I haven’t really had time or the clarity to wrap my head around this, but my brother Mike died this past Thursday. He was very recently put into home hospice with a hospital bed and the whole nine. He was getting weaker and weaker since April, but it got really bad in the last month. And we still were not speaking. 

I don’t know for sure if he was still going into work, but he was in pretty bad shape when I last saw him in April. I could hardly believe it, but he was still showing up for work on most days. He had to so he could keep his health insurance, and the health insurance for the whole family. Don’t get me started on health insurance, though.

I’ve been wanting to write about what’s been happening with all this—to process it, but I haven’t until right now. Instead, I’ve been trying to keep busy to distract myself. I don’t know why I do that. I guess I don’t want to feel the feelings. However, I’ve felt a low-grade depression since I found out. I’m also very touchy and irritated.

When I first found out, I lay in bed for a couple of hours. I cried a bit. But then, I was overcome with so many other complicated emotions. Our relationship was volatile at times, other times, it was non-existent. We haven’t been talking since the middle of May. It was my decision to stop communicating. At that time, he was leaving horrible voice messages on my phone. It was truly traumatizing me, so I told him, “No more.” If he didn’t have cancer, I wouldn’t have felt so guilty about it, but I couldn’t put up with it anymore. 

I didn’t make the drive to say goodbye to him, so I feel guilty about that too. I wasn’t able to drive because of my aneurysm, but I honestly don’t think I would have if I could. I feel like the last time I saw him was on a good note. We had a nice visit. In the back of my mind, I wondered if it would be the last time I’d ever see him, and it was. So there it is. I can’t go back in time if I wanted to.

Not even two days before he passed, I wrote a few pages to contribute to his eulogy. I had a hard time getting started with that, but then, little childhood stories and nice things about his character began to pour out of me. It was probably good to remember him in a good light and to give others some context about things only I knew about him. We were super close as kids.

That closeness was the fodder that kept our reconnections going. I longed for that closeness at each reunion, but it was always very temporary. Most of those times were because he was ill in some form or another. I’d run out to see him; he’d promised he was a changed person, but then we’d be right back to where we were at our disconnection points again. It would reach a point where it would become untenable. 

The last time we stopped talking, I began to realize how much like our mom he was. Sounds stupid that I never realized it before, but the more time I didn’t have him in my life, the more I saw him clearly. It’s not totally his fault. We both had the same crazy parents, despite how well he was treated by them. But he never had an ounce of therapy. He should have sought it out after the drugs, after Scientology, after each drug reversion, after the Evangelical Christian zeal, and more drug reversions later. Every time he was “finished” with these things, I thought, Now I can have a normal relationship with him. It never happened. I didn’t want to believe he was flawed. I looked up to him for most of my early life, and I wanted his shortcomings to be because of these things, not regardless of them. I refused to learn. I always wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, give him as much compassion as I could possibly shower him with, and I especially did that toward the end, but nothing I did was ever good enough. More and more, I’d leave our coming-togethers in tears, and I was too weak to endure it. 

I think my main problem with him is that he never listened to me. He never took me or my life into consideration. He actually didn’t know all that much about me. He never asked me how I was doing or what was going on in my life—very similar to my mom. My mom was obsessed with herself and Mike. That’s all she cared about. But Mike had a number of better qualities than she did, like being a generous soul and wanting to help others when he could. He and his wife adopted our two autistic (2nd) cousins when our first cousin and aunt died. He was crazy religious at the time, but it was still the right thing to do. He stopped believing in all that stuff a few years later, but he was still a good parent to both of them and to his own girls, though still estranged from his oldest son. He mentored the older cousin, who was ten when they were adopted. And he played with the younger one (an infant then) every single day after work. Now the older one, despite his autism, works in cybersecurity for the Marine force. The younger one, who is much more autistic, is doing well in school. It’s sad for all the kids, though.

I’ve been waiting to hear the dates of the funeral because I’ll be going to that for sure. I want to be there for his wife and kids. But I’m still waiting for the grief cloud to come and envelop me.