I really don’t like dwelling on things like the subject of this posting, but it feels like the right thing to do at this moment. The “things like this” is the passing of my brother Chris, who I found deceased on January 5, 2017. I’ve written about Chris before, and while I try to not repeat myself too often, I’m granting some discretion today.
To this very day, part of me has a hard time understanding
why Chris is gone. While I don’t have
the kind of “I was going to call him but then realized he’s not here” moments
that others in similar circumstances experience, I instead have a myriad of
small reminders that he is not here.
These mostly come at me in a kind of random fashion, where I’ll think of
something and then imagine what Chris’ reaction would be. God, I miss his sense of humor. We both had a kind of absurd sense of what
was funny, although, in fairness to Chris, he was always willing to take things
much further than I ever would or could.
That last sentence is just a function of my having to seemingly mature
in different directions than Chris did, although there are those who will tell
you with a completely straight face (mostly my daughters and my wife) that I
haven’t actually matured all that much.
Growing up, we were all a year apart in age, so we did a lot
together. I will note that it was a bit
tougher for Chris, as I tended to do more stuff with my brother Rich, but those
kinds of degrees are tough to measure.
The years between childhood and fully-formed adulthood took us in
different directions. He went into the
Navy right out of high school, mostly, I suspect because of two things:
·
Lurid tales shared by Navy recruiters of far-off
exotic women eager to meet young American sailors, and…
·
…he knew that he needed the kind of discipline
in his life that couldn’t be found in too many places other than the armed
forces.
In the year before he passed away, Chris and I talked a few
times about his experiences in the Navy.
In those conversations, I think the personal demons he was desperately
trying to confront sometimes manifest themselves in some traumatic memories
from his service. As someone who worked
in the medical field in the Navy, Chris told me he saw a lot of disturbing
things. I never once doubted him,
although I have wondered if these things were more symbolic of the other issues
he was trying to deal with as he moved into his 50’s. Regardless of the cause(s), I genuinely
believe that my brother was in pain, and he spent an inordinate amount of time
in the year or three before his death trying to self-medicate his way into some
kind of peace. Sometimes the
pain…physical and/or emotional…is so great that we just want it to stop and
we’ll basically do anything to make that happen.
In addition to a similar sense of humor, I think Chris and I
both spent a lot of time searching for some way to deal with the difficulties
of our mutual childhood. In my case,
that meant diving head-first into college, then a career, and then a family, all
in short order. That kept me busy and my
mind off of other things. Chris, having
served his term in the Navy, had to find his own way to manage life. For him, that also meant an early marriage and
a daughter that he absolutely adored.
Chris, having been an amateur boxer, always however seemed keen on the
fight, which never really interested me, physical or otherwise. I found (to this very day) that most forms of
confrontation are counter-productive.
Chris thought the opposite, and many times those confrontations had
something to do with our mother. As I
have noted before (probably), our mother’s passing in 2013 impacted Chris
deeply. He would never admit that when
he was alive, by the way, but I am as sure of that as I can possibly be of
anything. With our mother gone, the
boxer (Chris) no longer had an opponent in the ring. The thing he could point to as a concrete
reason for this inner turmoil was gone, and all that was left was in fact the
turmoil, unabated and running rampant.
He no longer had an opponent, so the opponent became himself.
In the years after his passing, I spent a lot of time trying
to understand what happened to my brother.
I’ll confess that I can’t really offer much in the way of actual
understanding though. I don’t understand
why somehow we had the same upbringing (we were both “…a poor boy…”) but yet we
had such different outcomes. I don’t
understand why he just couldn’t be somehow stronger...I always felt he was, in
many ways, stronger than I was, so why am I the one still here? I don’t understand the appeal to things that
were harmful. In totality, a part of me
just doesn’t understand why he isn’t here now.
Selfishly, well this whole posting is selfish, I always had
this vision that in his retirement years Chris would be mostly free of his
demons and that we would spend more time together. We could celebrate the fact that we both
reached our retirement years in spite of seeming to start from three steps
behind and four doors down. That’s never
to be though, and it’s just so hard to imagine someone like a sibling just not
being here anymore. On some level, I just
assumed he would survive, since that’s what I was doing, and as noted above, in
some ways I always thought Chris was tougher than I ever was anyway. You can add that to the list of
contradictions in this screed. Yes, the
tough guy, the boxer, was the one who didn’t survive; instead, the introspective
one who never really felt all that comfortable around other people…but yet has
made a career out of interacting with them (me)…did. It makes no sense, but then again a death like
that of my brother is never going to make sense. My cross, if you want to call it that, is the
fact that I am forever doomed to try and figure this all out.
So, what’s left? Well, January 5th will never really be a good day for me. And I wish Chris were still here. That’s pretty much what’s left.
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