At a certain age, when life still holds possibilities but less time to realize them, beautiful and terrible things begin to happen.

In the beauty department, you care less about the physical and notice more deeply the transcendent. Wrinkles aren’t so bad. If you’re lucky, grandchildren arrive to remind you of joy. The terrible begins slowly but speeds up. Not only do your parents die, but older friends begin to peel away, too. It is shocking at first when a friend close to your own age joins the unliving.

Then the worst thing happens: Death comes for a sibling.

It has taken me a while to sort out my brother’s death almost six months ago. In one sense, it was sudden. In another, it was a long time coming. He’d lived a hard, hard life. Still, I couldn’t quite comprehend how my closest relative, just three years my senior, could have simply dropped dead. I couldn’t believe that he of all people would leave me, his fellow protector of family secrets. A good Marine isn’t supposed to leave the wounded on the field.

The truth is, Jack and I hadn’t been close in a long time. We led different lives. He was only 18 when he joined the Marines in 1968, mostly to escape his unhappy home life, and served in Vietnam. Our widowed father had been harsher with him than me. We’d also witnessed our young mother’s death. He was 6 and understood it. I was 3 and knew only that I was on my own. He suffered; I adapted.

Like most Vietnam vets, Jack was never quite the same after he returned, but he was everlastingly funny. He shared our father’s quick wit and could devastate with a one-liner. It is a family survival tactic. We laughed our way through the best and worst of times — and there were plenty of both.

Jack tried to emulate a normal life. He married, fathered three adorable children, went wayward, divorced, bought and lived on a boat, and eventually migrated to the North Carolina mountains, where he lived and died alone. The slide toward what now seems to have been inevitable began two summers ago when, after three emergency trips to hospitals with life-threatening hemorrhaging, he underwent successful open heart surgery.

I was Jack’s nurse and chauffeur throughout that summer, shuttling him between his home in Franklin, North Carolina, and Asheville. The first time I walked into his room in the intensive care unit was also the first time I had seen him in a dozen years. “I don’t even like my brother,” I told the nurse. “But he’s my brother, so here I am.”

His adult children lived in distant parts of the country so it made sense for me to make the relatively short, three-and-a-half-hour drives to Asheville from my home in South Carolina. One day, I was farther east when Jack called to say he was being released and could use a ride home.

I took a deep breath and said I could be there in about five hours. “That works,” he said, and I had to laugh. The thing is, I would have done anything for my brother, as he would have for me. He had always protected me growing up and for a couple of years when I was lost and heartbroken, he called every Saturday morning to keep me laughing for an hour or two.

At some point during the second run, I said: “Jack, don’t you dare die now. I’m just starting to like you again.”

“I know it,” he said.

I never heard my brother complain about anything. That is, until I installed him in a rehab center that was really a nursing home, where he was supposed to recover for a few weeks. He didn’t like the food. He didn’t like the smell or the staff. Even as I filled his room with plants, snacks and magazines and promised to return in a few days, he gave me the hollow stare of an abandoned dog.

That was the last time I saw him.

The next morning, he called to say that he was back at home — he had called an Uber this time — and that his “research” had confirmed that men recover more quickly at home than in an institutional setting. Sure.

We kept up through text and email for the next two years. In July, his daughter, ex-wife and I convened on a cousin’s porch on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, where we took pictures for Jack and wished he was with us. We later realized he had already died. After his children’s daily calls had gone unanswered for two days, police found him seated at his desk. He probably died from sudden cardiac arrest.

At least he didn’t suffer. But gone for good seems unjust.

I don’t know how long souls hang around, but I think they sometimes do. A close friend who was killed in a terrible crash in 2007 visited me a few months later in what must have been a dream. I was excited to see him and said: “I thought you were dead! Oh, no, you are dead. What are you doing here?”

“I had some things to take care of,” he said, speaking in his unmistakable voice. “As it turns out, it’s not that easy to leave.”

So, in last night’s prayers (they help me sleep), I asked for a sign that Jack is still with me. When I woke this morning after too many dreams, I looked at my bedside Alexa and saw Jack’s photo on the screen. Never had seen it there before. Just sayin’.