Just a flicker, about the pervasive and subtle whisper of grief - and the mirror of another, where we see ourselves
my brother - the youngest of us
received a mysterious family heirloom delivered to the office in a brown towel the staff were too scared to lift up - his father's family had found him, trepidatiously reached out
and he accepted.
Tipsy, excited, a late night phone call after meeting with them - a million photos, going back to the 60's, more heirlooms, a run on sentence of people he had never met but had his face, he could recognize it in those physical images, suddenly a door opening up into the other part of where he comes from and lineages he carries/threads through time that didn't require access through the toxic, broken door of his father
Shock, that there was an earnest interest in knowing him - so different from the hungry gaze of our mother, looking for her own benefit
but also an awareness he expressed to me of not really being able to fathom their loving relationships with family they described to him - a subtle disconnection he noted to me on the phone, realizing he didn't have something they did.
Some context for the person his father was before sliding into addiction - as he talked I felt my childhood tormentor become slightly more 3 dimensional - the father of this man died at 26, and he watched a sibling die in a pool when he was too young to assist - grief was a component I hadn't really considered in the mess of that monstrous human being, and possibly a sense of needing or not having that underlay the cardboard sign he used to pretend being homeless to acquire money for drugs sometimes
My window to my father's side is gone - he was found dead in his apartment in 2019 and there were no friends or family to contact, until detectives finally found and reached out to my older brother, who hadn't seen or heard from him in over 3 decades. A dead end for us. My brother had called me after that and asked what I felt - nothing. I think that hurt his feelings, that maybe, deep down there was a fantasy or a kind of grief that I had long ago let go of but was fresh for him - I still feel like I failed him in that moment
And for all the years of my younger brother blowing off the idea of trauma or grief or anger, something about learning there might be a family waiting happily to receive him seems to have given him the safety to feel his rage at my mother for what she is and how she uses us, for the amount of 'dirtbags' in our family, as he described it to me
We ended up talking about when the ancient family cat died - one of the few creatures I think my older brother connected with, had physical contact with - mom had to call my younger brother to bury her because my older brother had locked himself in his room, so overwhelmed with grief - and it wasn't until my younger brother got over his immense rage at him for not being able to do it and hugged him - that our older brother finally broke down and cried. It is and is not about the cat, I know - it is about all of the loss carried in our lives that we have learned to ignore, bubbling up when a new fresh loss sweeps us under
So much grief. So much ungrieved emptinesses. Hoarding and drugs and false validation being used by all of these people to fill the holes we are pretending are not there
And the bittersweetness of ferocious joy I feel for my brother's new rooted potential, the rage and horror I feel that he couldn't allow himself to acknowledge how he feels about our family because at the same time he didn't want to lose what little connection he had, the familiarity of being confused by other people's warm emotional expressions of their familial ties, as well as the reminder that there is no warm curious family members waiting for me on the other side of a genetic door, like he has discovered he has.
Just vomiting it all up, so I can look at it - or pour over it later for clues and useful tidbits. I really am so tired of carrying this bullshit around like an identity. But, like the reality of my family, it is there and it is mine, I can't really lose it or let it go - like a bug or a balloon or a cold. It is more like a placenta, a dark twin that nourished me in the womb, feeding me my mother's toxic responses, stress horomones, broken dreams. We are what we are. I cannot pretend I came from somewhere else, or that I am unrelated, or that this is not my inheritance. That would leave me blind and make myself and others vulnerable to my own potentially unexamined and destructive coping mechanisms.
