WHEN A BROTHER DIES

“Even siblings we don’t see, who live differently from us, who move in their own world, may be shoring up our lives, our sense of family, our feeling of being at home in the world without our knowing it.”

My younger brother died quite unexpectedly in March. He was my only sibling, the only other person left in my immediate family, both of our parents being gone.  His daughter had asked my daughter to tell me the news. “Mom?” she said on the phone, and the sorrow in her voice stopped my breathing. Had something awful happened–to her? “Gary died.” The moment tore at both of us, I initially fearing for my daughter, then losing my brother, then breaking down in tears. She thinking, I am certain, what would happen to me if, you, my mother, were to die?

My brother and I had not been close. As children we were left home alone seven nights a week by our dance-teacher parents. We were both survivors, and yet we lived in separate worlds. We watched Laurel and Hardy together, laughing until tears smeared our faces, but we never talked.  Was it because of childhood wounds? Siblings injure each other without meaning to, without having control.  I remained our father’s favorite, getting good grades in school that my brother would never match.  He was prized by a mother who had emotionally abandoned me.

The gender norms of the 1950s further divided us.   I was inclined to stay at home and read in my bedroom. He preferred hanging out—anywhere but home– with friends I seldom saw. As teenagers, we would sometimes cross paths at the local beach. I lay on a long towel, fully basted with sun tan oil. He and his friends emerged from the sea and, still dripping, plopped their bodies on the sand. Towels belonged to sissies. So did sun tan oil. By the end of the summer the sun had bleached my brother’s blonde hair white and turned his fried skin black.  Boys, I thought.

But we were tied to each other, nonetheless, quietly, below the surface, this brother who collected Superman and Spiderman comics and lay sodden on the sand, this sister who was fond of Little Lulus and dried herself carefully before lying on her beach towel.  When I went off to Berkeley for graduate school, he, having dropped out of junior college, bought me a stereo set to keep me company.  When, two years later, my mother called to tell me he’d been drafted for Vietnam, I burst into tears and lived in fear of his seeing action.  He never did, but when he entered the Los Angeles Police Academy, I worried again.  “Why a police officer?” I asked. “It’s OK, Sis,” he answered gently. “I don’t want my life to be boring.”

Living in Berkeley where the sight of policemen clubbing protestors was often fresh in my memory, I fretted about my brother, wondered what would happen to his character, feared the dangers he might incur working the night beat in Watts. Jumping fences seemed a regular activity in his life. When I moved East in the 1970s he was working Vice, sitting around a lot in bars with long hair and a longer beard. Then he moved on to Robbery and finally Homicide. At his memorial this June, the Mexican-American officer who had been his partner told me he was a truly great detective, that he was kind and gentle, that he “cared about people.” These were things I didn’t know and was glad to learn.  This part of his existence had remained a mystery to me.

What I did see was his family life.  I saw that he had determined not to be a distant parent like ours had been.  When his young son cried, he took him gently on his lap and comforted him.  He indulged his little fireball of a daughter by throwing her into the pool over and over again at her command.  Groups of friends liked to gather in his backyard, moving in and out of the pool, eating potato chips and hamburgers and drinking beer. When the immediate family played cards on the holidays, he entered into it with relish and wry humor. He liked to joke and eat a lot.

After his wife died of cancer in 2001, he moved to be near his son and grandson and slowly began to decline. He had retired and stopped exercising. He ate more, drank too much, developed diabetes and a painful case of gout. He was treated for high blood pressure.  I was living in California again but we only saw each other at our aging mother’s birthdays. When she died, we exchanged phone calls and emails about the will. I took him for granted. He was my brother. He had always been there, at a distance, but there nonetheless. A large man who did what he wanted, he had seemed as permanent as a mountain.  I assumed we would both live to a very old age.  Our mother, after all, had died at 101. And then in the first minute of a phone call from my anxious daughter, anxious that I too would prove mortal without warning, he ceased to exist. I felt a hole in my life than I couldn’t have imagined. I feel it still.

Even siblings we don’t see, who live differently from us, who move in their own world, may be shoring up our lives, our sense of family, our feeling of being at home in the world without our knowing it.  I wasn’t aware of it, but my brother had done that for me.  Even now, when I occasionally “speak” to him and say, as if trying to take it in, “You’re not in the world anymore,” I hear him reassuring me, “It’s OK, Sis.”

judith
Based in the Bay Area, Judith is an author and Professor Emerita at U.C. Davis

18 Comments

  1. What a beautiful tribute to your brother. I can sympathize with you, as my siblings are not close-knit either. I believe we are in each other’s lives for reasons we don’t always understand. And sometimes it’s easier to communicate after they are gone.

  2. Beduwen, thanks for your comment. As someone else put it, it’s easier to think about a distant sibling after death because thinking about them during their life often suggests that a course of action needs to be taken and sometimes the course of action is too hard.

    1. Valorie, Thank you for reading. I tended to think that my relationship to my brother was unusual. I begin to see that it’s not. That’s comforting.

  3. This is a wonderful post and tribute to your brother. Sorry for your loss, but glad you have finally recognized the bond that had been elusive for so many years.
    Your fellow Blooming Late member, Elisabeth

  4. This rang true to me too as I have a younger brother and he is my only sibling. We are even more estranged than you were with your brother. Our social, political, cultural differences are like a chasm. But your piece made me reflect on how I might feel if he dies before me… this was an evocative tribute.

  5. I’m sorry to hear about your brother, Judy. He sounds like he was a great dad as well as a great detective and that he got his wish not to live a boring life.
    I remember him giving you the stereo and your father delivering it – and maybe you as well – to Berkeley. I carried it up the stairs to your apartment on Parker.
    “The Compassionate Friends” is an organization that helps people who are grieving over the loss of a child or sibling and some of the submissions in their newsletter are insightful. You might consider checking it out.

    1. Jim, thank you for writing and for giving me back that memory. He did live an interesting life. Writing the memoir made me see that it was the family way. Sometimes there were costs, but we weren’t bored.

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