Crossing the bar

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

-Tennyson

Apple fritter

Perspective

Concert

Before the past couple of years, I could probably count on one hand the concerts I’ve attended:

• Steve Miller Band at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in high school, featuring underwear-bearing and panty-throwing middle-aged women

• A clenched-jawed, violently hungover 21st birthday gift to a roadhouse to see Randy Rogers

• Sister Hazel at Fort Worth’s Main St. Arts Festival

• The LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl, twice — once under the charismatic Bramwell Tovey and once under the venerable John Williams

I’m surely missing some, though surely I’d have no need to incorporate toes for an accurate number. Concert attendance remained an uncommon enough event that most of them stand out, and most were undertaken at a once-every-few-years cadence.

Why? Part of me thinks the vast majority of artists sound better when recording music in a controlled studio environment. Partly it’s the noisy, crowded environment, anathema to an introvert. Partly cause I just didn’t get it – why would you go to a chaotic, live, possibly lower-quality event where everyone is singing or yelling, when you could listen to an album with a good pair of headphones and catch all the nuances in the recording?

Partly it’s the simple fact that I like music, but I am probably in the midpoint or lower of music appreciators. Music will move me emotionally and has been the soundtrack to my life like any normie, but I certainly don’t have the range or depth of interest to separate me from a passionate fan or proper artist.

If anything, my relationship to music has cooled over the past few years. This grief journey, which has led to being emotionally open to new experiences, also coincided with developments like owning newer vehicles that don’t even have a CD deck anymore – gasp! Forced to enter the era of compressed streaming audio, I’ve enjoyed indie radio stations and discovering new music but became more likely to treat music as background noise rather than an album to be experienced.

Which naturally leads me to Albert Camus.

---

In a recent piece, philosopher Sean Illing explains the dangers of living in a society that elevates abstraction over experience. He references Camus’ post-WWII concerns about hazards inherent to abstractive ideologies and the resultant spiral to political nihilism. Particularly incisive is his observation that nihilism doesn’t necessary refer to believing in nothing, but to refusing to believe in the world as it is. Nihilism is despair. But he also elucidates how braving those hazards can lead to sharing some of the noblest human bonds.

Like Frankl’s logotherapy, Camus posits that there is a certain solace amid horror, be it disease or war or disaster – any horror sufficient to forge necessary community among calamity. Right now, that could mean we share outrage at the plight of Ukraine, or a coursing pandemic, or for Uvalde, but…we share. Being together in that resistance – that defiance – for something better is a collective bond with your fellow citizens, our fellow human beings.

“The problem is that solidarity often slips away in the mechanics of everyday life. But the empathy and love fueling that desire to help in a crisis is a constant possibility.”

And that possibility is a choice we can choose to make every day. Within that choice is the lens we will use to see our world: defiant optimism or ideological pessimism. Or to paraphrase Camus: optimism is to resist despair.

Which naturally brings me to Garth Brooks.

---

The day before Garth’s literally earth-shaking concert at LSU’s Tiger Stadium, I probably could’ve been convinced to give my tickets to a deserving pair. They were a cherished gift, but hey – it’s just a concert. I don’t really go to concerts.

Fortunately, nobody asked, so I went in expecting merely a pleasant experience in a hallowed location. But before Callin’ Baton Rouge tipped the campus seismograph, 102,000 of my colleagues gave me a revelation. As did Garth. Some residue of self-consciousness had obscured it until then, but all those people were there to sing songs with him, and he was there to listen to them sing. The point of the concert was to be there together.

Hello, Samantha dear.

Reflecting on why I was so emotionally moved by a community singalong, it occurred to me that for an admitted word dork, it hadn’t occurred to me before that “community” etymologically refers to together-service: one voice among many, among 102,000, but singing one song.

---

On the drive home, I stopped to visit Menachim Aveilim, the cemetery in Lafayette where my dad rests. The grass has grown over the gravesite. The dirt is level. It looks like it belongs there, not like a fresh maiming of Earth. It is a scabbed-over wound; the healing is underway. For the first time since his interment, I did not cry when standing above my father’s grave.

