Thoughts Regarding My Strained Relationship with My Dead Brother

 

I’m going to talk a little bit about my brother.  He died a few years back, and my sister wrote just a few days ago on Facebook, “I miss him.”  I was tempted to write – but did not – that I had missed him since 1984, damned near 40 years ago as I type.  That was the last time he was an active member of our nuclear family.

He fell away from us, slowly at first and then picked up speed.  During the early years, he might show up for special occasions like Mardi Gras or someone’s birthday.  Then again, he might not.  He was always welcome, to be sure, as was his entire family.  After those first few years, even those rare appearances ceased. 

I was off in the military, but when I came home I tried to patch things up.  He had begun to believe that my mother – his mother, too – was some sort of unimaginable parasite, only contacting him when she needed something done.  This was patently false, but he lived with someone who promoted this ridiculous idea.  My brother was the baby, and my mother loved him more than she ever loved any of us.  Her baby.  One Christmas, I realized that my mom had not seen my brother in years.  This she told me as we rode around Ocean Springs, looking at Christmas lights.  I decided to take her to his house, unannounced, and we would wish each other happy holidays and make progress and so on.

He didn’t actually throw us out but neither were we welcomed with open arms.  We sat uncomfortably in his house for maybe 30 minutes before it just became too much.  He and his family didn’t want us there, that much was clear.  And so we made ourselves not there. My mom was thankful, though, that she'd seen him.  She would take what she could get with him.

I made other attempts to pretend things could be repaired.  One Saturday morning, I went to his house and together we walked the property where we had grown up.  We knew every tree, every inch of the jungle where we played, and we reminisced about treehouses and cousins and snakes we had known and so on.  And we talked about his relationship – lack of, to be clear – with the family.  We hated his wife, he told me, and we were hateful people.  I asked him to look at all the husbands and wives we had taken in over the years, and some of them could be pains in the ass, but they were family nonetheless. We weren’t going to reject his wife even if she was a bigger pain in the ass than the others.  She was family, as were his daughters. 

No, he said, we had chosen to hold her at arm’s length for no good reason.  He was bitter about how we had accepted the others and not her.  I said that maybe she was responsible for that, not us.  I said that if 10 people are looking at a car and nine say it’s blue and one guy says it’s red, maybe the one guy is fucked up, not the nine others. But, I said, I was willing, as were the other family members, to let it all go, to normalize our relationship, to get to know his kids, to have him once again be one of us.

And he rejected that outright. 

My eldest will turn 21 this year.  My brother met him once, and that was because I set it up and made it happen.  My youngest, a few years ago, was amazed to hear that I even had a brother.  I think about that a lot.  I had such love and respect for (most of) my uncles back when they were alive.  I went with them here and there, hunting and cleaning squirrels and picking beans and plucking guitars.

For a while, when I would be flung by events across the planet, I would send his girls a postcard.  I would have loved to get postcards from around the world when I was little!  Maybe I could have a relationship with his daughters.  Maybe I could be that cool uncle that sent them shit from other countries!  I never heard a word about it.  I don’t even know if they got them.  Maybe his wife intercepted them and tossed them in the garbage.  Who knows?

Along the way, my mom got busy dying.  Her last two weeks were full of friends and family and poboys and whatever she wanted minus the cigarettes, which I would have cheerfully supplied had it not been for the oxygen tank.  Maybe an explosion would have been a more dramatic way to go, but I didn’t think about that then.  Live and learn.  My brother dutifully appeared along with his tribe.  The girls, his girls, had no idea that their grandmother lived so close, they told me.  They could have visited, they said.  Ocean Springs is not big.  His house was about five minutes away and those girls didn’t even know where she lived.  Can you imagine not knowing where your grandmother lives? 

