How Did Your Brother Die?
not a simple question
“What happened to your brother?” My sweet neighbor, an older lady, asked me today, as I sit in her living room.
She has graciously offered to let me hang out there after I have locked myself out of my apartment, and am waiting for the apartment manager to arrive and let me in.
She asks this flippantly, cavalierly, off-the-cuff.
She is nearly 90. I am sure she has simply forgotten.
Normally, asking someone how a relative has passed is simple, straightforward. It doesn’t require a lot of bracing…
For what?
For the emotional impact.
Even if/when it’s not me, who feels the emotional impact and responds in such a way. It usually is not, since I am pretty used to this now, so, today, I answer this simply and straightforwardly.
But, what’s worse, is when you have to brace yourself for the emotional impact of how it will hit others.
Then you wait, for the awkwardness, if you’re lucky, and the emotional labor you will have to bear, if you’re not.
As an empath, who feels discomfort in how this truth will affect others, I feel it. I wonder what this answer will do to those who do not know how to respond and who can’t handle the situation.
I can understand how a friend in college did, who simply replied—
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I mean, I could lie, sure.
But the point is that the truth always requires that split second decision of whether or not to bear to them the harsh truth.
And it is difficult not because it is emotionally taxing for me. Quite honestly, the brutal truth is that it really isn’t, in terms of who I lost.
I cared for my brother. And yet, we had a very tumultuous relationship and we never got along.
I loved him, but I never particularly liked my brother. We were so different in values and personalities and I found him to be so selfish, so narrow-minded and black/white in perspective, so troubled; I [always] found it difficult with him.
I feel terrible for what he did and how ending his death must have affected/affects his daughter.
But, the truth is also that I didn’t lose someone I was close to—
When my current partner talked about the protectiveness that he and his brothers displayed to their younger sister, in high school, especially where other guys were concerned—
I thought, wow.
I said I simply couldn’t relate.
And I can’t. I didn’t have that, with a father or a brother.
I say this not to evoke sympathy, a pity party or ‘woe is me’, but rather—
The truth is that I didn’t lose someone I was close to or could count on. His death, affected me much like others, similarly with acquaintances and neighbors and our other relatives, we all just struggled with the simple fact of—
How could he have done it? What about his daughter?
When I struggle with Jeremie’s death it is that that I wrestle with. It’s not because I lost someone I was close with.
I struggled because I was the only one left and because I recalled, as a child, my dad telling me—after my brother and I fought viciously—that when he and my mom were dead, that I would only have him, that we would only have each other.
(I know he told me this because he lost his brother in an untimely death, a car accident, at a very young age.)
Still—
Not so, Dad.
I went from being motherless, an orphan, with both of my parents dead, to being the only sole survivor of my immediate family very, very quickly. Within a month. Too fast to process.
And that is what I struggle[d] with.
I also struggle in that I must have these conversations, which means I also must face the aftermath, which is that every single time I have some what of a deep relationship with a neighbor, friend, date, partner, etc, it may come up/I have to face—
Answer the question for me:
How did he die?
My father was old enough that it could have been a much more acceptable and less stigmatized disease, such as cancer, a heart attack. Even COPD or emphysema though it often labels you a smoker, also does not carry the mental health stigma/weight of a suicide.
We try to lessen the blows, categorizing these deaths now as “died from the disease of depression.”
That is true.
I appreciate it, as a Rhetorician.
And I can do and advocate for mental health awareness and to de-stigmatize mental illness.
And yet also—in those real time moments, that advocacy work really doesn’t help me.
I have no idea how people will respond…what they will think of me…how they will label me or see me, associated with this, with them, with such extreme levels of mental illness.
Though depression and anxiety are ubiquitous and exceedingly common enough now—to complete suicide, to actually end one’s life, and exit this earthly realm because you are so disturbed and you experience/believe yourself and/or life to be so terrible, that you are in that much pain, it is unimaginable for most of us still living.
I don’t blame them. It’s often unimaginable for me. And I too have wanted to die before. I never had a plan for execution, but I do know the feeling of not wanting to live and wishing I could die. I know my mother did as well.
And yet still, in better and healthier times, even we forget what that is like.
I do. I have, now thriving, much happier.
I can’t imagine what that is like, even though it was once my reality.
I am glad, but, still—
The mental illness of depression is a deceptively slippery little sucker that way.
But, of course, it begs the question that if I can’t ‘get it’ even though I have felt it, how much more so for those who have never experienced it, the hole of depression? That level of despair? Or for those who have never had a relative or close friend that has had to endure that?
It becomes unthinkable. They judge. They are scared. Nervous. Uncomfortable.
All of those intense emotions. And they are undoubtedly apt for such an intense, truly life-and-death situation.
Now, my neighbor did not belabor the situation, she nodded sympathetically. The conversation moved easily along. It did not feel painfully awkward.
I am thankful.
This is not always the case.
But still, I set with this, because it was such a seemingly, deceptively inconsequential moment.
And for so many others, it is, right?
How did your mom die?
Cancer.
Why did your dad pass?
Car accident.
How did your brother die?
He blew his brains out.
It hits different, even when/if I say—
“He completed suicide.”
_______________________________________________
And this time it was minor. But it is not always.
I have had to shoulder the discomfort, the emotional labor, as others process how someone they knew could have done this, even if that person is my own kin, my blood brother, and merely their acquaintance.
I never thought about this, in my formative years, how much the cause of death, for two of my family members, could/would carry such weight and impact my life so much.
I think I am glad I didn’t know.