[Very preliminary, rough and abbreviated draft]
Life One is more of a pre-life, in that it consisted of a tragic event and a very conscious decision on the part of its victims on how to respond to that event.
I had an older brother. His name was Harold Jr.; he was named Hal. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois on June 21, 1954. He was adored and loved by all who knew him, but no more deeply than by his parents. He was, by all accounts (friends as well as family), intelligent and even emotionally intuitive beyond his years. Growing up, I could see in his photographs how arresting Hal's eyes and facial expressions were. I could also see how special Hal was in the way others looked at him in photographs.
Hal died unexpectedly at age two and a half in Midland, Michigan on January 15, 1957, his father's 30th birthday.
For most of his life, Harold Sr. was a very disciplined diarist. At an early age, he received his first diary: a five-year edition in which one page was dedicated to each day of the year, and each page was divided into five sections, one for each of five years.
It is said there is no loss more profound for a parent than the death of a child. I can attest to that, based on the effect it had on my mother for the remaining 40 years of her life. It was even harder on my father, who took his own life less than five years after Hal's death.
