My Life In 35 Songs, Track 34: “Brother” by Brett Eldredge

Brother, I think it’s time we talk; why do guys like us spend most our lives playing it tough?

I just kept replaying it.

On the morning of Saturday, November 23, 2024, as I ran circles around my neighborhood in the rain, I found myself double-tapping my AirPods every three and a half minutes to restart the song. I wanted – no, I needed – to hear it again. It was the one thing keeping me from spiraling out of control. For that run, and that day, and that weekend, this particular song was my force of gravity. If I just kept playing it, then I could keep the things I held dear from floating off into the ether.

I am not the type of person to replay songs ad nauseum. Even the songs I love most have rarely had me reaching for the replay button more than two or three times in a row. So why was it that, on that November morning, the only thing that felt appropriate was listening to a mostly-forgotten album track from country-soul singer Brett Eldredge 10 times in a row?

That morning, I’d woken up to the kind of text messages you never want to see on your phone screen. “I know you won’t see this until the morning but please give me a call whenever you can.” My sister-in-law had sent that text at 2:08 in the morning. Another message, from a mutual friend of my brother’s, said “PLEASE know I’m thinking about you and the family. I’m here for whatever you guys need.”

I have never popped out of bed faster.

It was 8:30 in the morning and my wife was still fast asleep, so I quickly let myself out of our bedroom and walked into the kitchen, where I sat down on the floor and planted my back against the cabinets as I dialed my sister-in-law. There’s a song I love by Mat Kearney called “Closer to Love,” and it has a line about how “we’re all one phone call from our knees.” I’ve thought of that line a lot when thinking back on that morning, and how I sat down because I didn’t trust myself to stay on my feet. My heart was racing and my body was pumping with adrenaline, and I was as scared as I can ever recall being. Because, I thought my sister-in-law was going to pick up the phone, and tell me my older brother was dead.

My brother wasn’t dead, thank god, but it had been an incredibly close call. My sister-in-law told me that he’d collapsed the previous evening while playing ultimate frisbee with friends, because he’d had a heart attack and gone into cardiac arrest. I’d learn later that the type of heart attack he’d had is known as the “widowmaker,” because it only has a 12 percent survival rate among patients who experience it outside of hospital, and because there are basically no warning signs before it strikes. Fortunately, my brother was among that 12 percent. Quick, smart action from a whole bunch of people had saved his life and gotten him to the hospital in a timely fashion, and he was now sedated and in stable condition.

As soon as I got off the phone with my sister-in-law, I called my mom, who lives 10 minutes from where I live now. She was at work, but we made plans to drive downstate to visit my brother in the hospital in a couple hours when she finished up. It felt completely bizarre to try doing regular day-to-day things in the interim – like eating breakfast, or taking care of a few work tasks, or even lacing up my shoes for my daily run. I suppose that’s why, as I headed out the door for said run, I felt like I needed a song that would tether me to what was happening with my brother, and that would keep my mind planted firmly on the prayers and good vibes I was now sending out into the universe on overdrive. And while there are surely lots of songs out there about brotherly love, and certainly plenty of songs that remind me of my brother, I could only think of one that I wanted to hear in that particular moment.

“Brother, I think it’s time we talk/Why do guys like us spend most our lives playing it tough?” Those are the words that Brett Eldredge sings at the top of “Brother,” a non-single from his mostly-forgotten self-titled album from 2017. They resonated with me deeply that day, as I ran around my neighborhood and tried to make sense of the jumble of thoughts hurtling through my mind. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes before you die, or before you almost die? Well, my brother’s life was flashing before my eyes on that run. I saw him as a kid who loved dressing up as Robin Hood, as a childhood baseball fan memorizing the stats of all his favorite players, as an all-state distance runner in high school, as a groom the day he got married, and as a dad to his young daughter. I certainly saw all the complex architecture that made up our relationship – our youthful days of not always getting along, our bonding over live music, our inside jokes, the best man toasts we gave at one another’s weddings.

Growing up, you look at your older siblings like they are invincible and all-knowing. I certainly looked at my brother like that. He was five years older than me, and seemed to know so much that I didn’t know yet, and to have experienced so much of the world that I hadn’t grasped yet. I latched on to the music he loved, the movies he thought were cool, the jokes he found funny. When he started running, I wanted to be a runner. I loved watching him race in high school, and especially watching him win.