I visited during the ongoing Festival International de Louisiane, a music and arts festival. Amid the drizzle of a spring shower and poncho-muffled voices of the gathering celebrants, the sounds of fiddles and gospel choirs drifted through the raindrops.

Spirit

In the summer of 2006, my brother and I worked on our uncle’s ranch northeast of San Diego. We cleared trees, fed horses, split wood, mowed grass, laid rubber pellets in a horse pen, and (in my case) got a scorching case of poison oak.

In the bucolic mountains, before the era of the ubiquitous smart phone, there was extremely limited cell service. (A stump you could stand on in the driveway of the main house marked the spot.) The only things you could hear besides the tractor and machinery were the lows of cows, whinnies of horses, and tinny Panic at the Disco songs from the under-cabinet radio in the workers’ house kitchen, which picked up three stations depending on the time of day.

Aside from weekend trips into town for groceries, all we had for entertainment was that radio and a Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine that he’d yanked on his flight out, because it had an article about wiffle ball. 

We read every page of it, repeatedly. Every page. The tantalizing ads for Vegas restaurants. The wiffle ball tips, though we had no wiffles. The Donald Trump real estate seminar (featuring George Foreman) in the back. The crossword prompts, cursing the son of a bitch who did it in pen. The corporate ephemera and infographics. Towards the end, the fine print on ads. Every page. “It’s my turn,” we would angrily mutter halfway through our sandwiches. 

It felt like stilted, abject boredom at the time, but I just paid $22.75 on blessed eBay for a copy of the June 2006 Spirit magazine. What a great memory.

Darmok

"He who was my companion through adventure and hardship is gone forever.”

I am a dork, not to be confused with a nerd (who is productive), and I watched Star Trek as a kid. We watched it together. The “Darmok” episode’s take on interspecies communication and the Epic of Gilgamesh flew a bit over the head of a second grader, but it reappeared later during my brief stint at Rhodes, his future alma mater.

Like any good liberal arts college, Rhodes has two tracks of required humanities programs students must take: Search or Life. Life focused more on religious text, so if I had to guess, he was like me and selected the Search option, which is more broadly about the foundations of western cultural values. As I recall, they kick it off at the beginning — a look at Gilgamesh.

Back then the words meant very little to this dumbassed 18 year old, but they do now. As does the letterboxed episode of a sci-fi show produced thirty years ago.

Sir Patrick Stewart delivered a performance worth remastering and putting on Netflix, so now I can watch and rewatch S5E2 if I want to remember either a runty dingus who pretended to be Geordi La Forge, or a grown man who was a source of great joy during adventure and steadfast reliance during hardship.

It gets easier, but it is not painless.

Should not my cheeks be emaciated, my expression desolate;

Should my heart not be wretched, my features not haggard;

Should there not be sadness deep within me;

Should I not look like one who has been traveling a long distance, and should ice and heat not have seared my face;

Should I not roam the wilderness?

The gate of grief must be bolted shut, sealed with pitch and bitumen.

Greatness

My grieving process began in 2016 — March 5, to be specific, the day my grandmother passed. Her protracted decline offered a front-row seat to the heartbreak of my chronically ill father, undoubtedly also grappling with his own mortality in his own stoic way.

I drove him down to Baton Rouge to visit her, near the end. It had been several years since I’d been close to someone who only had a foot left in the door of life. In that familiar living room turned hospice ward, I felt for the first time the chest-crushing grasp of anxiety that would be become a close companion in coming years.  

I ignored it, as I had any emotional vulnerability for years. I cried during her funeral service, an ocular contact allergy to funeral services I still possess. The heavy weight of loss was leavened by the Hebraic tendency toward levity.

So I moved on. Her decline was so protracted and her stubbornness of life so intractable, it felt like she had evaporated away slowly instead of being here and then gone suddenly. A lioness was gently pet to sleep by devoted nurses and doting children.

