancer returned.

I had my part in his treatment: a trip to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital to be a bone marrow transplant donor. Being somewhat dim, I had a thoroughly Aussie attitude to it. “Sure, let’s do it. She’ll be right.” That’s until I entered the oncology ward at Royal Brisbane and saw everyone getting their chemo, sometimes with anxious loved ones watching on. My thinking changed to, “Oh shit. I am such a dickhead. This is life and death stuff.”

The transplant was deemed a success. It all went very well. Until it didn’t. A bone marrow transplant is a last resort treatment. The figures I came across about transplants aren’t so good on long-term survival. Almost half the time the cancer returns in a year. That’s how it was for my brother. He died one week short of the one-year anniversary of the transplant and two-and-a-half years after his diagnosis.

I visited him a month before his death. It was my last chance to speak to him. The mouth opened and all that came out was trivia. Trivia about sport. I knew someone who knew someone who was playing on the Queensland State of Origin Rugby League team. I was able to pass on second-hand gossip about the trouble they were having at their training sessions.

The last thing I said to my brother was about how I’d be up again soon in August. Only when I was walking back to the place where I was staying did I figure out the look that he had on his face when I said it. “I won’t make it to August.” He didn’t.

So there were no last words of any significance. There was no solace.

Yet when I think about what I really wanted to say to my brother, I still can’t come up with a clear statement.

Something about love? We’re Australian males in our late fifties. We don’t do love. Sure, with wives and kids you do it, but even then not with too much emotion. But brothers who grew up together in the sixties? No. Don’t be silly.

I could have given him some pathetic philosophy on the meaning of life and death. I’ll paraphrase some of the things I’ve read. I will not be infringing on any copyright. There’s nothing original in any of it.

The very first thing I came across was the argument by Socrates that it’s senseless to fear death, since death is an unknown, simple nothingness. Someone in the agora must have argued to the old Greek fart that it’s that very nothingness that we fear. Alas, history doesn’t record his response.

Or how about something along the lines of — “The life story of every human being involves loss through death. Pets, friends, loved ones, then sooner or later, yourself. We must accept that loss will come.”

Or possibly — “The fear of death is something that has been learned and is not in harmony with natural experience. We must re-establish that harmony.”

If I had attempted to say any of those things, in a less pedantic way of course, my brother would have stared at me as if I were a wanker talking a lot of bullshit, which is exactly what I would have been.

I think the advice I’ve been reading about death is just another magical salvation, like those promised by all sorts of religions, traditional and new age. I reckon that if the authors had to face death and listened to their own ideas come back to them, their last moments of life would be spent dealing with the shock at what dreadful wankers they were.

The fact is that I couldn’t even say the d-word to my brother. Maybe it was superstition. Maybe if I said the word out loud, he might think I want it to happen. Or if I said it out loud, it would happen sooner. Or if I didn’t say it, maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t happen at all.

I know in my head that it’s important for people who are dying to reflect on what gave their life meaning. You should help them try to remember what made them most proud. Talk about it with them.

Yet that’s all crap in your head. When I was actually sitting there with him, all I ended up talking about was sport. Or the old man. Complaints about our father were always a staple. You couldn’t go wrong with that.

I think it was the fear in him that I wanted to talk about. I wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to tell him not to be afraid. Quite rightly, his response would probably have been, “Easy for you, you’re not the one fucking dying.”

How could I tell him not to be afraid when I was so fearful?

When my brother, his family, and I had finished lunch one day, the rest of us cleaned up the table and went inside to the kitchen. We talked about…well, I don’t quite remember what we talked about but clearly it was nothing worth remembering. My brother was left sitting outside by himself. It felt like he was already halfway to leaving us and we were accepting it as the way it was going to be.

Maybe he was fine. Maybe he was at peace with the fact that people die, families dissolve, lovers part, friends detach, and life disappoints. I don’t know because I didn’t talk to him about it. I did not know what he was thinking. I did not know his mind.

