Tribe

In 2008, Seth Godin published a book called Tribes which I have, full disclosure, not yet read. That said, it was talked about a lot at the time, this idea of finding your group of like-minded people, and it stuck with me. It stuck with a lot of people, and for good reason. Aren’t we all looking for people who resonate with us? Who feel like extended family? Who feel, somehow, connected?

Here are some quotes from Godin, conveniently furnished by Amazon. (I’ve ordered the book, but felt the urge to start writing beforehand…Such is the luxury of blogging vs journalism, I guess.)

• “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.”

• “A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”

• “Tribes need leadership. Sometimes one person leads, sometimes more. People want connection and growth and something new.

I was reminded about all this in the context of my brother, and my ongoing question of how he survived 8 years in the most extreme quarantine anyone could imagine, in a sterile “bubble” room at the National Institutes of Health.

One answer that pops up immediately is, well he had his Tribe. My memories of my brother are not of him, sitting alone in his sterile room, facing an empty abyss. They are peopled with….people. All kinds of people.

My parents and I, of course. But also his doctors, and their families, who eventually gravitated to the non-sterile side of the curtain to hang out with Ted. Nurses. The one best friend who stuck with him from diagnosis to death, and who brought in another buddy. A local disc jockey, who Ted started calling on the night shift, and who started visiting. A guitar teacher, who worked at a local guitar store Ted was able to visit, off hours, in a special spacesuit, and who then became Ted’s guitar teacher and then family. Writers. Teachers.

There were more. I remember some faces but not names. I remember stories about what people did….a doctor who lived nearby, near enough to see Ted’s window, and who used to exchange messages with him via flashlights and Morse code. That’s all I know about him. There are other people who were part of his circle I’ll never know. There are people who I learned about, only after his death, and after my first book came out, who emerged, via letters and email, to share a story about Ted.

All of these people, per Godin’s quotes above, shared one thing in common, my brother, the hub of a wheel, who inspired them with his courage, but also drew from them. As a kid, I didn’t really know what I was seeing or experiencing, just that there were all these people in our lives who showed up, as their best selves, willing and wanting to be part of Ted’s circle.

In the midst of the horror of his situation, there was this. And it was magic. My brother brought out the authentic in people, not only because he was that way himself, but because his situation, I think, so clearly, as extreme illnesses do, put everything in perspective.

And there he was, negotiating it, day in and day out. We, all of us in his Tribe, got on the bus, and learned to do it, with him. My brother was special from the get-go, but he was not so special that he knew how to do this right away. He learned it. He was angry at first, my mother tells me. Just as a lot of us are angry about what’s going on now in COVID-world. My mother likes to say, “He conquered that room.”

His Tribe helped. Looking back, I am so grateful to Ted’s Tribe, and I miss them. We all dispersed after Ted’s death, in too much pain perhaps, or maybe it was that we did not know how to cohere without our hub, my brother, holding us together. I do know that, for a time, I was part of something both wrenchingly awful and beautiful at the same time. And I miss that, awfulness and all.

There’s a line from Moby Dick (full-disclosure number 2: I never finished it) that’s something like (see, I’m even too lazy to look it up…I love blogging) “Only I have survived to tell the tale.” It’s the last man standing at the end of the book, who survives to tell the tale of Moby Dick and the boat. I used that line near the end of The Empty Room, my book about sibling loss.

I think I meant it in the sense that my parents generally chose not to talk about Ted, at the time. But I also think there was a part of me that saw myself as the sole voice, or witness, who could. And that, I now realize, is wrong.

There was his Tribe. They’ve been carrying this experience around all these years, just as I have. And I have, as I mentioned, been trying to find them, these many years later, to interview them. It is both terrifying (because I’ll probably cry—hi, how have you been since 1980, sob) and thrilling. But soon, terror or not, I’ll begin calling them.