When I think of my brother Joe there is one aspect of his personality that is both perplexing and revealing. He had always loved adventures, whether mountain climbing, hiking across Death Valley, taking hang-gliding lessons, or doing a brief gig on a commercial fishing boat. He had that rugged, gutsy side to him. At the same time he was one of the most sensitive, the most gentle of gentlemen, I’ve ever known. He never liked violent competition, whether in sport or in war. As much as he loved nature and being in the wild, he scoffed at hunting. The idea of killing some big beautiful mammal for sport never appealed to him. I once tried to show him some fights on YouTube of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Competition). These were films of athletes pummeling one another, choking each other, and kicking each other in the face; bouts that would make my palms sweat as I watched. But he wasn’t the least bit interested. ‘Why would anyone want to do this’, he told me. The Joe I knew was not a deeply religious man, though he did have a strong conviction to non-violence. He was raised a Catholic, and I always felt he preserved a solid core of Catholicism. But being a youth of the Sixties, he was, over the years, drawn to Buddhism and Eastern practices of meditation. Shortly before his death I had talked with him about the health benefits of meditation. I asked him if he was keeping up his practice. As I ponder the life of the brother I knew for fifty years, it is this seeming contradiction that is most striking; the restless adventurer, wanting to get out of the office, always hungry for another challenge - and the gentle, amiable, artistic, software guy, with a rather quirky sense of humor. I believe Joe’s risk taking, his quest to challenge nature and himself, his mind, body, and spirit, was not in conflict with his passivity, but rather a compliment to it. The man who abhorred violence, who could not fathom the need for human beings to intentionally inflict injury on one another, had no qualms about putting his own life at risk. He died in a beautiful place, away from the industrialized man-made world we live in . He perished doing something he truly loved. He was my brother - and a brother to us all. God bless him.