My brother Ron passed away last week. He’d been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) 18 years ago. It’s an awful disease that can slowly take away a lot of your physical abilities to function, and ultimately your life.
When Ron was diagnosed nearly two decades ago, there were only a couple of drugs which helped some people, but unfortunately, not my brother. Over the years, many other drugs and options have been developed for those diagnosed with MS. For example, my Chief of Staff in Washington has MS, and she does remarkably well with it. It affects every person differently.
Anyway, my brother Ron was really a remarkable guy, and I loved him dearly. He was five years older than me (we have a younger sister Carol, and a younger brother Dave.) We lived in a trailer park until Ron was 11 and I was 6-years-old. And I followed him around everywhere. He taught me how to play sports, and we both became pretty decent athletes.
He was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout, so so was I. He was more successful than me, as he became an Eagle Scout, and I didn’t.
I’m on the left, Ron is third from the left.
My first political experience was with Ron. In 1960 we put Kennedy for President bumper stickers on our dad’s car. Dad was for Nixon, so they didn’t last long.
About twenty years later, in my first run for Cincinnati City Council, our dad dropped us off before dawn at the water tower in Mt. Washington, which is Cincinnati’s eastern-most neighborhood. We hiked 26 miles with a ‘Chabot for Council’ sign all the way to Sayler Park, Cincinnati’s western-most neighborhood. We stopped at noon at Fountain Square downtown where I’d announced I’d be available to discuss how I’d be a City Councilman for every neighborhood, from the far east to the far west of Cincinnati. (Only one reporter showed up.)
And sticking with politics for a moment, Ron was as liberal a Democrat as I am a conservative Republican. We talked politics all our lives. We agreed on the goals we should strive for, but disagreed on how to get there.
Ron was a very spiritual guy. A gentle soul. After graduating from Elder High School, he spent six years in the seminary studying to be a priest. That was back in the days when it looked like the Catholic Church might change its policy and allow priests to marry. It didn’t, and Ron dropped out and became a nurse so he could help people.
Ron married his wife of 34 years, Nancy, and they had two beautiful daughters, Laura and Maria. I will be forever grateful for the loving care these three special women, as well as my sister Carol, gave my brother.
In the 18 years my brother struggled with MS, I never heard him complain. I never heard him say a bad thing about another person (except for Republican presidents.) He would give you the shirt off his back – literally. (I’d complimented him on a new shirt he was wearing once, and he started unbuttoning it to give it to me. It became a running joke when I complimented him on anything he was wearing over the years.)
My brother Ron was really a special person – one of a kind as they say. I’m going to miss him an awful lot. But I know that after spending the last years of his life in a body that no longer allowed him to move around, he’s with Our Lord, and can go anywhere and do anything he wants.