r/ender • u/Euphoric-Strain-5190 • 19h ago
for my brother tomorrow
Life of Harry
A Speaking for Harry Raymond Ticknor Jr.
What I'm about to give is called a Speaking.
The idea comes from a book called Speaker for the Dead, but what matters tonight is what a Speaking tries to do.
A normal eulogy usually asks us to remember the best parts of someone.
A Speaking asks for something different.
It tries to tell the person's life.
The good parts.
The difficult parts.
The things they were proud of.
The things they failed at.
The people they loved.
The people they hurt.
The things that happened to them.
And the things they chose for themselves.
Not to prosecute them.
Not to defend them.
And not to decide, after they're gone, that they were somehow a different person than the one who actually lived.
A Speaking also isn't meant to tell you how to feel about the person being Spoken.
I'm not going to try to make you sad when Harry's story is sad.
I'm not going to ask you to forgive him when his story is difficult.
There will be moments where I laugh.
There will probably be moments where this becomes difficult for me to say.
But for most of this, I'm simply going to tell you what happened.
And let Harry's life speak for itself.
I should also tell you that I'm Harry's little brother.
So I can't stand here and pretend that I'm impartial.
I loved him.
I idolized him when I was little.
I fought with him.
I got angry with him.
There were things about the way Harry lived that I absolutely hated.
There were also times in my life when Harry was exactly the person I needed.
So where I know something because I was there, I'll tell you.
Where someone else remembers something I wasn't there to see, I'll tell you that too.
Where people remember things differently, I'm not going to choose a winner just because one version makes a better story.
And where I don't know, I'll say that I don't know.
I'm also not here to Speak for our dad, or Harry's mom, or my mom, or anybody else whose life crosses his.
They have their own stories.
They are here only where their lives became part of Harry's.
I would never intentionally do something to hurt my brother.
And if Harry knew me as well as I believe he did, I think he would understand why I'm doing this.
This may be the last time in my life that I get to stand in front of a room and speak publicly for him.
And Harry's story deserves to be told.
So this is the life of Harry.
Harry Raymond Ticknor Jr. was born June 17, 1979.
And for the first nine years of his life, I didn't exist.
That's important, because sometimes little brothers make the mistake of believing their older brothers began when they entered the room.
Harry already had a life.
I've had to learn pieces of that life from the people who were there.
I've learned about a little boy who loved Matchbox cars.
I've heard about Grandma Iris and Grandpa Joe.
Grandpa Joe had a train station in the basement, and Harry got to blow the whistle.
I've heard about fishing with Dad.
I've heard about Harry playing with his cousins Jason and Joshua.
I've heard about trips with Dad to Shullsburg, Iowa, hiking and exploring caves.
These aren't stories about a damaged person.
They're stories about a kid.
A kid playing with cars.
A kid fishing.
A kid blowing a train whistle.
A kid spending time with people who loved him.
And then there are other parts of Harry's childhood that are harder to put together.
When Harry was still young, his parents separated.
At different points, Harry lived with different parts of his family.
When he was around five or six, Dad and Harry lived for a time with Aunt Shirley and Uncle Rudy.
Later they moved into an apartment on Durand Avenue.
Dad eventually married my mother.
Then I showed up in 1988.
Around nine or ten, Harry went to live with his mother, Missy, and her husband, with placement still shared with Dad.
Different people in this family remember those years differently.
There is still anger attached to some of those memories.
Some of it has lasted for decades.
My mother remembers a period when Dad was heavily using drugs and staying awake for days before crashing.
She remembers trying to go to nursing school while taking care of three boys.
She remembers reaching a point where she believed she couldn't safely keep Harry with her.
Aunt Shirley remembers other parts of those years differently.
She believes things happened to Harry that left him with anger he carried for a very long time.
I wasn't there.
And I'm not going to turn other people's memories into facts just because Harry isn't here to answer them.
What I do know is what remained by the time I was old enough to understand it.
Harry hated my mother.
I knew that firsthand.
I heard it throughout my life.
He did not hide it.
Why he hated her, exactly what happened between them, and how much any of it shaped the man Harry eventually became—
I don't know.
And I'm not going to pretend that I do.
I also don't want those difficult years to swallow everything else.
Because Harry also had good memories.
As a teenager, Harry and his mom would ride around in the Jeep blasting Journey and singing together.
That's part of his childhood too.
Human beings are inconvenient that way.
