My brother Henry died five years ago on the day this posts, April 6. He would be 75 years old now. My mother would be 100, and my father would be 105.

It’s been long enough for me to get used to my family not being here, but I haven’t. I feel like they are somewhere over there, in some reality next door to this one. There has certainly been enough going on in this reality over the last few years to make me think there must be a better one somewhere.

I no longer think to myself that I need to tell one of them about something that has happened, or something I did around the house, or, more important, a question that I would like to get an answer to. That phase ended a while ago, but the need did not.

As Snoopy* once said, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry.”

So here I am, still with a lot of questions that need to be answered. I don’t know whether they would be able to answer them, but at least the questions would be there, out in the open.

By the way, if you are wondering whether you look old, you know the answer when someone sees you walking your dogs and asks you how old you are, and then congratulates you on being able to walk a dog. “Thank you. Still working at your age, eh?”

But here I am, still breathing. There is a bit of cosmetic damage, and some internal parts are not working as well as they once did. My mind seems to work almost as well as it did, let’s say five years ago. But then, maybe I wouldn’t know.

But I was talking about asking questions.

No one warned me that I would get old, and still not be wise. In fact, no one said a god-damned thing about that, and I want to know why. I thought we were supposed to be able to figure things out about life, the universe, and everything when we got this close to the end of it. Was I standing behind the door when wisdom was handed out? Maybe I was looking out the window, daydreaming, and I missed hearing my name called. Maybe they ran out of wisdom; it does seem to be in short supply today.

However it happened, here I am, needing questions answered. There is no one to answer them, and I’ll be damned if I can answer them myself. Is it like that for everyone?

This is the way I think of my family.

I don’t know when this photo was taken. It looks like the early 1990’s, possibly a little earlier than that. I don’t know where I was, or who took the photo.

Maybe that’s the way they look now, in that other reality.

* I’m pretty sure Snoopy said it once, but the only citation I can actually find was Franklin’s grandfather.