His wife came to my mom’s deathbed.  My mom looked up and said, having lost her ability to really give a shit what anyone thought, “What’s SHE doing here?  Now I’m sure I’m going to die.”  How many years since his wife had been in my mother’s house?  We could probably measure it in decades.  My then-wife made some food, some tasty Peruvian dish, I think – maybe arroz con pollo, chicken and rice.  And we ate it and were thankful to have it.  Later, the ex was cleaning up the kitchen, doing the dishes and whatnot.  My brother’s wife said it wasn’t fair – she had cooked and then she had to clean, too?  And the ex said, “My husband’s mother is dying and there’s nothing I can do about that.  But I can cook and clean so that’s what I’m doing.”  There were two very different types of people involved in that conversation.

I imagined that my mom’s death would bring us back together.  It did – for about 24 hours, and then his clan once again withdrew and ignored invitations to family events.  We were shunned.

Time went by and my middle sister got busy dying, too.  I flew home and we were all gathered at the hospital, hoping for a miracle that we were never going to get.  And there he was with his tribe, lamenting, crying, acting as if he hadn’t shunned my dear sister for decades.  I was not yet cold enough to point out that he only appeared when someone was dying.  (I did eventually get there.)  So once again, there we were, all of us, gathered like an actual family.  And we all picked up food from local places and ate it in a little room as we waited for my sister to die.  We ate together, recalled fun times long past, leaving the troubles aside for a few days.  And then she died and we buried her.  He and his clan once again withdrew.  My eldest sister, now our matriarch, was so sad then.  She’d lost her sister and now her wayward brother had yet again disappeared.  She tried so hard to invited him to everything and he rejected every attempt. 

One of his daughters was attempting college and needed help with her writing.  She emailed me – would I help her?  Of course.  Maybe this was the breakthrough moment.  So I spent many nights editing her papers, giving her suggestions, emailing back and forth like normal people.  But once she had used me up, she ghosted my ass but good. Eventually she began to insult me, too.  She said things to me that would have been completely unacceptable had I said such things to any of my uncles.

So it goes.

At some point, he rejected my sister’s invitation to something, I can’t remember what now, and I’d had enough.  I decided to tell him some hard truths.  Maybe he didn’t need to hear it but I sure needed to say it.  We had tip-toed around his bullshit for nearly 40 years, not saying what was really going on because there was always the hope that he’d come back to us.  Nobody wanted to burn the bridges, I suppose.  I wrote him a deadly accurate message.  I was not nice about it.  I told him to stop pretending to give a shit just because a nuclear family member was dying.  Do not, I said, bother to show up for my funeral should I go first (this seemed likely then).  Don’t pretend that you give a fuck, because you don’t and we both know it.  I told him what he’d done to his own mother.  How he had ignored his now dead sister until she was actually dying.  How he’d hurt my other sister with his continual ignoring of her pleas to come for Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, all of that.  I told him he should be ashamed but that I knew he was not.  Take your little tribe of bitches and call it a day, I said.  I can go and on and I’d held all that in for so many years, so I did go on and on.  We never spoke again, although I heard that he wanted to “beat my ass”.  I’m really too old for fistfights and he was a big motherfucker, but I figured he had perhaps forgotten that I was no longer the skinny hippie he remembered.  I was a fully grown man with decades of military experience.  I didn’t worry too much about his threats.  His health was terrible, too, so I could have just run from him for a couple of minutes until he collapsed and then taken him easily, but I’m kind of just kidding about that.  Mostly.

And then he died.  I thought a lot about how I felt about him.  We sure had some good times when we were little, hacking paths through the jungle and so on.  I decided that I missed that guy but he’d been gone for a very long time.  I loved him – he was my brother – but I didn’t like him.  And his tribe made it clear that if I (or my dear sister) showed up for his funeral, there would be Big Trouble.  They weren’t subtle about it.   

That’s never been one of their strengths.

And so that’s the way I see it.  Our family’s split with him – and it was always his choice - has caused me to lose contact with cousins who live in Ocean Springs and only heard one side of the story – his side.  Even some of the Lumberton part of the family delights in telling me what a great guy he was.  I’m glad they feel that way about him, but there’s an undercurrent there of what assholes the rest of my nuclear family was to him.  That was never true.  We always wanted him back, except for me during the last few years.  And it took me a long fucking time to come to that.

Putin On The DIcks