Before I twisted my ankle (the subject of a future post, probably), I made it up to the park, where I admired the frozen river and the ribbon of bleached-out highway. Even though it never should have been built, and even though it should be torn out asap so that those of us who live here can have better access to the shoreline, the highway is still beautiful.
Holding this contradiction in mind, I thought about my father, who died two years ago, and how he was estranged from his brother (my uncle). They stopped talking when my uncle refused to honor an informal agreement they had made to pay my cousin (my uncle’s daughter, who took care of my grandmother during the final years of her life) some money from my grandmother’s estate. My father thought that his brother had crossed a line, and they never spoke again. As far as I know, neither of them ever tried to discuss what had happened or to find a resolution, much less to examine the terrible childhood they had both endured at the hands of their abusive, alcoholic parents. The dispute over my grandmother’s estate was not the only difference between them: my father had quit drinking years earlier, while his brother continued to drink heavily. My father thought his brother was a ‘loudmouth’ and a ‘hypocrite.’ I agreed with my father. I always found it difficult to spend time with my uncle. There was something unctuous and unsettling about the way he always tried to impress me with his physical conditioning, something my father never did; there was also the fact that he got black-out drunk almost every day of his life. I remember him laughing uproariously about a joke one night and having no memory of it the next morning; my father referenced the joke and his brother looked back at him, confused. ‘What joke?’ My father grinned at me as he took in his brother’s obliviousness. ‘Don’t ever be like that,’ he seemed to say. Looking back on it, I think they were both in a lot of pain.
Until it happened, it never occurred to me that I would inherit the family legacy of being disowned by one of my siblings. There’s a part of me that feels justified in never speaking to my brother again — I’ll never think that it was right not to invite me to his (gay) daughter’s wedding — but there’s a bigger part of me that would like to talk things out, to acknowledge our differences in a respectful way, to figure out what went wrong and to take steps (beyond erasure) to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. I don’t believe in ‘writing people off,’ or least not people I’ve known my entire life. Relationships are complicated and move through ups and downs; it’s part of what makes life interesting and, potentially, rewarding.
Recently, I wrote to my brother and expressed remorse about the state of our relationship and a desire to move things into a different direction. I said that we would always be brothers, and that I’m sure it would be meaningful for our mother — despite being addled by dementia — to know that her sons had reached (or even had tried to reach) some sort of resolution beyond what she witnessed with my father and his brother. I proposed seeing a therapist who specializes in family conflict. What could we possibly have to lose?
Unlike my father, who was incapable of expressing anything but an oddly gleeful ambivalence about not talking to his brother — ‘What do I care? He’s an asshole!’ — I don’t like being estranged from my brother. It makes me question every memory I have of us, knowing that there was a point at which he decided that I was not worth his time or investment. Was it before or after I came out? Was it before or after I started writing fiction? Or playing guitar? Was it before or after I was born? Or started to work in publishing? Was it before or after we started taking an annual trip to visit our parents in Florida? Was it before or after I refused to read Harry Potter, even though it was his (gay) daughter’s favorite book series? Was it before or after I told his wife that her favorite television show ‘Friends’ was homophobic trash? And so on. I look back on some of these interactions with regret, knowing that I could have expressed myself more gently, but I always believed that the foundation of the relationship between me and my brother was strong enough to withstand such tremors, if they were even tremors. I have no idea what was bothering him and when, because he never told me. That said, I don’t believe it’s too late. I want to interrogate the past, even or especially if it turns out that I acted inconsiderately.
My brother did not respond to my message, however, which means that the freeze will continue.
But I will hope that, as I know is true of this seemingly eternal winter, that a thaw is coming, and that it will give way to something that may or may not be spring, but will at least mark a chance for new life where before there was none.
