IF I HAD TO CHOOSE A UNIFYING THEME OR NARRATIVE on the life of my dear brother Mark, I would pick a passage from the Gospel according to John:

“The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

My late brother Mark’s adolescence was troubled, matching, in a sense, the wider tumult and upheaval that marked the decade of the ’70s in the United States. He and my Dad were constantly at loggerheads, and eventually things reached the point that they were barely on speaking terms. In the midst of all that, Mark got into a car with a drunken driver, and the driver rolled the car doing about 80 mph or so. They came to a rest upside down on the Tennessee Street off-ramp on Interstate 80 in Vallejo. Despite the severity of the crash, Mark was the only person of the three in the car who was seriously hurt. He broke his neck, and the injury left him a quadriplegic for the rest of his life.

That was a dark time in the life of the family. Besides the Gospel of John, I might quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, whose tales Mark loved: “Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures.”

The wake of his accident was an occasion of grace for the family, a time when we were immersed in love. My parents didn’t have to cook dinner for the four months Mark was in the hospital because someone from our church brought food every single night. People from the church literally prayed around the clock for him. Mark himself never went a moment without prayer during those difficult days, nor during the long days of physical therapy that came after. Best of all, the things that had threatened to tear apart Mark’s relationship with my Dad melted away into insignificance.

One of the nurses in Mark’s Kaiser rehab program was a woman named Marilyn. Mark and my family came to enjoy her very much. She grew up in a rough area of Boston, and was both plain spoken and very devout, but in a very earthy and plain-spoken way. (She was the first person I ever heard use the term, “lower than whales__t,” which still makes me chuckle.)

Marilyn went to our Catholic parish in Benicia. And she eventually revealed that her husband, Bobby, was the drunken driver who had paralyzed Mark.

Bobby was an alcoholic, and in the wake of what he’d done, he was swimming in shame. He could not bear to face my parents or the rest of my family. My parents were obviously livid when Mark was hurt, but before too long they came to a place where they could forgive Bobby and not carry around the burden of a poisonous grudge. They had Marilyn relay this to her husband, but still he could not bear to face them. I went by his house a year or two after the accident and did what I could to relay my parents’ forgiveness to him.

My father told me once that Mark’s accident had, in some way, given Mark back to him.

As the troubles of Mark’s adolescence faded away, in their place was the beginning of the phase of Mark’s life in which it seemed that God took the raw materials of his life and circumstances, and from those made of him something like a saint.

The burdens Mark bore were heavy, but he bore them with great love. His burdens had not only to do with the physical limitations imposed upon him by his injury. There were other things he carried, too. Of all the children of the family, my father’s final illness and death 18 years ago were hardest on Mark.

Dad was sick with cancer for a long time before he died, and thanks to Kaiser’s wonderful home hospice program his final months were spent at home. All of us kids pitched in to help take care of him, staying with him and looking after him. But we could leave — get some air, take a break, recharge. Mark, because of his dependence on my parents, was there the entire time — yet he bore the burden with immense strength and patience. He was never bitter, never angry, always attentive to the rest of the family.

One of Mark’s regrets is that he didn’t get a chance to tell our Dad he loved him before he died. But I think there is, as I write, a joyous reunion happening in Heaven, where my Dad is letting him know that he knew Mark loved him, and they can express their love now without reserve or hindrance.

Mark spent the last few years of his life in increasing physical pain. Pain can blind you to others and keep your focus on yourself, but in Mark’s case, he reached out and became more giving — of his time, his prayers, and sending us things unasked for and unannounced — things he bought online that seemed to just arrive out of the blue on our doorsteps; things we might have mentioned in long-forgotten conversations that we might need or want, and he remembered and got them for us.

Mark died on Sept. 11, 2008, of a urinary tract infection that became septic. I expect that in some way, wherever he is now, he will continue his tradition of sending gifts, still giving us things that we didn’t know we needed.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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