Which naturally brings me to Kobe Bryant.

About a month later, he was going to play his final game: the 16-65 Lakers vs. the 40-41 Jazz. The all-time great deserved to go out more honorably than hobbling through a tanking season, but we don’t get to author our own screenplays; we just write the dialogue.

I sat down to watch this little digestif of history, expecting little more than a curtain call for a staple of my youth and formative adulthood. He was the Xennial NBA star, sandwiched between Jordan and LeBron. I had even been treated — an odd word for a Houston fan — to seeing him hitting a dagger three against the Rockets in the momentous 2009 season.

It felt inevitable: The Rockets took a single-point lead with under a minute to play, but Kobe buried a 27-foot three with 27 seconds left, and that was it. We all felt it coming; he simply felt it; and that inimitable shot and swagger was impressive to witness in person.

The Lakers and Rockets would go on to a six-round heavyweight fight for the de-facto championship in the conference semifinals that year. The Lakers won, of course, then claimed the penultimate championship of the Kobe era.

Fast forward several years, and the tyranny of aging and the cyclical nature of NBA rosters had reduced the Lakers to a rump state and Kobe to a Wizards-era Jordan: A legend you dare not besmirch, but not because the Mamba still had venom.

But I watched. I admired his commitment to a single franchise, to retire wearing a single uniform whose colors I admittedly don’t mind. I have a distinct memory of watching a late-era Jordan take a game-winning shot and missing it. Would Kobe follow the same quiet end, or was there one more 27-footer in him?

So I watched.

The Lakers were losing, unsurprisingly, but Kobe was scoring buckets, with more than 30 points through three quarters. Down 12 with under 10 minutes to play, he hit a three. Under 10 points is doable. The Jazz responded with a three. Kobe hit another one. The Mamba flicked his tongue, tasting victory.

And I watched.

Down 10 with just over three minutes left, Kobe Bryant scored 17 straight points for his team, dished an assist for the icing dunk and a 101-96 lead with four seconds left, and left the court a winner.  

Most of the talk about that game centers on his 60-point performance, but that’s not what impresses me; it was the way he emptied his tank in the last quarter of his playing career. He didn’t score points to look good. Kobe abjectly refused to end on anything but a win.  

I wept for a player I’d never possessed any specific affinity for, on a team I didn’t care about. Maybe because it was so esoteric, a titanic performance for a mere 17th win on the season. Maybe it’s because I knew these events were somehow connected, somehow.

Part of me recognized I was witnessing an end, albeit of a different kind, and my refusal to process the grief of losing my grandmother was manifesting itself in tears for a basketball player.

Which naturally brings me to my dad.

My dad had a saying: End on a make. I’m sure all of his players learned that during his coaching days, but it was just as true shooting hoops in the driveway as a child. You don’t walk off the court (or concrete) without your last shot going through the hoop.

Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it took losing all of these people to recognize the temporal nature of greatness, in all its forms: Player. Coach. Parent. I cried again yesterday, but not because I was sad a basketball player had died. I cried for the grieving, with sympathy for the pain of sudden loss. I cried for the loss of idyllic childhood moments.

I mourned the loss of greatness.

Atonement

Perfection is in a moment. It is not static. It is a fleeting experience. Perfection is a painting hanging on the wall that somebody observes and passes by. Perfection is not a word we can use often.

Last February, I was given the opportunity to visit LSU’s locker room, walk through the chute, touch the Win Bar, and enter a silent Tiger Stadium. It never rains there, of course, but it was cloudy and gray that day. Welcome to Death Valley, the sign said. I believed it. And I believed this team would become champions again.

I did not believe it would only take 10 months.

On New Year’s Eve 2012, I sat with my brother in our dilapidated townhouse and watched a listless team get kicked to the curb by an elated Clemson squad. We’d started 2012 sleeping off the bitter denial of a national championship game shutout in an even more dilapidated Lakeside tenement.

