So what have I learned this year… hmmm…

1. From the Mexico trip: Partying 7 days in a row can be detrimental to your health so take a break in between if ya can (this may be related to getting older)
2. From school: You can get perfect scores on every homework assignment and not do well on the tests… what?
3. From work: If you want money to live, you have to go to work.
4. From my kitties: Kitties can get asthma… did you know this?
5. From my love life: You can feel happy when your lover is interested in someone else – poly folk call it compersion or frubble. I call it cool when it works.
6. From my love life: Having more than one love partner is exciting… fun… comforting… wonderful.
7. From traveling: First class is cool but business class on a huge plane is effen awesome.
8. From the past: I still think my ex is an awful person.
9. From the past: I can be an awful person too. They say the things you don’t like in a person are the things you don’t like in yourself. Wise words.
10. From my brother: Or maybe because of my brother – Forgiveness is better than holding on to past transgressions… especially if the person is remorseful. Holding onto bitterness out of some sense of being wronged is childish and petty.
11. From my past: Forgiveness is easy to give but moving on with the person you forgave is harder… most people can’t or won’t do it.
12. From life: When you get the true meaning of forgiveness and moving on, it heals so many other parts of your heart.
13. From life: Number 13 isn’t really unlucky.

I think the biggest thing I learned this year is #12. My parents died in a tragic accident when I was just 13 and for many, many years it defined who I was in many ways. Not just in how others viewed me but in how I viewed myself. And then I had this fight going on with my eldest brother that was a big part of my life even though we didn’t talk and I thought I was “over it.” Until I confronted my past with him and dealt with all of the issues between us, I couldn’t really heal from losing my parents. I couldn’t deal with the pain that brought because I wouldn’t deal with the issues between my brother and me. We couldn’t heal together (and with my other brother) because we couldn’t deal with what was between us.

I remember the anniversary of my parent’s death this year and what I remember most is how hard it wasn’t. Every year prior on that date, I was a mess – internally mostly but the pain and grief was so deep and still felt so new. But this year, while I missed them and felt the pain of their absence, it wasn’t crippling like it had been in the past. I attribute that to the mending of the riff between my brother and me. Long needed, long overdue, but just in time. A gift I gave to him, to myself, to my parents – to everyone in my life. I have an inner peace I think was missing for so long… probably tied into feelings of abandonment and loss I didn’t even know were present.

So that’s my biggest lesson of 2008 – how the sins of our past and our ability and willingness to deal with them directly and forgive those who trespass against us unintentionally, well that’s a better way to live – truly forgive not just give lip service until the next time that someone lets you down so you can use it against them in a moment of superiority conveniently forgetting all the wrongs you’ve done in your life. Better than wallowing decades long in anger, bitterness and regret. I’m 36 and I hope that lesson stays with me in the future.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you have a great last night of 2008 and I’ll see you in 2009!

Then I notice him out of the corner of my eye.  I notice his bald head first, the glint from the morning’s rays reflecting off his head.  My mind then notices the goatee on his face and then the slight limp to his walk.  All this occurs in a fraction of second and my mind processes this information and the image hits on a memory stored within and recognition sets in.  My heart leaps a little as the rest of me catches up with my mind, which has been saying, look he’s here! look at him – it’s him…LOOK!

My head turns slowly in disbelief as my heart continues to beat harder and a gasp escapes softly from my parting lips.  My eyes widen and start to search for the man I saw on the street, the man whose image caught my attention, the man who looks so much like my deceased brother.  For a moment, my mind believes it really is him and my heart follows suit, joyously celebrating the miraculous recovery of my brother.

Until my eyes see it’s not my brother.  Until my mind realizes it miscalculated.  Until my heart recognizes the truth… my brother is gone.  This man is just a man who resembles my departed sibling.

My heart skips a beat and aches just slightly, as my mind moves on with other matters that concern my day, such as what street we are at in the bus line. 

I remember experiencing this phenomenom when my parents passed on… remember those tiny glimpses, those instant recognitions, the feeling of joy, relief… and the feeling of disappointment and acceptance when it turned out not to be true.  In time, I learned to enjoy those moments of recognition, to look at it as moments remembering those who passed on.

But for this moment, the ache remained for most of the morning, a lingering reminder of loss and death.

