My Brother, How I Miss You Already

The photo was taken in 1957, at our home in Manila only one year after our family moved from Flintstone, Georgia. Our mother was thirty-seven. Our stepsister Carolyn was fifteen. I was seven.

Mike was sixteen, already a man, kind, witty, and charming, an example for me to respect from a distance for most of our lives because I was only nine when he left the nest and we never lived in the same town again.

Linda and I were married at least a couple of years before she met him. Mike would have been not yet forty at the time, six-foot-three and movie-star handsome, so much so that Linda asked, “What happened to you?”

A lifetime later, I finally thought of an answer. I got a brother out of the deal.

Michael Lee Dyer passed away last night, December 4, 2023, of pneumonia, following a six-month battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was eighty-two years old, frail, suffering, aware of impending death and the most important thing he could think of during our last moments together was to say how much he loved me and how proud he was to be my brother.

Linda and I prayed that our natural father Benjamin Franklin Dyer, by all accounts another prince of a man, would be there to receive him. Godspeed, my brother. I loved you always, and will never forget you.