The Clemson loss, even more than the Alabama shutout, marked the beginning of a decline that lasted most of the decade. Often touching greatness without grasping it, these Tigers would pour their hearts out onto the field but were unable to beat Bama nor vindicate the program with a championship.

Then a homegrown new coach restored pride in 2016. 2017 brought humility. 2018 touched that greatness again, ringing like a distant bell. And then came 2019.

“I don’t think a lot of people are used to LSU scoring 40, 50, 60 points a game,” Joe Burrow said in the preseason, burnishing the reputation of the nation’s offensive punchline.

And then they punched touchdowns into the endzone of every team they faced. The legend is well known now, and most of it came on the road: 3rd-and-17 in Austin; Roll Tide What?™; mangling a succession of top-5 teams in Atlanta and New Orleans.

Alabama is the game that mattered more than any of the others. The season began and ended in Tuscaloosa. The Tigers sauntered in and dropped 46 on them, more points than any team has ever scored there in regulation. In the truer-than-he-realizes words of Jason Kirk: “They haven’t known fear since [46-41] happened.” They threw off the crimson yoke, and then they finished plowing the field anyway.

Success this century was imperfect: In 2003, they won a title with a single loss; in 2007, they won it with two losses; in 2011, they smelled perfection before having the cloche lifted to reveal nothing but wisps of steam. But in 2019, they feasted.

Then they danced on the carcass.

Like I wrote last winter, I concede it might just be a game. Already, coaches and players are moving on to the next stages of their professional lives, good memories of their championship season tucked away like snacks in picnic baskets. Maybe it’s just football.

Maybe it’s not. Try telling that to the generations of Louisianans, from Grand Isle to Ida, crying together over the outcome of a game. They won’t get mad; they’ll pity you, shaking their heads because you just don’t get it.

Tell it to the teeming thousands in the Superdome. We roared alongside the head coach, Bebe from the bayou. He vindicated himself to the country in the one state that can truly understand him, an hour from his hometown, in the very same building where our world had tilted off of its axis in January of 2012.

Fans leaving the Superdome entered a New Orleans concealed in fog yet clear as a sunny spring day. We walked, danced, and stumbled into a shrouded midnight in America’s most haunted place, a city alight with smiles and joy.

We had seen perfection.    

On the way home, those gray skies finally opened up over Lecompte, right as I passed the exit for Lea’s Lunchroom, an oasis in the pine desert of I-49. We shared a ham lunch there years ago on a shambling trip home after a win over the Aggies.

The raindrops battered my windshield, but this time I did not shed a tear.

I am both over and very much not over losing my brother.

Welcome to Death Valley

It is a pantheon of concrete and steel.

It is a city that rises defiantly in the delta alongside the father of waters.

It is the humidity of autumn evenings that drapes stately oaks and broad magnolias.

It is haunted ... and it is loud.

It is Halloween night and Cannon blasts.

It is a Louisiana gumbo of humanity that cheers its Tigers to victory and destroys the dreams of invading foes.

Chance of rain is ... never!

It is the cathedral of college football and worship happens here.

When the sun finds its home in the western sky, it is a field of glory for sure...

But much more than that, it is a sacred place.

And it is Saturday night in Death Valley.

—“Saturday in Death Valley” by Dan Borne

I grew up a Tiger.

Nevermind the handful of pictures of toddler me in A&M shirts or sweatshirts; I was born in Bryan, Texas — practically in the shadow of Kyle Field — and I don’t remember wearing them, anyway. I have no memory in my life of a time before purple and gold, nor of spelling “go” without a few extra vowels.

I grew up attending games, but my first year as a student brought me the 2003 season, and the UGA game in particular. I got chills just from typing that, as I do every time I think about the crowd spontaneously bursting into the L-S-U chant after the Bulldogs tied it up late. The crowd willed victory into existence. Skyler Green’s ensuing catch was preordained.

Then followed a slew of great memories of LSU football’s modern glory years:

Paying witness to the defiant will of Louisiana and her inhabitants during the hurricane-marred 2005 season.