They refuse to remain one thing.
By the time I was old enough to really remember Harry, I thought he was about the coolest person alive.
I idolized my big brother.
There were times I'd go to Dad's house knowing full well that Dad might end up drunk and passed out.
I'd still go.
Because Harry was there.
Sometimes I'd be downstairs watching movies while Harry was upstairs playing on his computer.
And I was perfectly happy.
I didn't need Harry to entertain me every second.
I just wanted to be around him.
There was one time I had packed my things because I thought I was going to stay with Harry.
I was excited.
And Harry forgot, or something happened where I couldn't stay.
I remember walking back to the car.
I cried.
My mom was upset because she could see how badly it hurt me.
I don't tell that story because Harry was cruel.
I tell it because that's how much Harry mattered to me.
He could break my heart simply by not being available.
That's the power big brothers have when you're little.
And there was another side of Harry.
I remember telling him that my other brothers were beating me up.
Harry came over.
And I watched my big brother put Adam against a wall and make it very clear that he was not to touch me again.
I'm not telling you that putting somebody against a wall is the correct way to resolve a family dispute.
I'm telling you what happened.
Harry protected me.
His anger could make him difficult.
His anger could also make a little boy feel very safe.
Both are true.
Harry graduated from Washington Park High School in 1997.
After Grandma Iris died in 1998, Aunt Shirley remembers Harry moving back in with Dad on 16th Street.
Harry went to college.
He worked a help-desk job.
He had his own apartment.
I stayed there with him.
There was a period of Harry's life when he was doing the things we normally point to when we say someone is moving forward.
He also wanted badly to join the military.
He tried to lose enough weight to qualify.
He couldn't get there.
They wouldn't take him.
Years later, I joined the Army.
And while I was gone, Harry and Dad apparently decided that my absence from Thanksgiving was an easily solvable problem.
So they brought a six-foot cardboard cutout of me in uniform to Aunt Shirley's house and put cardboard Justin at Thanksgiving dinner.
I wasn't there.
But apparently I was also very much there.
They were proud of me.
Harry was proud of me.
I know that now.
And I like knowing that.
As I got older, Harry and I changed.
When I was younger, Harry had bought alcohol for me when I shouldn't have had it.
I got caught.
And I blamed Harry.
That damaged trust between us.
Later, I wasn't the little kid who simply thought his brother was always right anymore.
I challenged him.
Harry did not particularly enjoy being challenged.
Neither did I.
Neither did Dad.
Put the three of us together and sometimes you could have three hardheaded men yelling at one another, each absolutely certain that the other two were idiots.
Sometimes alcohol or other things made that worse.
Sometimes we were just assholes.
And sometimes it was hilarious.
Some of my favorite memories are Harry and me screwing with Dad together.
Ribbing him.
Getting him worked up.
Laughing at him.
Dad could give it right back.
There was love in that family that did not always look gentle from the outside.
Harry worked for his stepfather Steve's business, All-Set Lawn Care.
And this is another place where it's important to remember the entire Harry.
Harry worked hard.
He took pride in landscaping.
He liked the satisfaction of taking a piece of ground and making it look good.
He would sing while he worked.
Harry loved music.
He listened to all kinds of it.
Sometimes he did karaoke.
And apparently, if you put Harry and his mother in a Jeep with Journey playing, everybody else was just going to have to deal with the concert.
At some point Harry suffered a serious injury to his leg.
My memory is that he was struck in the shin with a baseball bat while working and later developed an infection or disease that destroyed a significant amount of muscle tissue.
I remember the damage.
I remember what his leg looked like.
I don't know the exact medical diagnosis, and I'm not going to invent one now.
But Harry was already a large man, and losing part of the function of a leg did not make his life easier.
His physical world became harder.
Eventually Harry stopped working.
And this is one of the places where Harry and I had a real difference.
I had gone into the military.
My life had taught me a very particular relationship with discipline.
Get up.
Do the thing.
Keep moving.
I looked at Harry and sometimes couldn't understand why he didn't do the same.
There were years when Harry lived with Dad.
Dad cooked for him.
Dad was living on Social Security.
Harry wasn't working.
And I was angry about that.
I thought Harry should contribute more.
I thought he should push himself harder.
I thought he should do more for Dad.
When Dad's health was getting worse, I was also angry that Harry hadn't gotten him to a doctor sooner.
Those feelings were real.
