To honor my brother Izzy

PlainVanilla

My brother has metastatic cancer and I truly "feel" your pain. So sorry for your loss man.

larryganz

Well, it gets worse because my older brother has stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, but it was diagnosed summer of 2014 when the 5 year survival rate was 5%.

So the good news he’s alive and kicking and working as a PT while on chemo 6 years later, after multiple courses of radiation therapy to his lungs and brain. The bad news is he’s not into watches.

pdxleaf

Ah, man, you're killing me.

My brother and i are in are sixties. We lived together in a trailer in Alaska in our teens and twenties. We grew apart and didn't talk for years. But that didn't last, thank god. The last couple years we have been flying cross country to visit our mom who slowly drifted away from dementia. He was the driver for me to visit and i am so grateful. We are flying back East in a couple weeks for her funeral. He had back surgery a couple months ago and i got to spend some time with him. There was a brief time where i had to consider that he might not make it. Thank god he did.

We are getting older. I am older and told him it is the elder brother's right to die first. I can't imagine losing him.

I apologize for making this about me. This post about fixing your brother's watch really hit a nerve.

I am truly sorry for your loss.

larryganz

I am sorry for your loss too. My mom is turning 80 next month, and she is in decent health but you never know what might happen. My older brother (62) moved into her old house, and when she moved back home he planned to help care for her - but she is now out of the house 5 days a week caring for an older 96 yr old woman! I worry that with his lung cancer that eventually she will end up caring for him at her advanced age, but I don't see how it could work out to move him/her here.

I'm posting to help remind people that we should appreciate our loved ones while they are around, and that sometimes treasuring the things that they loved can also make us feel better and closer to them. The used Ti Victorinox chronograph that he gifted to me a few years ago while he was alive (see previous 1st post), and this Citizen that he kept and wore have decades of marks on them, that serve as reminders that he lived and beat up the watches doing the things that he loved to do (or didn't love doing but did anyway).

But also seeing how well he cared for the other three important watches that I gave him over the years makes me feel good; because he loved to fondle those watches and wear them around the house, even if he didn't go out with all them and show them off. He wore the Scurfa Diver One PVD almost every day for 9 months, till he passed with it on his wrist, but the PVD coating kept it pristine. Those watches have the most sentimental value to me.

His Dive Master 500 doesn't appear to have been worn at all, with the price tag still attached to the strap - It's a reminder that we shouldn't hoard watches that are safe queens, because they'll never become special to us and have no sentimental value to those to whom we pass them down.