My brother was fifteen when I left him.
He was mad about it. I know he was, because years later, he trapped me in a dark corner of The Roost and told me all about it. I was just there to drink and watch the drag show, but instead, I got to just drink and listen.
This wasn’t the first time I’d run into my brother at a local gay bar. That had been Buddys, much earlier, and as I hadn’t known he was any kind of gay, I was much too in shock seeing him there to listen to much of what he said, which was mostly comparing notes on who we mutually knew, what he thought about them, what he thought I should think about them, etc.
That night at The Roost though, it was different. It wasn’t good natured if awkward gay gossip. It was the drunken outpouring of all the ways he had resented me for leaving him. It’s not like I left just for fun. I was off to University; leaving home was mandatory – both for school and for sanity. The year before I left hadn’t been a good year. I’m not saying I was completely crazy, but ask anyone who knew me then and those are the words they’d use. I was in pain – and leaving was the only possible solution.
I’m not sure if I even spoke to my brother at all that entire final year at home.
You see, we weren’t ever close. There were only three years between us, but it was enough of a gap, I guess. He was close to our sister. She was two years younger than him, so five younger than me. They had each other growing up for sure. Siblings and besties. That wasn’t the relationship I had with either. That night at the Roost, I couldn’t help but compare my relationship with my younger siblings with the relationship between my boyfriend at the time and his gay brothers – they were so close. But not Tim and I. No, our relationship was more a classic example of how hurt people hurt people. The anger and violence I endured as a kid, I passed it onto them, rather than protecting them from it as a big brother should. Those are the earliest memories I have of my brother, me raging and violent towards him, him looking up at me for help and protection.
This was a far cry from my mom’s first memory of us. That memory was my brother still in the hospital as a newborn baby. We were there, you see, to choose from one of the kids available for fostering and eventual adoption. My brother was apparently crying, crying, crying, and my response was to tell my mom to stick a bottle in his mouth to shut him up and bring him home. I’ve heard the story enough to be able to see it in my head, but it’s not a real memory, and it wasn’t a proper solution either – a bottle may quiet pain, but doesn’t solve it.
We both learned that lesson. I often think about the way we both self-medicated with alcohol, our parallel journeys deeper and deeper into drunken oblivion. We were so similar, in the throes of our growing addiction, our rage exploding out of us on the other side of the bottle. We started the same; we manifested the same; but we ended so differently.
In 2011, I was able to break the chains of addiction and live sober. That I was able to do successfully, that time, is a combination of luck and will-power and timing, but one of the challenges I’ve found in sober living is an impatience with those I see on the same dark path. Too often, I’ll try to give the tough love I probably needed sooner; too often, they don’t need lectures, just listening and love. But the drunken certainly push my sober buttons, and no one as much as my brother did. He pushed them so regularly that even as grown-ups, we weren’t much closer than we were as kids. And the chance to change that is gone now.
You see, earlier this year, damage from prolonged alcohol abuse took my brother away. Today, on what would have been his forty-fourth birthday, I just find myself thinking – about all the guilt and the regret, but mostly, I find myself thinking about that last time it was just him and I, in the hospital. He was in an out of consciousness, and we don’t know how much he understood about what was happening to him. But on his second-last day, he had a moment more lucid than not, when he asked me when he was getting out. I said, I don’t think you are, Tim. He said, ever? And then he was out again. But the look on his face, there at the end, in that moment, was him looking up at me for help, like a baby brother should be able to get from a big brother, and there was nothing I could do. Even now, months later, that “ever?” lingers in my brain, so broken, so desperate. He didn’t want to be there dying; he had built himself a beautiful life with a loving partner and long-term successful career and he just needed help. All the moments I could have helped him – the way we could have been there for each other coming out, or the way I could have tried to protect him better along the way, or the way I should have fought harder for him to find the same sobriety I found – all those moments had slipped away. Like he did the next morning.
My brother was forty-three when he left me.
