My Brother, Rick Dahl

 

I am on the plane coming home from LA and a trip to help my dad deal with the sudden death of my brother, Rick. It’s been two weeks since I posted the slideshow of our idyllic trip to ME, and as I start to write this, it occurs to me that this isn’t exactly the 180 I had in mind. Rick and I were four years apart in age (he was four years younger) and that made a huge difference in terms of us being close. We were never in the same schools together, either, so there wasn’t any of that. In fact, I moved to Detroit when Rick was all of 16, so you get my point, we weren’t close. I have  told a lot of funny Rick stories over the years, the heckling at the Bismark Theater, the overflowing hot tub at the Bismark Hotel. Come to think of it, after that trip he really wasn’t allowed to come back to Chicago, and he really didn’t have any desire to, either. I was always a measuring stick to which he felt he came up short. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, he took care of my parents for years, battled drug and alcohol addiction throughout his entire life, and made a killer guacamole. I can relate to the addiction issues, I make okay guacamole, but taking care of my parents, especially my mom as she became more and more ill, was something that I would have failed at miserably. Rick took care of it. He never complained about it, and saw things no son should really ever have to see his mother go through. I’ll uncork some of the lighter side of Rick Dahl over the next few weeks on the show, but I just wanted to say, for the record, that Rick measured up just fine as far as I’m concerned. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t even have one picture of him in my computer, and since I’m posting this from 30,000 feet in the air, I’ll just use a picture I took while I was sitting alone in my dad’s church last Sunday. I was reminiscing about the good old days and trying to shake off the loss of a good kid, who did the best he could do. Sometimes, that’s all the measuring up anyone can ask for.