Last modified: Wednesday, August 1, 2007 1:14 AM EDT FLANAGAN: A brother, and a hard question to ask You have to ask the hard questions in journalism, they say. The fact of the matter is, you have to ask the hard questions in life. Someday, for instance, you may have to ask somebody how they want their funeral handled. Maybe that looks like an easy question on paper. Face to face, when it forces a person to own up to a basic truth, but one we'd rather treat with denial - everyone has to die sometime - it's not. Here's how a guy, allegedly with professional training in asking hard questions, dealt with it: "You ever thought about what you want for a funeral, Bob?" I ask in the middle of a bull session in the patient smoking area outside Kent County Memorial Hospital in Warwick, R.I. He chuckles his trademark chuckle, and flashes me his trademark sly grin. "Hey, I ain't plannin' on dyin', Mark. Not for a long time. Don't need to think about it." To buy time, I take a quick look at the surroundings, the hospital buildings and parking lots, the flower gardens, the attractive wooded setting, the clear blue summer sky. And my brother in a wheelchair, his 6-foot frame reduced to less than 150 pounds. Fourth-stage lung cancer cuts pounds fast. Then I lie. "Yeah, I know. I expect you to be around a long time. But just in case things don't work out the way you and I want them to, you don't want the rest of us having to guess at how you wanted things, and then worrying that maybe we got it wrong, do you?" "I see what you mean," he says. The grin is gone, and the chuckle, too, but only for a moment. "Cremation. I definitely want to be cremated. And I want my ashes scattered in the woods. I always liked to be in the woods." I tell him about the resting place I've chosen for myself, and ask if he'd like to go there. "No. Those are your woods," and the chuckle is back at the preposterous notion of a resting place so far from his chosen home. "I don't want to be in your woods. I want to be in my own woods, down here in Coventry or West Warwick." The first woods Bob Flanagan ever roamed were in South Attleboro in the early 1960s - little stands of trees around Cranberry Pond and off Mendon Road, not far from his boyhood home on Greenwich Street. It was in South Attleboro that the chuckle and grin became his trademarks. If you've heard about the joker who rode his bike through the corridors of South Attleboro Middle School (now Coelho) waving to his classmates at their desks, that was Bob. He paid for it with a double dose of discipline - one from Principal Charles Cokonis; one from his father, Charles Flanagan - but told me "it was definitely worth it." And it was in South Attleboro where he played White Hawk football and Little League and in the South Attleboro Youth Basketball Organization and where he won swimming races at the South Attleboro pool. And it was South Attleboro where he got into his share of trouble. Well, maybe more than his share. Thirty years ago the family picked up and moved to Warwick. Bob grew up to become a house painter. He could manipulate an 18-inch roller loaded with ceiling paint as easily as I manipulate my toothbrush. By every account I've heard, he was a master of his trade. Two marriages failed, but the first gave him a daughter, Caitlin, who was the pride and joy of his life. He liked to pitch horseshoes, rooted for the Pittsburgh Steelers and cared for a cat that he named Stinky and always referred to as a dog. Beyond that, I can't tell you much about my brother's adult life. Until I got a call June 22 that he was in the hospital, I had not seen him at all in the 21st century or for the last few years of the 20th. "I went off the radar screen for seven years," he told me in his hospital room. In a nutshell, there was a financial responsibility he chose to dodge. And in a world where there are people who worry incessantly about invasion of privacy, through the Internet or by the government, Bob found it easy to remain invisible to the bureaucracy. Just as long as he drove carefully. I wanted to ask him more about life in the virtual underground, but his voice grew steadily weaker and raspier as the cancer advanced. But there is one essential fact you should know: He smoked Marlboros. He smoked them until the end; the bitter end, as they say. That should give you enough information to connect any dots that need connecting. Bob died early Monday morning. Soon he will be going to the woods. His woods. He was 45. MARK FLANAGAN is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335 or by e-mail to opinion@thesunchronicle.com.