One thing I did know without talking about it was that he hated losing his autonomy as he lost the ability to care for himself. Pain, dread, false hope, then the exhaustion as the body completely breaks down.

Maybe our grief and helplessness at his situation, no matter how well or badly we dealt with it, also exhausted him. He didn’t need that on top of the cancer.

All these things came into my head all the time, all these things I wanted to say, but I knew that saying any one of these things would not have been useful or caring. Worst of all, it probably would have come over as sort of stupid in the situation. Or maybe my brother would have been embarrassed if any of these things were talked about. I just don’t know.

Now in an essay of this nature, this would be the part where I’d talk more about my brother’s life — his personality, his likes, his dreams, his hates, his quirks. Maybe I’d recall a funny story or two.

I don’t have much. He and I weren’t that close for a long time. We did everything together up to when I was about nine and he was seven. Then we started to have different interests. I left my hometown while he stayed. About forty years of his life are hardly known to me. We did our own things, lived our own lives, far away from each other.

Everything I know about him is from when we were young, and my memory only gives me an image of him that I can’t quite get into focus. When I try hard to think of it, my past rolls over me like a dumper wave, knocking me down hard, rolling me about, then leaving me jumping up and gasping for air as it finally recedes, yet I’m no better off remembering.

It’s sad for me to say that the most I had to do with him since we were about ten was in the last two years of his life, because of his illness and being the transplant donor for him.

After hardly speaking on the phone for years, he’d called me quite a few times before the transplant, asking how all the tests were going. I assured him that it was all good. (I was still in the “she’ll be right” mindset.) Only after the event did I understand that he was anxious. I was his last resort and if I did something stupid like fall off my mountain bike and break something, then the transplant would be a no-go.

What I can say about him is that he was a solid Australian man in all the best ways. He was hardworking, dependable, friendly, and he liked a laugh. He was never loud and rarely aggressive (except on the footy field), hardly ever did anger get the better of him. He was rarely sick or missed work, until the cancer. His work being on the local council, operating heavy machinery such as graders and bulldozers.

Most of all, he was tough. All his life he took physical and emotional knocks that would have floored me. The nurses who attended him while he received his cancer treatment were always amazed at the doses of chemotherapy that the doctors prescribed for him. His cancer was aggressive and the treatment was in kind.

He was also brave. While he might have been afraid and dismayed at what was happening to him, he was no coward. I know how brave he was because I’ve got a very good reference point for comparison. I’m piss weak. In that way we were quite unlike each other.

To even it up, I feel the need to talk about some of the less admirable aspects of my brother’s character. But I’m still in that haze of grief where I just can’t remember a single bad thing about him. There had to be plenty. I just can’t bring them to mind. If I do remember something bad, I quickly realize that I was the one in the wrong, not him.

When I last saw him, he might have been waiting for me to speak, waiting to see if I would break through and say something. But the words stuck in my throat like fish bones. I wanted to say something, anything more than trivia. I feel I failed him and failed myself. I was afraid that he knew I was struggling to say something. Piss weak as always, that’s what I think he was thinking. He would have been right.

I couldn’t talk to him because what I was struggling with was my own fear. Maybe what I should have talked about was my own fear. If my younger brother was going, then surely I’d be next. I couldn’t find the words, not for him but for me.

But if I had said something about my fear, my brother might have been the one to find the right comforting words for me. That wouldn’t have been right at all. Or maybe it would have been. Maybe that’s how it should have been. Maybe it’s the dying who really provide the solace.

Yet I couldn’t make an emotional circus of it — that would have been awful. Remember, we’re Australian males in our late fifties. I certainly wasn’t going to do a “you’re going to get a big hug, brother, whether you want one or not.”

I have learned the lesson that life is full of holes, full of absences and losses, where things and people once were but are no longer.

I still feel I needed to say something to my brother. Something that I hope he would have appreciated. The best I can come up with now is:

Take care, Bill. I’ll be joining you soon enough. I hope I’m as brave as you when it all goes down.

I could not say the words. All my brother got was silence.

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