One particular race popped into my mind that morning – a race he’d run on our home high school track, at our school’s signature invitational meet, more than two decades previous. Racing the 3200 meters against his counterpart from our crosstown rival school, Andrew bided his time, letting the other guy take a commanding lead during the first mile. That other runner built such a substantial buffer over Andrew and the rest of the field that I remember people in the stands around me remarking on how the race was probably a done deal. It wasn’t. During the last four laps, Andrew picked up the pace and made his comeback, culminating in a down-the-stretch finishing sprint where he caught and passed the other guy in just the nick of time to take the W. Andrew had raced smart and strategically, and had done something that’s hard to do when you’re a runner people expect to win races: he’d taken his ego completely out of the equation and had faith that his endurance and his speed would be there at the end, when he really needed them. Let other people think you’re the underdog. Let other people think they’re watching one race. And then, when the time is right, show them what you’re really made of.

There was a line in the Brett Eldredge song that connected back to that race, for me, and gave me the faith that Andrew would find a way to pull off a similar magic trick this time around: “If you’re the underdog, you’re the comeback kid/You’ll find a way to get through this.”

He did find a way. At every stage of his recovery, Andrew exceeded the doctors’ expectations. The heart attack happened on a Friday, and by Monday evening, he was back home with his family. Six days after the incident, it was Thanksgiving Day, and needless to say, it wasn’t hard to decide what I was most thankful for this year. A month later, my family got together for Christmas, and everything felt almost normal, as impossible as that would have seemed when we were all clustering around Andrew’s hospital bed in late November. It didn’t escape me how different that holiday season could have been if a few circumstances hadn’t lined up exactly the way that did, and I felt deeply, humbly grateful for everything and everyone that had just happened to be there to save my brother’s life.

In the fall of 2020, a work colleague lost her brother, in very similar circumstances to the ones that almost took mine. Here’s what I wrote to her when that happened:

I’m not often at a loss for words, but I definitely don’t know what to say to someone who has lost a sibling. ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘My condolences’ just never seem to carry enough weight, you know? I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Even the thought of losing my brother or my sister makes me want to crawl under my desk and cry. One of my favorite quotes about grief, from the great Bruce Springsteen, is that losing someone you love deeply is ‘like losing something elemental, like losing the rain, or air.’ Moving on after that just seems so…wrong, so impossible. But I hope you are holding your family close and sharing lots of fond memories of your brother. When I think back on my grandfather’s funeral, I ultimately remember it as a happy day, because we all got to be together, sharing a million wonderful memories of him, laughing like he would have wanted us to. It’s all a consolation prize compared to getting just one more day with the person who’s gone, but it’s definitely a reminder of how much good they poured into the world while they were still here.

I don’t know how I would have carried on if my brother hadn’t survived. I don’t know if I’d have been able to get over the unfairness of it. I don’t know how anyone ever does. And I didn’t need it to be Thanksgiving or Christmas to give thanks that my family got to keep him – that we got to take the alternate path. I’ll be thankful for that every day for as long as I live, and I’ll be grateful for all the new memories Andrew and I get to make together because he’s still here.

Case-in-point: This summer, a couple weeks before Andrew’s 40th birthday, I bought us tickets to see The Gaslight Anthem, one of our mutual favorite bands. It was our first show together since his heart attack, and I wondered if he’d feel differently about that kind of experience than he did before – about the way the beat of the pounding drums can feel like its resonating within your own chest cavity, perhaps, or about the rowdy jump-around-and-scream abandon of a great rock show. From what I could tell, though, Andrew approached and enjoyed that concert just like the many, many shows we’ve seen together before. If anyone was having a different experience, it was probably me, simply because of the urge I got, five or six times throughout the show, to reach out and wrap my brother in a big ol’ bear hug.

We spent the evening singing along to Gaslight songs, but in the car heading home later, it was this Brett Eldredge song that flitted back through my mind, particularly the bridge:

I hope you know I’d take a bullet
Stand out on the front line
Oh, life is short, don’t you know it?
Everybody needs a partner in crime

I’m glad my partner in crime is still here, and that we’ll get to share more concerts and more holidays and more good memories down the road. I know that my family got extraordinarily, miraculously lucky, and I hope yours does, too. But just in case, please go hug the people you love, and tell them you love them. Because you never, ever know when you might get a phone call that brings you to your knees.

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