I’d not exactly put him off, but I’d really not responded in kind either. I’d listened to his stories and comments without providing any feedback, good or bad. I mostly listened in a kind of awe as I realized how differently we remembered our past.

I couldn’t find the words to express what I was feeling about our past, so I decided to print out the posts from this blog that I’d written specifically about him. I took them all and asked him to read, keeping in mind that some were written prior to us talking again.

He read the post I’d written about our parents’ death first; I sat silently while he read. After a few minutes – a lifetime – he set the papers down and said that was how he remembered it too. He then said to me, with tears running down his face, “Even when it was bad, I knew we’d be together again as a family – you and me and Joe (our other brother).” He stood up and I stood up and then we wept together. In sadness and in happiness, we clung to each other and cried out our mutual pain. He said again he was sorry and we let our past go.

I left before he read the other posts but he called me later about them to share that he’d forgotten some things and those posts brought it all home. But we’d said our goodbyes to those painful times. He still spoke about our past at times, still asked me if I remembered this or that – sometimes I didn’t remember things he did and it was eye opening. Other times, I remembered it differently, and we’d start to bicker until I remembered that it wasn’t all that important right now.

My brother asked me once what I remembered about him when I was a teenager, as a father figure to me, and I responded, “what I remember most is how angry you were… just so angry.” He called me later to thank me for opening his eyes to that anger, and he wanted me to know I was right.

Jeff told me once he couldn’t understand how I could forgive Richard for our past, for the things he did or didn’t do when he was my guardian. But what I realized as I listened to Richard’s stories was that we were at a point in our story where we were both beyond forgiveness. We were both learning about acceptance. Because my brother was dying and this was our last chance. This was my last chance to grow the hell up and realize it isn’t always about me, and this was his last chance to face what he’d done.

The truth is my brother lost a set of parents too. He lost a mother and father who adored him. He had to be the adult, the big man – he was the one who everyone turned to and expected him to make it alright. He was 24, true, but how many of us are truly adults at 24? How many of us have to face the burial of not one, but two parents and the responsibilities that entails AND the responsibility of a 13 year old sister?

I never once really considered what my brother went through when my parents died. I got a little taste of it with my brother’s death now, and I feel great sorrow and empathy for the 24 year old boy my brother was at that time and facing such a daunting task. All these 17 years, I held on to this anger and pain about what my brother did to me. I never thought of what he did to himself. In the end, my brother lost his whole family – his parents, his brothers, his sister, aunts, uncles, cousins… what a steep price to pay when I believe, with all my heart, his original intentions were good.

I don’t know exactly what’s changed my perception of my brother but I can’t look at the past with the same eyes. With the same venom and spite. With the same anger and hate. I just don’t have it in me. What I see is the sick, suffering soul I saw in the hospital about a year ago. Down, out, sick, without his family. I never wanted that – not for anyone and especially not for my brother.

So I got over myself. Dealt with my shit and learned how to be there for a man on borrowed time. I became the sister he needed. Not out of duty but out of love.

He was my brother. He deserved his family. It was the best choice I made in my life ever. To let go of my pride, to let go of the past, to stop being a victim to my own perceptions – no matter how justified they may seem. I let go of what he did to me long enough to meet the man he became. And found something in myself I never knew I needed to find, didn’t know I was missing – I found a sister. I was – I am – Richard’s sister.

Maybe he couldn’t be strong for both of us 22 years ago but I could be strong for both us now. I wanted to be strong. This is what love is -this is what it means to really love someone; not self sacrifice, just acceptance.

Goodbye, Richard. May you be at peace. May you know that you are loved and missed by your family. You are loved by me, and I will miss you.

1. He preferred being bald.

2. He had a terrific, if somewhat odd, sense of humor.

3. He only recently got sick – prior to this past year (and his previous bout with leukemia) he was quite healthy.

4. He loved to cook.

5. He loved his wife – a lot.

6. He loved his family too – though we were all estranged.

7. He did some really bad things for a really long time – and regretted it.

8. He didn’t really change as a person – rather he gave up selfish and destructive behaviors that affected who he was to himself and everyone around him.

