Remembering Ricky

This weekend marked my older brother Ricky’s 13th yahrtzeit. Passing time hasn’t made me miss him any less. In fact, each year brings more occasions I wish he could have shared.

I was the goody goody. He was the daredevil. I would go on nature walks in the woods behind our house and come back with colorful leaves and caterpillars. He would go there to race go-carts, launch bottle rockets, and set fires that thankfully never got out of control. I found ketchup too spicy. He bought sauces labelled XXX and once nearly killed his cat with the fumes from cooking some searingly hot ghost peppers. I hung out with the other nerds in my honors classes. He hung out with the friends he made playing practical jokes in homeroom — Fox, Frantz, Gordon — I can hardly think of a high school friend of his whose last name didn’t also begin with an F or a G.

Four years older than me, he bossed me around mercilessly in my childhood. He rode me to school on the back of his bike when I was in kindergarten, kicking down the stand while I was still strapped into my little seat. He jumped off the top bunk onto my bed every morning and woke me up. It was my job to get up and change the channel to whatever he wanted to watch, even if I had claimed the TV first. He loved a whoopee cushion or a crank call. By age 12 I was considered the more responsible babysitter for our younger siblings even though he was 16. He threw the kinds of parties people talked about for years, with camp friends driving hours from Altoona to attend.

In college, it took him a hot second to bail out of the honors dorm where he was originally housed and switch to a frat house. My main memory from the one time I visited him there was my feet sticking to the beer-soaked floor and a fresh pile of doggy doo in the entryway. He gave me my first car — an aqua blue AMC Gremlin he bought off a frat brother for a few hundred bucks. I called it the Turquoise Terror. The passenger door was roped shut, a simple fix for a broken latch, so my friends would climb in through the hatchback. He had upgraded the radio with a tape deck, a luxury at the time, but a few weeks later he repo’d it, leaving a Flintstones size hole that I could actually see the pavement through. It’s tough now to think that my parents must not have really valued my safety too much or they would never have let me behind the wheel of that heap. I loved it.

In college he got so many parking tickets on my dad’s insurance policy that years later, my sister’s car got towed by the NYC police based on a random check of the license plate. Unfortunately, her expensive dental school books were in the trunk. At first she thought the car was stolen. Weeks later we learned it had been sitting on a paid tow lot all that time and would cost thousands to redeem. Rick researched when it would be put up for auction, then won the bidding for $200, less than the books alone. When he was paying, the clerk noticed he had the same last name as the insured. With his signature chutzpah, Rick didn’t flinch. “Oh, so you think there’s only one Fein in the entire city of New York?” I wonder if that would work in the age of Google.

Rick loved music and was always offering concert tickets, especially at small venues for artists who would reliably go on to greater fame. We saw them when, for an extra 10 bucks, you could meet before the show and share a beer. He also found the best comedy — I remember him visiting me in college, taking me to a then-unknown Jerry Seinfeld at Catch a Rising Star on JFK Street, years before Must See TV. Even Jerry couldn’t make me laugh the way Rick always could. 

My dad, husband, brother-in-law and Rick used to play golf together, a Bad-News Bears crew for the country clubs. While the other newbies were carefully lining up their shots and trying to remember every lesson on body position, club selection, and precision putting, Rick would just walk up to the tee and smack it miles further than anyone else. If it went into the woods or the water, he’d shrug, take a drop, and smack it again.  

He was a devoted uncle to my little kids, who he would swing around dangerously most every weekend and take special pleasure in asking the toddlers to go get him a beer from the fridge. He was magnetic to children, combining warm admiration, a willingness to engage them, and his legendary irreverence that they absolutely loved. Sitting on the beach or waiting to order at a restaurant, he’d quiz preschoolers on American history, Bible stories, current events, and obscure scientific facts. Unlike most adults who gave praise for effort alone, Rick teased them if they missed an answer, so his praise when they got one right actually meant something. He’d circle back on ones they missed, giving them lots of second chances and handing out quarters to the winners. My kids adored him, and we got together most weekends of their early childhood, going to a park with their cousins, getting ice cream or brunch.

Siblings are the original soulmates; sharing your childhood and your parents creates a special understanding that time and space never erase. It is hard to believe it has been 13 years since he tragically passed away at age 48. Does grief have an age of maturity like a bar mitzvah? 

At moments large and small I still can’t help but think, he should’ve been here. He should’ve been with us all summer at the beach, treating the kids to ice cream and dozing on the sand. On Rosh Hashanah he should’ve been dousing his brisket in hot sauce, questioning every ritual, engaging the kids with his questions, making fun of their goofs. He should’ve been able to take pride in his own kids’ achievements, his daughter’s creativity, artwork, and free spirit, his son getting his master’s degree and landing his first job. He should’ve been making us laugh every time we took ourselves too seriously. In truth, he is still making us laugh.

Laura (Lori) Fein of Teaneck is a litigator at Eckert Seamans LLC. She is the daughter of the greatest mom ever, who she hopes is reading this, and the mom to five daughters who probably never will. Her podcast Mommash: The Oy and Joy of Family is available on all platforms, and she can be reached at mommash.podcast@gmail.com.