Chapter 3 - How do you get over the loss of a brother?
In Part 1, "Burial of the Dead" of my memoir, "My Own Private Waste Land"
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3 – How do you get over the loss of a brother?
What is it, Elly?
Uncle Lee, how do you get over the loss of a brother?
Elly had never called me before.
Elly’s father had died 8 years earlier, but it had been less than a month since her older brother Seth had died.
She sobbed fresh and full, with a catch every time she breathed. Her phone call was a delicate package of pain dropped at my feet. Her heavy cries sounded as if she were pulling broken shards of glass from her flesh.
I was in Kauai on a weekend trip with a new girlfriend, a splurge for my birthday. Emerald green Waimea Canyon stared back at me from the overlook where I pulled off the road to take her call.
I didn’t know Elly. I only knew of her through my parents who kept me up to date on the rest of the family. She was my brother’s third child.
The first time I met Elly, my brother spanked her. She was 6 months old and needed her diaper changed. She fussed and cried, kicked and screamed. My brother lifted her with one hand, gripping both her ankles, and slapped her butt several times with a flat hand, a little too hard, and said in his soft but stern paternal voice: “No, Elly, no. Bad.
We weren’t raised with corporal punishment. His church advocated for “spare the rod, spoil the child.” It’s the closest I ever came to disliking him.
Rage burned on my cheeks. I whispered with our mom in the darkened back bedroom.
“We don’t tell other people how to raise their children. You’re going to have to let it go, honey.”
“But Mom, you know it’s wrong.”
She studied her fingernails in the dark and lit a cigarette.
“Come and help me in the kitchen.”
Elly was seven when he cut his wrists the first time. She would not have been told the truth of what was really going on, that her father had tried to kill himself and would have to be hospitalized for a while.
As middle children, Elly and her brother bonded in that house of illness.
Now here she was, calling me, our shared bond having lost brothers. I was overjoyed that she had called. I had not had contact with any family since the estrangement three years before. I reasoned that since she--the strong independent young woman I had always heard about--since she reached out for help, she would not succumb like her father and brother. I thought her call meant she would be safe. She knew enough to reach out for help during a time of crisis. She had learned in the house of illness.
I didn’t know Elly or any of my brother’s grown children. They had grown up during their father’s illness when I lived in Kansas, before I returned to California. I was 35 years removed from knowing a brother who, in many ways but years, was my twin. We had not been close for decades. But Elly was his daughter, a blood relative, and needed my help. I would give what I could.
Did I say to Elly, Seek help if you need to? Did I say, Talk to your mom, see a counselor?
“It’s not the same for me, Elly,” I rationalized. “I knew your father when we were much younger, before he joined the church. He was different then. He was also 10 years older than me.”
I wanted to say: You got a raw deal. You and your brother are trauma-bonded, middle children in a fucked-up family. You and your brother learned mental illness and dysfunction just as you learned religion, a little sign language, and zero coping methods. Considering everything, you have done so well.
I probably said: Hang in there. Take it one day at a time. It gets easier. It really does. Be happy for the life he had. Be happy for the love you shared. You will get through this.
Her pain was too fresh for her to hear anything close to “you will be all right.”
The vast canyon in front of me, its ridges of rock terraced in a kaleidoscope of tropical green shades; the chasm beside me, a girlfriend who would explode my life with lies and deceit in three short years, those expanses were not as large as the chasm between me and Elly.
The chasm between Elly and me was unbridgeable. My brother had seen to that.
I listened to the dying fall of her tears, musing upon my brother’s wreck.
Seven months and nine days after her brother, without a whisper from the pill vial spilled on the carpet in a dark room, Elly was gone too.
Unable to survive the loss of a brother
Unable to survive the loss
Unable to survive the loss of
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I write about:
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mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
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