About eight years ago, my brother Craig allowed me to borrow his new Honda Civic, which he had named Xanthus in honor of Achilles’ immortal horse in The Iliad.

“Beware the fate of Patroclus,” he warned, reluctantly handing me the keys.

Yes, Craig is a tiny bit strange. But he’s Southern, and we encourage that.

He was alluding to Homer’s classic scene in which Patroclus, kinsman and bosom friend of Achilles, borrows the great warrior’s horse and armor and is then brutally slain in battle by the mighty Trojan Hector.

At the school we both attended, students read a version of The Iliad in eighth grade called The Trojan War. Ever since his exposure to that story, Craig has been obsessed with all things Achillean, even forcing my family while on vacation in Kauai to see Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy on opening night. Unfortunately for him, Craig hated the movie.

Last week, my strange little brother got married to a beautiful girl named Meredith. She’s a successful accountant at Ernst and Young. He’s also successful and works in PR at Children’s Hospital. They have a lovely starter home in Dallas with a deck and a big backyard with a hammock. At night, they will take walks down their tree-lined street as cicadas hum and crickets chirp. They will have children. They will watch movies. They will go to church. They will love and be loved by friends and family. I believe they will be deeply happy, and it makes me happy to know this.

But last Sunday, the day after their wedding, I drove Xanthus back to my brother’s house in Dallas from our hotel in Ft. Worth, and I couldn’t stop crying. His green car felt weighty in his absence. I felt untethered by that bewildering grief we feel when the familiar changes irrevocably, even when those changes are welcome and good.

When we have forgotten ourselves, my brother and I take a drive in his green car. We listen to the White Stripes. We go for Mexican food. We drive past the levee in Yazoo City. We talk and talk and talk and talk. These last few years separated by thousands of miles, we’ve kept right on talking. He’d call me on his commute through the serpentine interstate that is Dallas. I’d call him from the Ruggles T stop in Boston, waiting on a train.

My brother is brilliant and hilarious. One of his groomsmen observed that Craig is the only person he knows who will reference Nietzsche and Joe Namath in the same sentence. Craig doesn’t just have opinions, he constructs entire paradigms to support his opinions and they are always readily offered. He’s got a list of fifteen criteria to defend his belief that Dumb and Dumber is the greatest comedy ever made and an elaborate graph he calls “The Sports Pyramid” to support his assertion that basketball is the purest sport. Last Thanksgiving, as I drove from Las Vegas back to California, we argued for an hour the semantic difference between the terms “hipster” and “hippie.”

In The Iliad, Achilles is presented with a choice few of us mortals are ever given. His goddess-mother Thetis informs him that he can either die in battle and gain an immortal name or he can return to Greece for a long, comfortable life. He chooses death in battle. He chooses the immortal name.

I watch my brother assume the mantle of responsibility in his new family, and I think Achilles made the weaker of his two choices. It is relatively short work to die in battle. It is a long road to stay alive, keeping your heart of flesh intact, loving along the way humans beings who inevitably disappoint and who always die. It requires a kind of courage and a depth of humanity I’m not sure eternal-named Achilles ever possessed. But I know my brother, true and kind, does possess it.

After the death of Patroclus, fearsome Achilles returns to battle without his armor to avenge his friend. In one of the most cinematic scenes in Western Lit., he stands on a hill high above the battle. Without him, the Greeks have almost been driven back to their ships. Achilles gives a soul-piercing scream that is echoed by the goddess Athena, who then rings his head with fire. His scream alone scatters the Trojans and all their horses.

Thousands of years after Achilles, Patrick Shaw Stewart, British poet and eventual casualty of the First World War, sat facing the legendary battlefield of Troy. He wrote:

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knewest, and I know not,
So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning,
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

I drive past the concrete skyline of Dallas, sun-burnished in the mid-afternoon like the topless towers of Ilium. I return Xanthus to my little brother’s driveway, crank my own car, and turn it back towards Mississippi once again. New life waits for me there, requiring every bit of courage and honor I can muster.

Oh, stand in the trench, Achilles, flame-capped, and shout for me.