In August of last year, my sick brother dropped off the face of the earth again.
At first, I didn’t worry too much; frankly this was normally behavior to me, at least as I remembered. The first few weeks I just wondered when he would call. Then after a month I wondered if he would call. When several months passed, I considered calling around to hospitals to see if he was admitted or even dead. Again, something I remember vividly from our past together.
Eventually my brother called me – from the hospital. It was now December, and he’d been admitted for congestive heart failure again. We chatted a bit, I told him I was glad he was okay, and then he promised to call me the next day when he was home from the hospital. That evening, the hospital released him. His wife took him home to the motel they were living in. They started to eat some dinner, when all of a sudden my brother collapsed. A blood clot had broken free from his lung and traveled up to his vein, blocking delivery of blood and oxygen to his heart and brain. He’d had a stroke.
Despite my brother insisting he was fine (not lucidly I might add), my sister-in-law took him to the hospital. She waited until the next morning to call me. He spent the next few days in the hospital getting his strength back. He has been in and out of the hospital a couple of times since then, as the doctors and nurses try to get his medication just right. Some days he is full of energy and funny as hell. And other days he is too tired to talk to me.
The doctors told him the give him about a year to live with his heart being the way it is. I guess the little guy is just tired. My brother seems to think he can defy the odds yet again – beat the heart rap like he beat the leukemia rap 10 years ago. I consider the fact that him and I are speaking now, 17 years later, as brother and sister- and I’m inclined to believe that seemingly impossible things can happen. Whatever his time, I will take it and learn acceptance and patience – acceptance of who he really is and patience of who he really is.
Time is all we have.
Definitely value each and every moment you share. You can never get this time, these moments, the conversations back. We can never take for granted our families…. Never.