To lose a sibling. It seems like an impossibility. They’ve always been there; they would always be there, right?
You’ve known them all their lives. You’ve built forts in the woods together, eaten off each other’s plates, gotten spankings together.
My brother Stephen died Saturday evening after his idea of a perfect day.
He had worked on his farm, shot targets at Prairie Wildlife and had enjoyed a quiet dinner with his beloved Dava.
“They were all perfect days,” Dava said at some point Saturday night. “He was so good to me.”
The designation “larger than life” has been thrown about so often as to render it meaningless. Not so where Stephen was concerned. His exuberance, his deep knowledge and love of the natural world, the pony tail.
He was fully engaged in the lives of his three children, Trey, Stephan and Hannah. On Sunday he was going to the Atlanta market with Hannah who has an online clothing business. The trip would have been his first venture into the world of fashion merchandising.
As a kid I was jealous of Stephen’s athletic skills. He was a star running back for Ben Owen’s Gra-Y team, same in junior high. He was a natural with a baseball bat and a tennis racquet.
His athletic genius was most evident in his preternatural ability to shoot a flying target out of the sky.
In recent years he took up helice shooting, a form of target shooting that mimics the spontaneity of live bird shooting.
His friend and partner in Prairie Wildlife’s helice program, Jimmy Bryan, said Sunday he’s been flooded with texts from all over the country from people who knew Stephen through his shooting.
A Facebook post Monday from the U.S Helice Association paid homage to Stephen and his shooting ability: “During the 2019 World Helice Championship in Rome, he was the awe of shooters around the world for his ability to not only shoot low gun, but to break target after target using a method that most would never dream of trying.”
“I’ve been shooting that way all my life,” Stephen told Bryan, in his matter of fact way, “Why should I change now?”
In addition to being a memorable character, Stephen was a memorable storyteller. In his early 20s he embarked on a round-the-world backpacking trip. The journey supplied him with a lifetime of stories.
I have a recording made during a family vacation of Stephen telling stories about the hospitality extended him on that trip while in the Australian Outback. My brother’s flair for the dramatic is on full display here, egged on by the enthusiastic response of his siblings and nieces and nephews captured in the recording. No doubt the Aussies were likewise mesmerized.
Here’s an oft-told Stephen story:
Two of our sister Tanner’s children, Brian and Scott, played for Northwestern the year they went to the 1996 Rose Bowl. The whole lot of us had flown out to Southern California for the game. After the parade, festivities and game, we all went our separate ways.
Stephen and Dava drove north to Big Sur where they stopped for lunch at Nepenthe, a restaurant with a jaw-dropping view perched on the side of a mountain overlooking the Pacific.
Afterward at the restaurant’s gift shop while paying for a purchase, Stephen declared as he signed the guest book, “Somebody is going to come along who knows Stephen Imes.”
Another kook from the hinterlands, the staff no doubt thought. Stephen said this with full confidence not knowing we weren’t far behind them.
About an hour later we showed up at the gift shop. As Beth went to pay for her purchase, she looked at the guest book.
“Look,” she said, “Stephen has been here.”
“You know Stephen Imes?” the clerk said, incredulous.
On the Sunday after Stephen’s death, we were talking by phone to our son John, who lives in India, a place Stephen couldn’t get away from fast enough on his around-the-world odyssey.
John recalled a conversation about the afterlife he once had with his cousin Stephan, Stephen’s older daughter.
Stephen, who was listening, chimed in, acknowledging he had no idea about the afterlife. “For all I know my spirit might be dancing on the other side of the universe,” he said.
That is where I’d like to think my brother’s spirit is now: dancing on the other side of the universe.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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