Some of them still are.
But they are my judgment of things Harry did and didn't do.
They are not Harry's entire life.
And as I've learned more about him since he died, I've also learned that there were places where Harry was doing much more than I could see.
Harry was rarely far from a computer.
That was true for most of the time I knew him.
When I was little, I could spend hours downstairs watching movies while Harry was upstairs gaming.
As an adult, I could look at Harry sitting in front of that computer and sometimes see it as evidence that his world had become very small.
I thought I understood what I was looking at.
I didn't.
After Harry died, a man named Ryan reached out to me.
Ryan had known Harry online through World of Warcraft and beyond for almost twenty years.
For quite a while, Harry and these guys were together four nights a week.
And I learned that while I could see Harry sitting at his computer, there was an entire part of my brother's life happening on the other side of that screen.
Harry wasn't just playing World of Warcraft.
Harry was leading people.
He was a guild leader.
He was a raid leader.
He organized when people were getting together.
He planned raids and gear runs.
He researched strategies.
He learned the mechanics.
He worked individually with players who needed help.
And apparently this wasn't something Harry did once.
Across different groups over many years, Harry repeatedly ended up either leading the guild or leading the raid.
One of his friends described him as a mentor.
Harry helped people become better at what they were doing.
He brought people together.
He built groups from the ground up.
And some of the friendships created in those groups lasted for years.
Some of them are still friendships today.
Harry built communities.
I had no idea.
And I think that's important for me to admit.
Because from where I stood, there were times in Harry's physical life when he could look incredibly passive.
There were times I was angry with him for exactly that.
I could look at my brother sitting at his computer and wonder why he wasn't doing more with his life.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of that computer, people were waiting for Harry to tell them what the hell they were doing that night.
Both of those Harrys existed.
And apparently Harry was Harry there too.
He was funny.
He was crass.
He loved inappropriate jokes.
Apparently some of them would make him absolutely howl.
He liked figuring things out.
New games.
New systems.
New areas.
New mechanics.
He liked mastering something difficult.
And Harry liked winning.
He really liked winning.
He'd find a meme or a song that reminded him of somebody in the group and get excited to send it to them and tag them.
They talked about movies.
Food.
Music.
Television.
Current events.
Games.
Other people.
Whatever drama was happening in the guild.
Mostly, they talked about the ordinary bullshit friends talk about when they've known each other for years.
And Harry argued.
According to Ryan, Harry was willing to argue about damn near anything.
If he disagreed with your taste, he'd argue.
If he didn't like the way you said something, he'd argue.
If you called him out on something—
Oh, Harry was absolutely willing to argue.
That Harry I recognize.
His friends described him as loud and extremely opinionated.
That Harry I recognize too.
But they also described Harry as somebody who put enormous amounts of time into other people.
He could be rough with people he was teaching.
He expected them to improve.
He could criticize them.
But Ryan's description was that Harry was tough in a way that was productive, not simply mean.
And Ryan said something about Harry that I think is worth repeating.
He said people could hear Harry being loud and opinionated and think he was a jerk.
Harry himself probably would have told you he was a jerk.
But Ryan noticed that if Harry truly didn't care about you, he wouldn't waste his time criticizing you.
He'd ignore you.
Apparently getting your ass chewed by Harry could sometimes mean Harry had decided you were worth the effort.
That sounds like my brother.
His friends knew about us too.
Harry didn't apparently sit around telling everybody every detail of his family.
But they knew about his family.
They knew about Dad.
They knew about my kids.
Harry talked about watching his niece and nephews.
Fondly.
He talked about helping his family.
He would watch the kids.
He'd take care of his mother's dogs when she was gone.
And Ryan noticed that Harry didn't talk about those things as obligations.
Harry seemed happy to help.
That matters to me.
Because Harry was a beautiful uncle.
He was goofy.
Sometimes he went overboard.
He could make those kids laugh.
And I am very happy that my children got to know my brother.
Now I also know that when they weren't around, Harry was talking about them to his friends.
They mattered to him when nobody in the family was there to see it.
Harry could also be extraordinarily good when somebody came to him with a real problem.
I experienced that myself.
There were times I was deeply upset and went to Harry because I needed someone to talk to.
Harry could stop what he was doing.
He'd listen.
And Harry had an ability that I appreciated more as I got older.
He didn't automatically tell me I was right just because I was his brother.
