Sometimes, events come up that remind me that while my biggest obligation for health is to myself, that I made promises to people I love and that I mean to keep.

This week, my oldest brother is very much on my mind. He passed away after a ten-year battle with prostate cancer in 2015. We shared a love of music that ran deep; he was a horn player long before I was old enough to make a choice for myself, and while the brother between us picked cornet, I begrudgingly followed Greg as a horn player. Hey, we already owned the horn I would use to learn, and my mother was nothing if not a pragmatist, but I fell deeply in love with it.

Later in life, we also shared a love of all things tropical. Greg had a side gig playing trop-rock music in the Chicago area; he was a one-man band and mixed in his own original tunes. Although he was a musician for a lot of years before cancer changed his world, he played his music as long as he was capable. After his diagnosis, he sometimes used his music as his own personal therapy — and by extension, those of us around him.

There have been moments in my life when someone has left me far too soon. Among them was my father’s death; I admit that there’s part of me that wishes he could see me, now — far more self-confident and self-assured than he ever would have preferred. I suppose even thirty years after his death, I feel that defiance as a motivator; be all the things he scorned in women.

But Greg? Well, we shared our love for trop-rock and horn music, and at least he knew I was a good year and a half into my journey toward better health when he died. I became an official Parrothead the same fall I committed to losing weight and regaining my health, so we shared that, too, as well as all the familial things we needed to resolve as adults.

So as I head into our Buffett Week here, Greg is on my mind; I have carried him with me as I’ve traveled to places he wanted to go or had been himself. I think of him every time I pick up my horn, and especially when I perform. And, as our local Parrothead club works a large pre-concert and then a tailgate before the Jimmy Buffett concert, you better believe that he’ll be with me, probably laughing at the silliness, the forever-summer attitudes, the never-grow-up devotion that seems unique to these folks I’ve grown to love like family.

It’s about time that I have come to the point where I feel comfortable in my own skin; time to not feel like a stranger in my own life.

It’s about time.