My Brother

I lost a fraternity brother this week.  Again, I came face to face with my own mortality.  I guess we all do from time to time the older we get.

My fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi at the University of Florida, was a very special part of my life in college.  I am sure fraternities are special wherever you go, but at Florida, we were an unusually high achieving group—leading the Greek community in academics, service and sports.  We also partied better than anyone else I am proud to say.

My pledge class was 90 strong--the largest in TEP and U of F history!  52 of us were initiated as brothers, and over all these years we have kept that special relationship alive between all of us.   We became professional people, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, whatever. The advent of email made our ability to communicate and stay in touch incredibly easy, and during the last 10 years or so we have had many unique group discussions and interactions that historically were never possible.

After our large reunion in 2005 there were heated discussions about the state of the fraternity and what we should do, if anything, to assist and guide the chapter back to health.  It reminded me of those all night meetings when we were deciding the fate of prospective pledges, only it wasn't all night, it was all month!

Then there were the intermittent communications when one or another of us had a major success or disaster, and all of us came together to provide support.  Our brotherhood suddenly realized it had an electronic meeting place where we could all return and talk with the brothers who had been our dearest friends in college.  It was wonderful!

The downside is that we now are instantly aware when one of us passes, and as the accolades start rolling in from everyone, along with the stories and remembrances, we are together again to share the moment.

My brother, Peter Fryefield, was a judge in Jacksonville, Florida and as I started to read the tributes, it was clear he was universally loved by the community and all the TEP brothers who lived and worked there with him.  I remembered him as a slightly built dark-haired fellow who had a toothy grin, a great laugh and was a favorite of his pledge brothers.  Now I read about him as a man of great intelligence, compassion and passion for things like Bluegrass music and vintage guitars.  I regret that I didn’t get to know him better as an adult.  I guess we all had great potential in the early years of our maturity and it is a unique experience to learn about how we all have developed over the years into what we have become today, often far different from our memories of each other in college.    And then there is the comfort of discovering that in so many ways we have not changed at all!

I do know that I miss him for what I remember of him, and for what he became….and I am thankful that I now have the support of all those brothers who were a part of my life back then.  I know that they are all there for me when and if I need them, and that is a benefit that is unexpected and blessedly welcome.

In today’s impersonal electronic reality, I feel like my fraternity brothers and I have created a place where we can recapture a piece our emotional past.  A place where we can joke with each other, yell at each other and feel that sense of brotherhood that we all knew we wanted to feel throughout our lives.  Eternal friendship is no lie.