Then graduation, hopping onto the 2007 roller coaster season and carousing through the French Quarter to celebrate a home-brewed championship.

2011’s greatest regular season of all time. (And thanks again to the Quarter, precious few memories from that year’s championship game.)

In 2010, the girl I brought to the Alabama game took a tailgating-assisted tumble on the sidewalk. Scraped up and offhandedly complaining about a sore shoulder, she was still a trouper and made it through the game. Two weeks later she had to have surgery for a grade-two dislocation. (I sent flowers.)

I’m still grateful for her toughness, because since then I sat through the consecutive crimson heartbreaks in 2012 and 2014, and the consecutive shutouts in our last two home contests.

That bitter taste has been bolstered by the bold seasonings of sleepwalking through a shutout to basement-dwelling hogs, last-second bowl losses, and the ignominious ends to our winning streaks over Miss State and the Aggies.

But it’s the bitter that makes the sweet, and we still win more than we lose. There’s no team in this country — nor any fan who attends — who leaves a Saturday night in Death Valley the same.

So... I get it. I know what makes Louisiana, and LSU in particular, special. I’m a fan not just by upbringing, geography or pedigree. I’ve lived it.

I’ve paid my Tiger taxes: Making the long drive across I-20 and  down I-49 for games, and buying tickets, parking passes, and the new branded Nike Free shoes (which are, by the way, the most comfortable I own and worth every penny).

But those things aren’t what true fandom is about.

I’ve spent many years reveling in worship in the cathedral of college football, but I admit my rites and rituals were empty. I’d never claim to actually bear the purple and gold stigmata.

My indifference was justified by practicality, equivocation: It’s a business. It’s a fun hobby but only a game. They’re just kids trying to get a degree or make their living.

And then suddenly last year, my father and my little brother — fans, true fans — were gone within four months of each other. The former unexpectedly, from a cardiac event; the latter after a rapid but agonizing battle with cancer.

Yet neither were officially alumni: My dad left LSU a semester shy of graduation, and my brother was an ABC after graduating from Rhodes College in Memphis. How true a fan can you be without the necessary paperwork? Purely, it turns out.

My dad: In 2013, he suffered symptoms we feared might be a stroke. As a type 1 diabetic, he had a number of health problems, and our family was familiar with both of Fort Worth’s main hospitals. We asked him which one he wanted to go to. His answer: "The one with ESPNU." The game (UAB) would be on the next day.

As he was checked into the ER, the triage nurse asked him standard assessment questions, including if he'd ever thought of harming himself or others. His slurred response: "Do you know who Nick Saban is?"

My brother: He was an Aggie-leaning youth, but we really won him over as a teenaged guest to the student section at its best, amid one of those frenetic moments — the snarl of a tiger, cornered, ears back, vicious, continuous — when he turned to me with his eyes wide and mouth open, unable to hear his own screams. And later, as a former high school defensive backs coach who appreciated good defense.

On his deathbed in October, four days before he’d be gone, and the day after the Miss St game — after a family friend got word to Coach Aranda that a guy to whom he’d already sent an encouraging note was in his final days, and Aranda replied that they’d “dial one up,” then throttled Moo U — my little brother pointed at the door and said he wanted to go to Tiger Stadium.

No framed sheepskin of mine outweighs the credentials of men who saw death waiting on the other side of the chute and touched the Win Bar on their way out to meet it.

The diseases that killed them weren’t infectious, but the Tigers are: Now my Aggie mother and Badger sister-in-law say they’re our fans, too.

In September, I cried in Jerryworld because my dad missed the Tigers’ playful romp over Miami. I shed tears writing this thinking about the last text my brother would ever send me, amid the riotous celebration following the unexpected delight of beating down previously unbeaten UGA in October: “Looks like crunkville down there.”

I tear up thinking not just about how much I miss them, but how much they will miss: More heartbreaks, assuredly, but also more championships.

