Back to Four
When I was 16, my mother asked me casually, as if it were a hypothetical, how I would feel if she had another baby. Like any self-absorbed, distracted teenager, I brushed off the question, which (as you might guess) turned out not to be a hypothetical, and a few months later, our baby brother Michael was born.
In many ways, in those first couple of years, Mike actually felt a little bit like “our” baby. With no childcare or significant household help and four older children to tend to as well —Tom (17), Tony (13), Paul (9), and me—our mother had an overwhelming workload. To help, Tom and I would stop at Foodtown for groceries on our way home from school, and many days I would give Michael his late afternoon bottle watching the 4:30 movie on Channel 7 while my mother made dinner.
It was from taking care of Michael that I learned how to swaddle an infant, change a diaper, and even how to bring down a spiking fever. So much of caring for young, preverbal children is pure physicality, and I remember missing that terribly when I left for college and Mike was only 2 ½.
We used to tease our little brother about missing the really poor years in our family’s history, when my father was still in training and not making much money. Mike got the trips to Disney World and summers at camp that we older kids never did. But it wasn’t always easy for him to be the fifth child and so much younger than the rest of us. He effectively had six parents telling him what to do all the time: his two actual parents and four bossy siblings. As he got older, we tried to scale back on the nagging, we really did. Probably not enough though.
I have four or five favorite pictures of Mike in my mind that capture his generous, loving spirit over the years.
The first is of him as a little boy of three or four, curly haired and mischievous;
The second is of him and me dancing at my wedding, Mike an enthusiastic 15-year-old groomsman serving in his first wedding party;
The third is of him walking off the football field at Williams College on a picture-perfect fall day, tired and thrilled after a successful game;
The fourth is a photo of Mike with my brother Paul and my two sons after the “uncles” had stayed with us for a few days during our vacation in Stone Harbor;
And the last is of me and my brother Tom filling in for our cherished parents and escorting Mike down the aisle to await his beloved bride Valerie at their gorgeous wedding—also in Stone Harbor—just over three years ago.
We tragically lost our little brother and Valerie earlier this month. After a period of some struggle, Mike had recently seemed upbeat, making plans and looking forward to celebrating his 45th birthday in early November. That celebration will never happen now, and our entire family is devastated. For a while we were the four Minnefor kids, and then, happily—but for too short a time—we were five. Now we are back to four, shell shocked and heartbroken, our baby taken from us far, far too soon.