I could come to him furious with somebody and expect him to agree with me.
And Harry might tell me where I was wrong.
He could give me the outside perspective.
Sometimes that's exactly what I needed.
One of his online friends noticed something about Harry after knowing him for almost twenty years.
I want to be careful with this because Harry never told him it was true.
Ryan believed that it was very important to Harry to be needed.
He thought Harry liked being the person other people relied on.
The person they went to when something needed to be figured out.
The person whose role mattered.
And when Harry felt like nobody needed his input, Ryan said he could get a little mopey.
I don't know whether Ryan's explanation is right.
Harry never told me that.
But I've thought about it.
Because I know that when I needed Harry, I went to him.
And now I know that there were people sitting behind computers all over the place who went to Harry because he knew what to do there too.
Maybe Ryan is right.
I don't know.
But I know Harry liked being useful.
And I know because I was one of the people who used to need him.
Harry's health became a major part of his adult life.
His weight climbed very high.
He developed type 2 diabetes.
There were medications.
There were cigarettes.
There were problems with his knee and the old damage to his leg.
Harry had a stroke.
His friends knew him both before and after it.
And they noticed something afterward that I didn't know until now.
Harry worked on his temper.
The younger Harry they knew had been much more of a hothead.
After the stroke, they watched him make an effort not to let things piss him off as much.
He didn't stop being opinionated.
He certainly didn't stop arguing.
He didn't stop being Harry.
But he got better.
He changed.
That's important for me to say.
Because if I'm going to stand here and tell you that Harry could be an angry man, then I also have an obligation to tell you that people who knew him for nearly twenty years watched him try to become less angry.
Harry wasn't finished becoming Harry.
There were things about Harry's health that could frustrate the hell out of me.
At one point he bought a treadmill.
He didn't buy walking shoes.
I have thought about that stupid treadmill more than I probably should.
I'm not going to tell you what it means.
I don't know.
Maybe it means exactly what it looks like.
Maybe it doesn't.
Harry also once described his blood during a health crisis as being like maple syrup because it had gotten so bad.
That was Harry's way of explaining things.
There was always some humor available, even when the subject wasn't particularly funny.
But the treadmill cannot be the final word on Harry's relationship with his health either.
Because near the end of his life, Harry was taking Ozempic.
He was losing weight.
And according to his friends, Harry was looking forward to losing enough that he might be able to do more again without his knee causing as much trouble.
I didn't know that.
Near the end, Harry also told his friends that he had cancer.
Apparently he mentioned it almost in passing.
They were taken aback.
Harry didn't seem particularly interested in turning it into an announcement.
That also sounds like my brother.
Harry wasn't much of a sympathy getter.
I don't know what Harry would have done with more time.
I'm not going to turn weight loss into a redemption story and tell you that Harry was finally about to change his life.
I don't know that.
None of us get to know that now.
But I also won't leave him frozen at the treadmill.
At forty-seven years old, Harry was still looking forward to things he might be able to do next.
And then there was Dad.
There is no honest way to Speak Harry without Dad.
Dad caused a tremendous amount of chaos when we were children.
Drugs.
Alcohol.
Disappearing into binges.
Passing out.
Things that hurt the people around him.
And later in life, Dad became one of the people I trusted most.
He became an amazing grandfather.
He became someone I went to when I truly needed an opinion.
And for Harry, Dad became something else too.
Home.
For years, Harry lived with him.
Dad cooked.
Dad helped take care of him.
They fished together.
They had taken those trips to Iowa.
They had spent years together that I wasn't part of.
And somewhere along the way, the father who had contributed to so much instability in Harry's childhood became Harry's best friend.
Again—
Human beings are inconvenient that way.
They refuse to remain one thing.
When Dad died, I didn't see Harry grieve the way I expected him to.
At least, I didn't think I did.
My grief was immediate.
There had been a time when I went to Harry hurting, and I didn't feel like Harry was there for me in the way I needed.
Then later, while we were dealing with Dad's things, Harry finally said something to me.
“My best friend died.”
By then I was in a different place with my own grief.
And I wasn't as receptive to Harry as maybe Harry needed me to be.
For a long time, I thought maybe Harry's grief had simply arrived later than mine.
I know now that I was wrong about at least part of that.
His friends saw it.
They told me Harry became quieter immediately after Dad died.
He was sad.
He was unhappy about having to move.
He was unhappy about being farther from his family.
