Doctor Grandma

One year ago, I started this blog. The reason I started it was therapeutic, for myself to write down my thoughts, as I went to sit with my brother dying of cirrhosis of the liver. We had not seen each other for 25 years.

It is hard to imagine that was a year ago. I can remember very clearly, our visit, each day, his voice, the way he looked, the various people I met. He was somewhat out of it, sometimes totally coherent, sometimes not so much (which was a very familiar pattern for speaking with him on any day, any year!). We had no relationship, basically, except for a few words on the phone if he called when I was at our mother’s, before she died a year earlier. He was a user. He called mom for money. However, as I have said many times, as far as we know, he never hurt anyone physically, and he had a good heart. He said that himself that last week, “Oh they all know me, I have a good heart, and they know that here.” It was like he was trying to believe it, trying to believe they saw through his adamant and insistent addiction and mental problems.

He never could just follow the rules. Ever. He slept in parks, couldn’t stand to be enclosed. That week he told me parks and places I should visit. It was so funny, like he was telling me what to go see, because he knew it all, he had been everywhere, and seen it all. He occasionally told a joke or something he thought was funny. His face would light up suddenly, like a light bulb bright. He looked pathetic, sick, like a person with addictions who had been homeless for 20-odd years. But he was my brother. We had other memories, of other decades, other times. I reminded him of a few of them. Like the time he came home from hiking the John Muir trail, and wanted to hide in the closet and pop out and scare our dad. He was funny.

He was sometimes disturbing, like the day he kept telling me to take him out of there, and told me off when I wouldn’t. “I just can’ t believe you won’t help your own BROTHER.” He was 2 days to not being in this world. He got so mad, he was going to stand up and walk out. And all he could do was hobble! That was Dan, defiant and independent to the end.

But he destroyed his body and who knows how much of his mind, with alcohol, cocaine and other drugs.

He never withdrew his membership from the Baha’i Faith, which then allowed me to list his name in a Baha’i publication after his passing. That was very comforting to me. Some who knew him and me, wrote to me.

I do miss my brother. I miss the relationship we could have had. But addictions took that away. I miss my mother as well. Lord knows, I’ve missed my dad for 40 years, since he left us! It is lonely sometimes. No one in this world knows what we all went through, and there is no way to explain it, or any purpose in doing so. In that, I am very alone.