RIP Stephen P. Burke (1951-2023)

Many things have pulled me in different directions in Real Life this year, and you may have noticed that my output has been greatly diminished. I may have hinted at things without coming right out and saying much, except to a handful of people offline. And now I can say something.

My older brother Stephen has had health issues for most of this year. Actually, they date back through the pandemic, but he checked into a hospital back in May. He'd been in the hospital and a nursing home since then, with health problems interfering with physical therapy. I've been visiting every week (multiple times per week during the summer), and dropping by his apartment to get his mail and keep tabs on things. And it wasn't always easy figuring things out.

But that's all past and no longer worth mentioning.

What is worth mentioning is that Stephen was went to college with I was a little, so I got his bed five nights a week. On Friday nights I'd be spirited out of one bed and placed in a different one alongside my other brother who was much closer to my age. (Large Irish family, don't you know.)

Stephen had a love of chess which I never picked up, probably because he could trounce me, given his age, and the fact that I never learned to think more than 2 moves ahead. Somewhere in his apartment, he has some collectible chess pieces. I know this because he seemed very concerned about them any time we talked about the "stuff" at his place. For all the Disney memorabilia that he and his late wife (passed during Covid lockdown) accumulated, it's what he seemed proudest of.

Jumping back to those early years, Stephen liked to write. He also used to act in shows at Iona College, where he starred in several productions that I recall. He appeared with the Everyman Company, doing street theater, and at the Irish Arts Center. He did other shows that I can no longer remember. I was young, he was in his 20s.

Stephen had a love of comics and used to draw illustrations of his own. I thought that they were amazing. My superheroes never made it out of the cartoony stage. I have a sense of shape, but nothing like what he was able to do. That said, to my knowlege, he never wrote his own comics, like I did. Granted, if they had, his probably would've been much better than mine, considering his encyclopedic knowledge of comic lore, while I was writing goofy kid stuff that made sense to a goofy kid who'd seen a movie or two.

And, of course, Stephen was a writer. Would I have ever been interested in writing if Stephen hadn't been there first? I hate to think all the stories that will now be lost forever with his passing. The only ones I'm currently aware of are the two I commissioned from him to appear in Driving Tigers Magazine back in 1991. I thought he could've gone further with his writing, but life didn't work out that way.

And now I have to say good-bye to the older brother who planted creative seeds into an otherwise analytic math-oriented mind. I don't have a pithy comic book line or any other fandom that I can grab.

All I can say is, Good bye, Steve. You will be missed.