9. It took him many, many years to realize what he needed to do – what was the right thing to do.

10. He didn’t want to die, and yet he was tired of the pain.

11. He took over 15 medications daily in the end.

12. Snowball lived – through him – because of him, she will never be forgotten.

13. Because of him, I found a little part of myself I didn’t know I was missing.

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My sister-in-law and I spent TWO hours just in the funeral home alone. It was a drawn-out, painful process. All I could do was stroke my sister-in-law’s back when she broke down and try to hold myself together. I made jokes with one of the arrangers, which is how I sometimes deal with pain. So that helped.

And we have to start all over again tomorrow. Picking out clothes for my brother, arranging a family get together… I’m tired just thinking about it.

When will this be over? I keep telling it to be over…

November 6, 1961 to May 5, 2008

May He Find Peace

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.

His column is a personal journey, and he speaks from his point of view. At one point, he spoke poignantly about his wife’s relationship with her father, or lack thereof. And he states eloquently, “The few times (the wife’s father) has visited in the last 20 years has seemed to turn my wife back into the little girl that still hopes her daddy will be there.”

As I read this one line, I had the thought, Is this what I am going through with my eldest brother? The brother who I suddenly started speaking with after 17 years of silence. I was looking for the father figure I always wanted him to be.

I have two full-blood older brothers. The other brother is also older than me but in the middle. He is a good man. He has been there for me in ways no brother should have to be, and we share a bond that is deep. He was – is – my hero and role model.

But with that one line in that article, I realized what has attracted me most to this new relating with my eldest brother was the starting over. Maybe I’ve been looking for him to fulfill that promise he made me oh so many years ago.

Is is possible?

“But the truth was – the help was there for my asking. I was just too proud.”

As he spoke, I know he spoke the truth. I knew that as much as he wanted to succeed – in being the dutiful son, the responsible guardian, the savior – he was doomed by the very thing that gets the best of most of us… his pride. I can even picture his pride being his undoing. Add on to that his own weakness, and my brother didn’t stand much of a chance living up to the expectations he put on himself.

I can see that now. I see it in this older, tired version of the brother I knew as a child. As he sits across the room from me in his hospital gown with machines all around him monitoring him, I can see how hard he tried, how sadly he failed, and how deeply he regrets.

But life moves on. Regrets get us nowhere in life. Neither does anger. As I sit across from my brother listening, just listening, I know this to be true. I don’t have it in me to be angry anymore. Or to feel loss at what my life would’ve been like had our parents lived. Because I moved on a long time ago.

There are so many things I thought I would say to my brother during a visit like this, so many things I thought I needed to say. But I don’t need to say them anymore. I am blessed, truly blessed in life – for so many reasons. And it’s enough. It’s enough for me to look across at this man and know that I can try to be a sister to him, if only because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t have to give anything more than I want. And it’s enough.

I looked at him blankly, not understanding.

“The day of the accident. I remember that we said it was just us.”

My heart clenched, emotion spilling over, and I’m sure it showed on my face. Oh yes. That promise. “It’s just you and me now,” he’d said to me almost 21 years ago.

I don’t know that I viewed it as a promise at the time, given the fact that I was 13 and our parents were dead. I’d never held a job or had to run a household. I’d never had to worry about a roof over my head, or getting food on the table, or making sure there was toilet paper in the bathroom. My mom used to clean my room for goodness sake. Promise?

But maybe it was just that – a promise to each other. A trust in each other placed under horrible circumstances. I believe I stood by that promise.

Even when he would disappear for days on end. Even when there was no food in the pantry. Even when I went to school with torn and worn clothing and was mocked and teased.

I stood by that promise as he declined into drug addiction. Even when he would sit at our mother’s kitchen table getting high for days on end, rambling about a fantasy future filled with ill-gotten money. Even when the sheriff came to move us out of one place or the next, because he’d used our rent money to buy more drugs.

I ran away once, but the shelter I ran to called my brother. And when he came to pick me up, I stood by him even as he threatened to have me committed to an institution as a troubled teenager. Even when he called me a pitiful orphan and threatened to take me to an orphanage.

Even after I moved out of his house at the age of 14, I still stood by him and never once turned him in for any of the stuff I’d witnessed. When I got a job, he’d call me for money, claiming he was waiting for another check. And I stood by him, at 16, and I gave him money out of my miserly earnings. And he took it – a 27 year old, capable man.

I held unknowingly to that unspoken promise until I was 18. Because he was my brother and my guardian. Because, when I was 13 and he was 24, he said to me it was just us now.

I wonder, can he say he did the same?