In December of 1966, when I was six years old, my mother gave birth to a stillborn boy. When she got home from the hospital, she sat down with her three daughters and said, “He was such a beautiful little boy. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring him home.” My parents buried Baby Jervey in what was to become a small family cemetery on the property, and kept their grief separate from the lives of their daughters. As a child I absorbed the knowledge that I would have no more siblings and moved on with growing up. As an adult I thought often of my baby brother and wondered what kind of man he might have become. Many years later, after my mother had died, my father told me of a dream that he had: all four of my grandparents, my mother, and a young man who must have been his son were closely gathered, talking and laughing out loud, thick as thieves.

In 1985, in Anchorage, I invited my future husband to Thanksgiving dinner. The scene, often told in our family, was this: Scott appeared on my doorstep, shaggy as a well-trimmed bear, offered me a bunch of tiger lilies, and gestured behind him to another shaggy bearded man in a flannel shirt, tin pants, and a leather cap. “These are for you,” said Scott. “This is my little brother Terry. Can he come to dinner too?” Naturally, I invited them both in. We had a great dinner and a game of Trivial Pursuit with a group of friends, after which I watched, with bemusement giving way to comprehension, while Terry engaged in a minor ritual that I was to see many times in the future: he picked up an empty pop can and used the enormous knife that he kept on his belt to cut the top out of it. He then packed his lip with snoose and used the can as a hand-held spittoon. And just like that, and for the next thirty-five years, I had a new baby brother.

Terry was born a half year before my first brother, in May of 1966. When I learned that Terry would soon die, I traveled with my husband, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law to the same city where I first met him all those years ago, to join the family in saying goodbye. God speed, little brother. If you get a chance, before you head out fishing with your father, your brother Ed, and your father-in-law, stop by that other small-but-growing gathering and say hello to my side of the family. I know they will be glad to see you.