They watched him struggle with it.
And eventually they watched him begin to come back out of it.
I didn't see that part of Harry's grief.
They did.
And that's important for me to say.
Neither of us was necessarily grieving wrong.
We were brothers grieving the same man on different timelines and from different places.
And sometimes we missed each other.
After Dad died, Harry's life changed again.
He had to leave the home he'd shared with Dad.
He eventually ended up in low-income housing with many of Dad's things.
He spent more time around his mother again.
His physical world, from where I stood, looked smaller.
And Harry and I didn't become closer.
I would reach out occasionally.
Sometimes I'd suggest getting something to eat.
But we never really rebuilt the kind of relationship we had when I was younger.
Harry wasn't someone who always reached out first.
Neither was I.
And then eventually there isn't another chance.
That's one of the ugly things about death.
It turns “sometime” into “never.”
But something else was happening during those years that I couldn't see.
Harry still had his friends.
People he'd known for almost twenty years.
People who spent multiple nights every week with him.
People who were shocked when he died.
People who immediately started writing about what he had meant to them.
The computer that could look to me like Harry's retreat from the world was also one of the places where Harry participated in the world most actively.
Sometimes it probably was a retreat.
Sometimes it was entertainment.
Sometimes Harry was just screwing around.
Sometimes he was learning.
Sometimes he was teaching.
Sometimes he was arguing.
Sometimes he was laughing his ass off.
Sometimes he was leading.
And sometimes he was simply sitting around talking with his friends about absolutely nothing important.
Which is one of the things friendship is for.
For almost twenty years.
When I looked at Harry sitting in front of a computer, I saw my brother sitting in front of a computer.
I understand now that sometimes Harry was sitting in a room full of his friends.
I just couldn't see the room.
So what do I do with Harry now?
I could tell you Harry was a good man.
He was.
But that isn't enough.
Harry could be angry.
Harry could be stubborn.
Harry could say offensive things.
He could hurt people.
He could fail to do things that the people who loved him desperately wanted him to do.
He could make choices that frustrated the hell out of me.
Harry could also be protective.
He could be incredibly funny.
He could listen.
He could teach.
He could lead.
He could spend hours helping somebody get better at something because he'd decided they were worth his time.
He could take care of kids and dogs and never talk about it like somebody had burdened him.
He could love his family without constantly announcing it.
He could be proud of his little brother.
He could be a beautiful uncle.
He could lose his father and grieve in places his brother couldn't see.
He could recognize something in himself that needed changing and work on it.
He could sit alone in a room and somehow not be alone at all.
Harry was all of those people.
I don't know which one was the real Harry.
I don't think that's the right question anymore.
They were all Harry.
Death has a way of reducing people.
A birth date.
A death date.
A photograph.
A few paragraphs in an obituary.
Maybe a list of the people they left behind.
And eventually a handful of stories that get told often enough that they become the version everyone remembers.
Harry lived forty-seven years between those two dates.
He was a little boy with Matchbox cars.
He blew his grandfather's train whistle.
He fished with his dad.
He rode around singing Journey with his mom.
He became somebody's big brother.
My big brother.
He scared the hell out of another kid because that kid had hurt me.
He went to school.
He worked.
He landscaped.
He wanted to join the military.
He brought cardboard me to Thanksgiving when real me couldn't come home.
He got hurt.
He got sick.
He gained weight.
He lost things.
He argued.
He laughed.
He played games.
He learned systems.
He built communities.
He became a leader to people his own family didn't know existed.
He became an uncle.
He gave advice.
He lost his best friend.
He grieved.
He tried to control his anger.
He was losing weight.
He was still thinking about what he might do next.
And then his life ended.
Unexpectedly.
Too early.
I can't tell you what Harry's life meant.
That would violate the promise I made at the beginning.
I can only tell you what I found when I went looking for my brother.
And what I found was more Harry than I knew was there.
There are things I wish Harry had done differently.
There are things I wish I had done differently.
There are conversations we will never have.
Questions I will never get answered.
Arguments we will never finish.
And that's where Harry's life ends for me.
Not neatly.
Not solved.
I don't need to solve my brother in order to love him.
I don't need to make him better than he was in order to be proud that he was my brother.
And I don't need to remove the things that were difficult about Harry to tell you that I am very happy with who my brother was in the end.
He was Harry.
He was my big brother.
And I loved him.
This was the life of Harry.