They’ll miss our post-game debriefs at my uncle’s table, around cold Jay’s BBQ sandwiches or steaming bowls of crawfish stew. They’ll miss cursing at Gary Danielson’s haughty insolence and the interminable length of CBS commercial breaks. They’ll miss the inevitable ecstasy of throwing off the crimson yoke.

Now, and always, the tree near Gate 6 on the west side of Tiger Stadium will have a plaque sunk into the dark soil beneath it. That stately young oak will pay tribute to my brother, Cory; my father, Richard; and my grandfather, Johnny — probably the only person my dad would admit was an even bigger fan than he.

Those of us who remain will gather there, savor a moment of quiet reflection before the coming storm that never rains, then enter the gate that takes us to season tickets our family has held for more than three decades.

Welcome to Death Valley, the sign greets all visitors.

“It is haunted,” but not just by the ghosts of Halloween night. “It is loud,” and not just with Cannon blasts and cheering fans.

I don’t know the whole poem by heart. And though I know the words, I don’t typically sing the alma mater. I probably still won’t. I don’t know if my rites are pure. I don’t know if my rituals are enough.

But now I know what it means to be Forever LSU.

Shogun wedding

In mid-April of last year, we were all still cautiously optimistic. Thanks to the skilled hands and dedicated care of an excellent surgeon, my brother Cory’s surgery to remove a large tumor from his abdomen had been successful — or at least as successful as ripping a cantaloupe out of your guts and sewing you back together can be.

We waited for a formal diagnosis and official word that danger had passed or would at least be manageable, allowing life to resume its normal pace. There was a wedding only five months away, and planning had been disrupted by the sudden appearance and ferocious growth of the tumor. 

Though his scar healed, he didn’t seem to get markedly better. The fevers returned; his color didn’t. There was gnawing doubt about what the final word would be. As we eased nervously into the last week of April, of our dad’s birthday and his annual crawfish boil fiesta, Cory got the worst news imaginable.

The tumor had regrown, and it had spread. There was lymph node involvement, along with nodules on his liver. It was soft tissue sarcoma — “undifferentiated” in the medical parlance, which for the rest of us means it was a particularly bad version of a horrible thing. Stage VI, which needs no explanation.

Within a matter of days, he’d have a central line installed and would begin weeklong bouts of high-intensity inpatient chemotherapy. “High intensity” is a euphemism for saying they’ll kick you to the brink, then hopefully bring you back but leave the cancer on the doorstep.

Saying you’re fighting for your life implies a certain measure of fairness. This wasn’t going to be a fight so much as an ass-kicking. He’d have to fight the treatment intended to save him nearly as much as the disease trying to kill him. But he had Katie on his side. It didn’t make it fair, but the scales were at least a bit better balanced.

Cory and Katie’s wedding ceremony would be mostly for the celebration. They were already cohabitants, and already life partners. The solemnizing of the vows was a practical formality. In the preceding weeks, we’d joked about them doing the courthouse thing to ensure her legal rights to access her spouse receiving medical care. When he got the news, it wasn’t a joke but a necessity.

The birthday boil became an impromptu family reunion and rally. On Saturday, we’d feast; on Monday, he’d face a brown bag of poison dripping into his heart; but on Sunday, they’d get married. They’d done the paperwork with the county, and the two of them asked me to get legally ordained. By the power vested in me by a Google search, I became a minister of the Universal Life Church of California.

It would be casual, just the three of us. Nothing fancy, no frills, just getting the job done. The real wedding — the real party — would be in Madison, Wisconsin in September. But they did want to do it in a place they both loved: The quietude of the Japanese Garden, part of Fort Worth’s Botanic Garden.

I was led to believe it was a casual affair, just the three of us and some hastily acquired rings. I went to meet them wearing my finest drug-kingpin casual attire: a linen shirt and Lulu pants. When I arrived at their home, I found Katie dressed to the nines and being attended to by her photographer’s handpicked hair and makeup retinue. Cory was sporting a new slim-cut suit. It occurred to me then this was not be as casual as I expected, for any of us.

