Memories of Bobby

I’ve had a variety of writing opportunities since the newspaper business left me, including stories on buying insurance and paying taxes, profiles of baseball players and company CEOs and a first-person piece about being a movie extra. By far the most difficult thing I’ve had to write was my nephew’s obituary.

Robert David Braun Jr. – we called him Bobby – was born on Oct. 16, 1970. I was a junior in high school then, and I learned about his arrival from our school guidance counselor, who also was a neighbor and had received a call from my father. At the lunch table in the school cafeteria, I handed out gum to the friends sitting with me.
I took this picture of Bobby the last time I saw him, in April. Bobby would have been 39 years old this month, but he died Sept. 5 in a motorcycle accident in New Jersey, where he lived his entire life. He was my brother and sister-in-law’s eldest child, my niece’s only brother, my mother’s eldest grandchild. I knew he was loved by many, but not until his funeral did I realize how many. The line stretched out the door of the funeral home for much of the visitation time.
On his birthday, Bobby’s mother, sister and 4-year-old niece took balloons to his grave and sang “Happy Birthday” to him. It about broke my heart to hear this. My mother, who turns 93 soon, had talked about how she had made Bobby a birthday cake every year and now she wouldn’t be doing that. At my sister-in-law’s urging, she baked a cake anyway.

Crying as she was telling me on the phone, Mom said she had trouble decorating the cake – partly because of what arthritis has done to her hands and partly because she didn’t know what the decorations should say.
“I didn’t know what to write,” Mom said, “so I just put ‘Love,’ ”
“That’s perfect, Mom” was my reply.