I have a birthday coming up in about three weeks. If I don’t get run over by a bus between now and then, the number that I will put in the “age” blank on forms that I fill out from here on out will be higher than any number my late brother was ever able to write in.

I remember when my mother turned 82 in 2008, she said with pride, “At least I outlived Ellen.” Ellen was her older sister, who died in 2006 a week shy of her 82nd birthday.  My mother didn’t outlive Ellen by long; she died two months later.

I never had any desire to outlive my brother, who was three years older than me. As I was growing up, Stan was my hero. When I was 2 or 3 years old, I would stand at the door and cry when he went off to school in the morning and I had to stay home. But being a good brother he would try to teach me everything he learned when he got home.

Like a lot of older siblings, Stan often made me the victim in our relationship, whether on purpose or by happenstance. Take The Sled Incident, for example. We lived in South Bend, Indiana, when I was in kindergarten, first grade and second grade. We had what I remember as a great sledding hill a short walk from our house. Stan (who would have been in third- or fourth-grade at the time)  and his friends got the idea, probably from a cartoon on TV, that we would all ride down the hill on the same sled. I would be on the back of the sled, one end of a rope tied around my waist and the other end tied around a tree at the top of the hill. We would all take off down the hill, and when the rope went taut, the sled would stop dead, sort of like when the coyote runs off the cliff and stops in mid-air immune to the forces of gravity. Of course you know what happened. The sled loaded with four or five kids takes off down the hill, picks up speed and the rope goes taut, yanking me off the back of the sled. I believe I still have rope burns around my waist to this very day.

Around the same era was The Swing Set Ring Incident. We were visiting some of my parents’ friends and Stan and I were playing in the back yard. He picked up one of those swinging rings from the swings and threw it at me. A metal barb caught me square in the back of the head and  I began bleeding like a stuck pig. We went quickly into the house. My mother sees me, crying like a baby, and Stan following along behind, trying to catch my blood in cupped hands as it flowed out of my head. “Stan, honey,” she said. “What happened to you?” Once the facts were determined, I was rushed to the emergency room for the first and only time I had to get stitches as a child.

This kind of behavior continued into our adult lives. When I was 22, he took over my apartment when I moved to another town for a job and he ended up sticking me with a very expensive phone bill. I remember complaining to a girl whom I was dating at the time that I expected more out of family. I believe she was an older sibling, because her response was, “If you can’t screw over your family, than who can you screw over?”

I’m sure there were many more instances of screwing over the younger brother that he took to the grave. I am fortunate that he never figured out that my Social Security number was just one digit different from his.

I stuck with Stan over the almost six decades that we shared the planet together.  In our young adulthood we were drinking buddies, going to Astros games or professional wrestling together when we lived in Houston, or running out to a bar the night in 1981 that we heard on the late news that singer Harry Chapin had been killed in a car wreck so we could knock back one in his memory. We were in our 20s then, and I will readily confess that I did a lot of stupid things in my 20s.  Stan never fully realized that not everyone drank as much as he did, and that his drinking behavior was not considered to be normal in society.

Stan married three times and fathered sons with two of his wives. I married once and have two stepsons, and celebrate my 33rd wedding anniversary a week before my birthday. Stan’s marriages didn’t last long, with alcohol abuse playing a big role in the last two divorces. He still was able to hold jobs until he was close to 50, first as a waiter or restaurant manager and later in an auto parts store.

The year he turned 51 I tried to “rescue” him. He was living in his ex-wife’s basement at the time, and recently had a wine bottle cracked over his head in an argument with one of his sons. I figured that was no place to get sober, so I paid to have him fly to Spokane to live with us. I learned that summer that he was in a cycle of holding a job until he got a paycheck, then taking it to the closest liquor store and exchanging it for all the alcohol it would buy. Then he would go on a bender and drink until he blacked out, then repeat the cycle. That summer his boss, a recovering alcoholic, would take him to AA meetings, but by that time Stan was well-versed in the game of saying whatever he was supposed to say so he could ultimately get what he wanted.

I also learned a lot about addiction that summer. I learned that he still had hopes and dreams. As I tried to help him find a job, I asked what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He said what he really wanted to do is wait tables. He really loved people and enjoyed interacting with them. I also learned that deep inside, he really wanted to better himself. He bought some of those teeth-whitening strips, and I remember how genuinely disappointed he was when they didn’t work like he expected them to do.

In his later years, a lifetime of substance abuse led to dementia, kidney disease and liver disease. The last couple years of his life he spent in Tallahassee living in a homeless shelter. The people who ran the shelter remembered what a nice man he was, not like a lot of the others. When they had a workday and he was unable to help out because of swollen feet or walking difficulties, he apologized and was sincerely sorry he wasn’t able to do his part and help out. That’s the kind of person my brother was: a good person, shackled by addiction. He left his world Aug. 18, 2014, the last member of my immediate family, leaving a void in my life that I’m reminded of whenever Kentucky basketball season rolls around or a Meat Loaf song comes on the radio.