(How and why a photographer was there to begin with is an entirely different story, and you can read it here. Kristina shot the absolute hell out of 20 minutes in the Japanese Garden.)

The norms of a wedding were in place: They did not see each other as they dressed, and they would drive separately, me taking him over early to stake out a perfect spot to exchange vows. The park requires passes for photography (and events), so the plan was simple: Buy a photo pass. Get in the park. Get married. Get him home to rest.

Upon arrival, there sure were a lot of cars in the parking lot. A surprising number people milling around, too. Cory noted it was a pretty good crowd for what’s supposed to be a sleepy Sunday afternoon. We arrived a little before 4 o’clock — plenty of time to spare before the 5 o’clock closing hour — and we waited in a line snaking through the gift shop for 15 minutes to buy tickets.

When we finally reached the cashier’s line, we learned the gift shop was only selling souvenirs that day. We were then directed to a tent in the parking lot for tickets to the festival…

…For the festival? The annual Japanese Spring Festival, which was happening that weekend.

Where large crowds can enjoy traditional Japanese dance, martial arts, music, and more.

A nice big audience instead of a sweet private moment among brothers and the betrothed.

The line at the tent was much shorter, so we figured we could still get safely in before Katie and Kristina, the photographer, arrived. Except the volunteer at the tent reminded us that the garden closes early for the festival. At 4 o’clock, in fact — in five minutes. The last tickets had been sold and entry to the garden was closed for the day.

Cory stalked off, fuming, a delicate balance between his classic Irish rage and an exhausted, pained body. I played the only card I could.

I leaned toward the turquoise-shirted volunteer, a lady somewhere between middle aged and retiree, and told her that I know this sounds like a made-up story, but that guy over there is my brother, and he has stage IV cancer, and I’m trying to get him married before he starts chemo tomorrow in order to make sure his fiancée would be able to stay with him in the hospital. We will be quick, and we will be quiet, but this is the place they wanted to exchange their vows. And then I just stared at her.

And then I watched her walk off to the entryway and speak briefly to the box office, then lean toward the police officer guarding the entryway and gesture back at us. And then I watched her beckon us forward.

I’m going to regret forever not asking her name or being able to thank her beyond some mumbled words as we passed through the gate.

The box office worker seemed perturbed but let us proceed. The cop behind her gave us a sympathetic nod. Kristina, Cory and I meandered through the garden, trying to find the right place. Cory’s growling annoyance grew as his energy flagged, until a little corner in the path near a foot bridge opened up and we all immediately knew it was the spot.

Katie was summoned, Cory watched her walk up the path as Kristina played processional music from a portable speaker, I shortened my officiant script from four paragraphs to three, and amid the sound of beating drums from a musical demonstration taking place behind us, they got married.

I told them we were merely pre-gaming for the real wedding, making official what they both already knew and what we would all celebrate for real in September. But it still took all of us a while to get through those three paragraphs, and not because it was allergy season in North Texas.

I think the weight of the moment took all of us by surprise. I know it did me. We all cried together, but it was not fear of what would come on Monday, the ominous fight that would define his life no matter what the outcome. It was not fear at all; it was love.

It was the consecration of their love for each other, and the love we shared as brothers. It was opening up that special bond to formally include one more Dardi. We cry because we are either hurt or happy, and they were happy. And I was happy to not just witness it, but to be honored with the task of solemnizing it forever.

As the ceremony ended, so did the drum show. We were not officially on the festival’s docket, and I imagine we provided a confusing scene to more than a few among the crowd filtering out. They were universally respectful and sweet, waiting patiently while Kristina worked for a shot and speaking congratulations and well wishes to what otherwise must’ve looked like any other normally wedded couple.

And then they went home. I signed the document nervously and sealed the envelope. We popped a bottle of bubbly for Katie and me, and a tall sparkling glass of Topo Chico for the sugar- and alcohol-abstaining Dizzle. He was exhausted but satisfied; she was radiant and overwhelmed.

I left them there to enjoy their first night as newlyweds. And so forever began.