My younger brother, my only sibling, died a little more than a year ago. This will be our second Christmas without him. My brother was a loner and unpredictable so Christmas without him, even when he was alive, was not rare, but this year feels different. When you love someone, even if you don’t always enjoy their company when they are around, knowing they are safe somewhere in the world is a comfort. My brother’s existence seemed less and less safe as the years went by, certainly in the last few years when he had physically moved a thousand miles away and was living in his van, but he kept in touch with my mother by phone, often daily. I didn’t always believe or trust in the news he shared with her about his life. My brother’s narratives often strayed from reality, and I never knew how much he believed of his own tales. Toward the end of his life I would have liked more than anything to know how much he believed himself of what he spun for the rest of us. But that was the one thing you could never really know with him.

My brother was an alcoholic.

He was the smartest person I ever knew, smart enough to observe and draw conclusions about life that most people happily miss. He was smart enough to see that his intelligence, his dyslexia, his six foot seven inch, one hundred ninety pound frame, his poet’s heart and painter’s eye made him an odd stranger in this world. We were eighteen months apart in age, and the children of addicts. That it was my job to pilot my little brother to safe waters seemed clear to me at an early age, but I lost that sense of mission when I started school. While school was a place of safety and belonging for me, it was only ever a danger to my brother. So it became every man for himself in my little family, and that single, unspoken truth wounded him immeasurably. It also, as wounds often do, defined him.

When you love an addict, you always imagine there is a way of helping just within reach, something that you, and maybe only you, can do, or say, or maybe a way of being that will change things. That somehow it lies within your power to make the light snap on. There isn’t of course, but the fact that you believe there is makes you and your addict perfectly suited to one another. My brother found and made his own family as an adult, cobbled together from childhood friends, and like-minded dreamers. He sometimes loved well, and was loved by others along the way, but his wound would not be healed. He died alone. A resilient few people tried hard to keep that from happening, but looking back, I think that is how he had planned it.

Christmas, however, offers an alternate ending to my brother’s story.

Christmas was not his holiday. Too much family. Too much forced cheeriness. Too many ways to disappoint and be disappointed. Christmas is about beginnings, about the hope that comes with beginnings. Christmas, as a holiday on its own, does not have much to recommend itself to broken people, people with wounds, people who have seen more endings than beginnings. But Christmas, as a holiday, doesn’t stand alone. It is encompassed within the story of a larger life, the life of a man who, like my brother was defined by his wounds, left alone by his friends, and homeless. Christmas, as a story, is circumscribed by the story of Good Friday and Easter. The baby grows. The man loves others more than himself. The world sees no use for him. He dies alone.

And then, in the most unimaginable twist, he conquers death, takes back his broken body and walks among us. Christmas introduces us to the One who can truly say, “No one dies alone.”

I think, in the days and hours after we left his side, the days and hours he lay in hospice dying, my brother had a divine appointment with a fellow wanderer. How he responded in those last moments is, for a time, a mystery, but because it is Christmas I can hope.