Invictus by William Ernest Henley (1888)

Many years ago, my brother suffered a loss that sent him into a tailspin. Jason, my husband at the time, and I insisted that he fly from Southern California to Portland to be with us while he went through the worst of it.

My brother is 14 years my senior, so in my personal schema he is a caretaker. He’s the one who let me jump on his water bed to Van Halen (I recognize how wickedly, how exactly, that dates us), who drove around for hours looking for my lost cat, who took me to piano lessons, and, when I was around four years old, encouraged me to show “middle man” (from the Where is Thumbkin song—I was innocently flipping the bird) to inhabitants of other cars. In college, he wrote me a letter on yellow legal paper that is one of my most prized possessions. He is the essence of big brother: my protector, my strength, my history.

So it was unnerving to meet him as an adult going through a pain that, back then at least, was unimaginable to me. He’d arrived in winter time in Portland without a jacket and with only sandals. He was shivering and bereft. My brother was broken, and far outside my schema.

The first few days of his visit were music and chats, a fresco of melancholy. On the third day, the three of us decided to visit the Japanese gardens. There, we followed a docent through the carefully arranged spaces to a plum tree, its white blossoms somehow a blinding contrast to a gray sky. As my brother shivered in his t-shirt and flip flops, the docent told us how lucky we were to be there in December.

The plum tree was blooming.

Our guide explained how unusual it was for a genus to bloom during harsh winter. But that’s what plum trees and their sisters, cherry trees, do. They take the absence of sun and they fight to thrive. In the dead of winter, the plum tree defiantly flowers.

After our tour, we went to the tea house and shared a pot of green tea. There, my brother reappeared. His laughter returned as he regaled us with the story of the Monkey King. (He is a hilarious and warm storyteller—he reminds me of the late Mitch Hedberg, both in mannerism and in the offbeat observations he makes of the world.) That day, in the Japanese gardens, over tea, listening to the tale of the Monkey King, I knew that my brother would find a way to take his pain and flourish.

It remains one of the greatest lessons of my life.

Short Stuff:

• The character Long John Silver is based off of William Henley because he only had one leg.
• While incarcerated, Nelson Mandela would recite this poem. There is a famous portrayal of this in the movie Invictus with Morgan Freeman as Mandela.

Topics

Overcoming adversity; free will

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Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

–William Ernest Henley