I rode my motorcycle to Portland, Oregon to visit my brother, Greg. Greg has dementia. Dementia is a terminal condition.

Waiting for the pilot car at one of the many long Montana road construction sites, the guy in front of me got out of his car and I took off my helmet. He was on his way to Walmart. His job, he told me, is to teach Walmart employees to merchandize books, “The money’s in hardcover. We have less than four feet of paperbacks.” I said, “I like a paperback.” “To be honest, me, too. The only hardcovers in my bookcase are Stephen King.” He was tall, thin and sixties and wore a voluptuous grey 10-speed handlebar mustache.

Following the Columbia River into Portland, the wind pushes the bike around so that I have to pay attention and there are whitecaps on the water. Greg wind surfed that river for many years with great skill and passion. He had a Ford van full of boards and sails.

The difficulty with loss is that it’s so ordinary. The words have all been written. For Greg, there is no happy ending. Things will not get better. The avid hiker shuffles short steps. His balance is tenuous. He doesn’t see the ducks, he can’t follow a pointed finger. There is no trial medication or treatment in Mexico. There is no hope. There is only sadness and guilt, guilt that it isn’t me watching lacrosse on the big screen while my housemate snores beside me.

The Military Police brought us home in their jeep when I was four and Greg was two. Dad was a captain in the Army stationed at Fort Ord. We lived on post. They caught us at the main gate, a mile or more from home; we were holding hands, going to the beach on Monterey Bay. We were barefoot, Greg was in diapers. That’s who we became.

As we sat on the couch, I asked him, “Greg, do you know who I am?” He stared into my eyes for many, many seconds and I stared back. The disease has turned his eyes a pale sky blue, almost a grey, the bright Norwegian-blue eyes he got from Mom are faded and gone. He never answered my question.

In his stare I looked for him. There’s a temptation to romanticize, “He’s still in there,” I say to myself, I want so badly for it to be that day again when the jokes were worn and the conversation easy. But that’s about me, not him; it’s about my own struggle with finality, my inability to cope with the void, with infinity, with my own frailty and pending death. The empathy is horrifying. As we walked, we passed a guy with a yapping Chihuahua on a leash. I said under my breath, “The only good thing about a Chihuahua is that it’ll fit in a garbage disposal.” He chuckled, maybe in response to my quip. There’s no knowing.

Greg has been kicked out of two assisted living homes for his violence, a common symptom of dementia. His rage is there. You can see it in his fists and rigid 90-degree elbows, you can feel it in his shoulders, you know it when you say, “Greg, this way” over and over and he keeps walking toward his own destination. His anger exists, it seems, as a vestige of a previous life appalled at what’s become. I tried to engage him with kid memories, peacocks at Mooney’s Grove, hiking Snake Lady’s Wall, sneaking into the county fair, surfing the early morning sets at the Eleventh Street beach, stealing Dad’s Opel summer nights, pushing it down the street before we started it and riding the dirt roads of Black Mountain with all the friends we could fit in the backseat. He was silent. What are shared memories when they’re no longer shared?

When I was thirty and Greg was twenty-eight, we rode motorcycles around the world; SE Asia, Australia, Nepal, India, the African continent, Europe. My wife Meredith and I lived in Tokyo during the boom-boom economy of the early nineteen eighties and we bought two Hondas for the trip and then a third. The ride took thirteen months. It was the kind of life experience you enter as one person and come out someone new. Greg came away with a great skepticism for the dictums of capitalism, for money as purpose. He worked, he made a living, he raised Morgan and Madeline, my wonderful nephew and niece. But he recognized something I’ve only learned of late. And maybe it wasn’t the trip, maybe he just knew. Greg has lived life on his terms; travel, windsurfing, hiking, camping. He taught his kids to love life, to love people, to accept risk, to stand up straight and go for it. That’s his legacy. He remodeled kitchens when he had time.

Greg’s is a life to celebrate and even now, as the path narrows, he still, every once in a while, when you’re not looking, twitches the half-smile that inevitably preceded his snark. I knew that smile when we tried to escape Fort Ord. I love my brother and I miss him.