A Sister’s Sad Burden

Perhaps the most difficult task, when undertaking to chronicle something as personal as the life and death of a brother, is to be straightforward, factual and specific—yet also somehow synthesize the details into a story with broader implications for the rest of us. With Requiem for My Brother, Marian Botsford Fraser succeeds admirably in the specifics, but often leaves me feeling regretfully unaffected in that larger sense.

I say “regretfully” because I wanted very much not to be left wanting. To complain about lack of transcendence or an absence of wider analysis in a real-life story where so much pain, struggle and courage are in evidence, feels churlish at best and, at worst, insensitive. Yet a kind of social context seemed missing to me, given that the long, slow dying of anyone—particularly someone as determined to survive as Fraser’s brother, Dave—is a subject of such enormous pertinence to a society of middle-aged men and women, sandwiched between...