Sorry that it has
taken me so long to do a new post. I really had to think over how to share this
one.
He was Family
Her brother was
dead and she did not know how she felt about it.
As a flood of
memories washed over her mind, her frustration and anger grew to an almost
uncontrollable point. She fought to control her helplessness and anger as she
had a too much to do to plan his funeral with her parents.
She smiled when a
flash of a six year old girl sitting at the kitchen table kneading play-dough
with her teenage brother, showing him how to make various animals with the
colorful clay … then an image of the same girl, a few years older, playing
Noah’s ark under the pin-pong table with the same young man. She was amused
with the scene of a 12 year old girl getting in trouble together
with her brother when she con him into letting her drive the truck while out
mending fence on the family ranch. She sighed as she heard his favorite songs
warm the Christmas hearth.
Then, the vision
grew dark. She shuddered when she thought of all the secrets she shared of her
cousin’s multiple molestation and rapes of her. She remembered
her fear on the night of his first grand mal epileptic seizure that had her
running for her mother. He was soon sent to Eastern State Hospital
Finally, she
wrote her part of his elegy:
“He was my
brother and I loved him. As part of our family, he was naturally stubborn which
had served him well.
He was a mighty
Warrior, as child, he fought to keep up physically with his siblings and the
rest of the world. As a young man, he fought his demons
of mental health illness every second of everyday of his life. Those
of us who stood by him in his battles felt the pain of his defeats and reveled
in his victories. As the years past the demons preyed on his
physical being, taking from him that he greatly valued: The ability to share
his music, the ability to speak clearly and finally his ability to fight.
Yes, my brother
was stubborn: he fought his long war with the devil right up until
the very end.”
Exhausted, she
sighed. She knew that she would spend the next years struggling with her mixed
emotions and with the fact it was her explanation to the family about his last
struggles to end his pain that helped the family, as a group, to decide to take
him off life support which would eventually ended his life. Why was it that she seemed
to be only sibling to have faced it all when all the others ran away into their
separate lives? Why was this duty expected of her when she was the one most scarred
and damaged by his illness? Why did she do it when it hurt so?
It was simple.
He was family.
