Anthony

Written for Anthony by his brother Nick, shared with an entire hospital and close loved ones during his Honor Walk.

The bond between siblings is something that lives in a language only the two of us ever spoke. Anthony was my younger brother by six years, and from the time he was small he seemed to understand something that took the rest of us much longer to learn: that love, said out loud, is the simplest and most important thing a person can give.

He said it constantly. To family, to friends, to people he had just met. “I love you” was how Anthony closed a conversation, the way other people say goodbye. He meant it every single time.

Anthony was the thread that held our family together in many ways. He was the one who remembered, who checked in, who showed up. He carried our connection the way he carried everything in his life, which was with his whole heart and without asking for anything in return. He was a caregiver by nature, not by obligation. It was simply who he was.

He loved animals. He loved the garden and the dirt under his hands. He loved making art and building community and sitting with people in their hardest moments. He treated every creature and every person he encountered as worthy of tenderness, and that is a rarer thing in this world than it should be.

At 36, Anthony leaves us the way he lived his entire life. He chose to be an organ donor so that his final act would be the same as all the ones before it - to help, to serve, to make the world a little softer for someone else. Pieces of him will continue forward, doing what he always did…

Still giving.

Still loving those he will never meet.

I will miss my brother for the rest of my life.   I only now at this moment understand the scope of our bond and the magic that holds it all together as Im left holding the entirety of what was us.  But I know how he would want us all to stand here right now. He would want us to look at the people next to us and say the thing he always said. So I will say it for him, and to him, one more time.

We love you, Anthony.