I don't really want to write this because one of the glories of a blog is the selection process. While everything I put up here is true, there's stuff I leave out, in an effort to skew this towards the prettier side of me. But I have an urge to present this thing, for me, so that I can try to understand what it means, and for you, as a gesture towards balance. It came up a few nights ago, talking with my oldest friend, and it made me deeply sad, thinking about this, thinking about the things I lost along the way.

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So: I used to be sensitive, in the easily-wounded sense, and in a reluctance to wound (this latter part is still largely intact, if only because I don't like being disliked). I also thought of myself as someone who cared about other people, not in the remembering birthdays, solid sense, but in that I was easy to talk to and liked it when people opened up to me and spilt a little of themselves, and I had a number of friends with which I talked to primarily on an emotional basis (generally about them). This was part of an overall sense of (in retrospect, barely justified) personal selflessness, in that I hated - and still hate - selfish people; the fullness of them, the power with which they moved through their days, their narcissistic absorption, the mirrorpeople Yet in a strange twist, these were often the people who came to me to unburden themselves. Perhaps it is not so strange, really - these friendships were almost love/hate, I think - and I used to enjoy feeding on their emotions and strong sense of self, which at that time I lacked (and therefore loathed in others). Now, five years later or so, I look up from the day-to-day and find, on examination, that I have indeed become the thing I hated. I've become selfish, and pervasively so. While I'm still more than willing to do things for other people (when asked), I can't truly imagine other people's lives at all, I don' t the power or willingness to imagine how it is that other people exist and live their lives. I think primarily about me, as I suppose most people do. I still love to talk to people and engage as deeply as they will allow me to, but now, I suppose I am shorn of the illusion that it was ever altruistic. Perhaps very little truly is altruistic, perhaps I even do help people, but god, at the bottom of it is me. And this makes me sad, because, as I have almost managed to forget, a truer altruism did exist, and perhaps does elsewhere, still. I know this altruism existed because he lived with me, for 18 years my brother, until a cancer unfurled and slowly took him away. Nearly three years ago now this happened, after two years of dying, two years when his needs and health took over us all and subjugated us in desperate pursuit of his continued life. He was the best of us, I don't doubt this ever, and this is why I feel my own selfishness as a failure. He was good, truly good, and I have almost forgotten him. Yes, I live forwards and spent very little time in the past, but is that an excuse?

I have known my oldest friend for 15 years, (call him J.) and I live with him now, and we are very different. Rebellious and unsettled as a teen, he had a special connection with my brother, who he saw - especially after he got sick - as a role model, as an object of wonder. He woke him up one morning in the early days of his sickness to take him to see a dawn. They talked often, my brother with a slight awkwardness at being valorised so, at being admired for his steadfastness and simple refusal to die, for his tenacity and love of life, for his unwillingness to ever say a harsh word about anyone, for his true altruism, for the fact he was genuine in his care. He gave it because it was the right thing to do. He kept his religion while I lost it as soon as sex presented itself as a credible alternative. He was more like my mother than we other two. Humble and honest, a boy becoming man, a boy never permitted the joy of his first girlfriend, a boy forced to grow up fast only in order to die. And these are things I have only thought afterwards, and they only come back to me on the occasions that I talk of him with my family, or with my friend. We were driving back from Eltham, back from our family homes into the city, and we talked as we talk every few months, about him. J. talked glowingly of him, of my brother, of how he admired his principles and approach to life in the midst of death, and my words were paltry in response and I realised how little I do think about him, and how little I really knew him.

The eulogy I gave was unmemorable for anyone else except me. I remember it keenly because it sums up my failure to ever live up to him. I used fancy words, talked about him, made him a hero, detached any reality from his life and sent it floating out among them, those who knew him better than I did and knew the falseness and glibness of my words. I remember organising cars to the cemetery and wondering when it was going to hit me. Surely within three months? Surely within six?

That summer, I did crazy things and put myself elsewhere as often as possible and only later did I come across a line in a book that those experiencing death embrace life-affirming behaviours. So that made sense. But then the grief did not flow, and was instead replaced by guilt at my lack, and the guilt was made more by the deep and abiding grief of my mother.

And now it is nearly three years on and the only time I think about him is in the abstract - this is why I keep thinking about death and life, life and death. I have small disclaimers I use on myself to lessen the impact and they are that I live life intensely now, so during his sickness I was intensely involved, and afterwards, after a lull, the only thing I knew how to do was live forwards.

See, I'd never be able to speak this, because even that would make it too real.

So I've been through death and come out the other side sans god, but with a sense of self and a knowledge of my own selfishness and a knowledge that although I have spent this time building a self which I felt the lack of so greatly, that I, like my brother, will end.