He was Family ...

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 for evaluation. She felt betrayed when she thought of the night she finally stopped her cousin’s advances by kicking him in the nuts only to have her brother rape her later that day. Years of keeping this secret silent as she was expected to nurture and watch after her brother. Remembering the pain of suppressing the hurt, fear and growing resentment as she watch helplessly as he slowly lost the fight with the demons in his head as his physical health declined … the agony of the years of trying to help their parents deal with his multiple attempts at suicide as their other siblings blissfully went on with their lives. Her frustration in know that she would never be able to confront her attacker for what he did as he was unable to comprehend how deeply she was cut.

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.