There are three sets of us. The older set, the middle set, and the little set. The middle set was severed by death, leaving only one with six year gaps on either side: which one fit better? I don't know. I am twenty years older than the youngest of of us and the oldest of the little set just celebrated his fourteenth birthday. He stands a head taller than me and looks so much like the brother we lost at this same age. If I was superstitious the resemblance paired with the age might scare me, but I trust in a Higher Order.

Tonight we bookended, the oldest set minus one and the little set present and accounted for. Are you confused yet? We were eight: seven boys and a girl. My parents joked that they broke the mold after me and I used to think they were serious and just didn't want another one of me; would you have? We were seven but death sneaked in on a rainy April morning and snatched number four away and so we were six for a few months, then a premature eighth joined us. Then we were shattered completely.

I don't write about my family much. Not because I don't think of them or love them or wish great things for them and small things too, but because as personal as all the personal things of the world are, there isn't much more personal than family.

Tonight before I read out loud to the little set, I sat on the edge of my couch and said, "You won't always have friends, but you'll always have us, and so treat us well. Treat one another well." And I meant it.

I see my parents in me more and more. My mother was younger than me when she had me and I am the age she was for my earliest memories, her hair short and her clothes colorful. I don't remember much of my dad until later, much later, I wish I knew why those memories aren't so easily recalled or if they happened at all. I remember holidays, Easter bunnies and a Santa Claus that smelled of chalk and cigarettes. I remember a godfather and godmother. I remember the Roman Catholic Church.

Tonight I see my mother in me when I brush back the hair on the fourteen year old, when I hear myself say her words. I wonder if she felt the same inadequacy that I felt saying them. And so I didn't end there, I said more, I said, "I know I've failed to do that, treat you well always, but I want to. I want to."

And he nodded at me and his eyes, so like his older brother who is frozen in my mind at fourteen, smiled. This is why I trust in the middle of what was shattered and scattered completely: because there are no do-overs, he is not the same person, though they look so much the same. He is new and fresh and different. And so, too, are the rest of us. We don't walk forward out of our history and into perfection, we are still figuring it all out.