How Did It End Up Like This?
Sometimes when I’m just hanging out, or driving, or something where my mind is allowed to wander, I think of him as he used to be. The him that was before the pain, the addiction, the rotten teeth, the glassy eyes, and the willingness to give up everything, including shelter, for the sake of the smack.
I think of the boy with the brown hair, and mischievous smile. The boy who always smiled with his whole body in photos, always told jokes, and was always drawing something crazy. The boy who always got me to laugh even when I wanted to punch him in the face.
I think of the boy who would pull all the fresh linens from the closets and then convince me that we should both put on our sweats and stuff them with the fresh laundry until we could fight each other like sumo wrestlers on the front lawn. Mom would be frustrated about her clean linens, but stand out there with the camera and take photos of it anyway. Sometimes, I wonder if our sumo wrestling days are the reason none of us ever had a full matching set of sheets on any of our beds our entire childhood. She probably decided to just forget about putting all the linens together since we were going to pull them out anyway.
I think of the boy who would help me make magical potions from everything in mom’s baking cupboards, or convince me to watch scary movies in the basement after everyone went to bed.
It’s hard to let my mind wander to those days, and to that boy, and remember all that was before. Because two decades and a few years later, all I see, when I look at him, is pain. All I feel, when I look at him, is pain.
The mischievous grin faded slowly over his teen years and twenties. It was replaced with the downward turn of a life of sadness, pain, torment. His creative brain dwindled from the use of smack, meth, weed, crack, cocaine, and any pill he could find. His will to explore changed to a lost torment in the darkness of bipolar disorder, and addiction.
Throughout his twenties, he started to become dead behind his eyes, as he failed to keep any relationship in his life, except his relationship with his drug suppliers. When our mom died when he was 31, he tried to live a normal life, and almost succeeded for a year before his problems caught up with him again. He attempted rehab for the fourth time, failed, tried again, failed, and wound up walking the streets.
“It will just be for the summer while I get my stuff together,” he told me when I asked if he needed help finding an apartment. “I don’t want anyone’s help anymore. If I change it will be all me.”I watched him disappear into street life, only to resurface whenever he needed money, or had been injured in a fight, or had something stolen. Over the years, our relationship morphed from kids who played together, to him viewing me as a replacement mom. Someone who would always take care of him like she had. When that became too much for me to handle — the pressure, the manipulation, the sheer pain of failing to save my brother’s life — I severed our relationship. He had been on the streets for almost a year already, and there was no end in sight.
“I just need a break. I can’t be there for you anymore because it hurts too much, and I’m just not strong enough to handle this. Please leave me out of things for a while.”
I had typed it in Facebook messenger because he didn’t have a phone, and sometimes would log on at the local library. I felt like an asshole for sending it that way, but what other option did I have? His life was becoming to scary for me to handle. The last time we’d hung out, he had shown me all the weapons he was carrying to protect himself. One of them was a meat cleaver wrapped in a towel tucked into his underwear. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t drive downtown to the dark parts of town, and sit and talk with him on the curb of the gas station parking lot while he smoked a cigarette, talked all about the crazy street life, and eventually mustered up the courage to ask me for money.
Our mom’s brain tumor and what it did to her had been enough for me for an entire lifetime. I couldn’t handle watching my brother slowly die of his own form of self-inflicted cancer, too.
Facebook told me he read my message a few days after I sent it. I had written it in a fit of rage after one of the worst weeks of my involvement in his life. He had called me at work, and frantically told me that his dealer had put a hit on him since he couldn’t pay his debt, and that he was going to die that day. Then he hung up. I never got a hold of him after that. I frantically called the police, and the phone number he’d called me on. I called all of our siblings, and warned them. Then it was radio silence for 7 days.
That entire week I wondered if he was dead, if it was a manipulation tactic to get me to talk to him (I’d been pulling away from him ever since he showed me the meat cleaver), or if it was a hallucination of his from a drug cocktail. He was constantly mixing street drugs with his bipolar medication, and god only knows what that did to him from time to time.
After a week, he finally called me. It was as if no one had said they were going to kill him at all, and that conversation had never happened between us. He wanted his mail.
“Oh, so nice to hear you’re safe and alive!” I said seething with sarcasm and anger.
“Oh, yeah, that was weird of me. But… do I have any bank statements at your house?”
THAT’S IT?! THAT’S ALL HE HAS TO SAY? That was the last straw. I severed our relationship a few hours later. The entire week I hadn’t heard from him, every time my phone rang I felt like I was going to vomit the contents of my stomach. I was just so sure that one of those calls would be the morgue, and I’d have to identify my brother who I can hardly even recognize some days. I had already told myself that no matter what he looked like, I would identify him by the tattoo on his right hand. It says, “no h” in a bold serif font.
It was supposed to remind him not to use heroin, but it appeared to be quite ineffective considering there were track marks all along that arm above the tattoo.
The drugs and pain have been constants in his life ever since he was a teenager. He was never a super happy kid. He had great moments, but he was always so angry. He wasn’t like me or our other siblings. We could get things done, and do as we were told. He just couldn’t. Everything was a fight with him. Rules were meant to be ignored.
As he grew older and stronger, fights between him and our stepdad became a regular occurrence until the police were called and abuse charges were filed against our stepdad for using excessive force on a teenage kid. The only problem was, if you didn’t use that type of force, you never knew what would happen because when the angry kid exploded, he fought with blind rage and reckless abandon. He was violent, dangerous, and scary, and sometimes you had to diffuse the bomb before it exploded… and with a kid that size with that strength, it wasn’t easy or pretty. I’m not sure who was right when that happened, I just knew I hated when he was living at home.
Our days of playing together ended, and, while we still got along, we were quickly going in separate directions. I got straight A’s. He failed every class on purpose. I got a job to pay for college and a car, and educational trips, and he skateboarded and got arrested for fighting, trespassing, vandalism, etc. I made plans for the future, he took every drug imaginable to forget he was alive. I moved out, went to school, made a lot of friends. He stayed home, got suicidal, and disappeared into addiction.
It’s baffling to think how this could be his life when I grew up at the same time as he did. We had the same family, the same deadbeat dad, the same mom and stepdad, and we were almost the same age. He was born 18 months before me. We grew up at the same time, yet, at some point, I kept going and he stopped and began wishing, and trying, to die.
Sometimes when I am driving near downtown, I do my best not to look at the homeless people on the sidewalk. I tend to see his face in every single one of them, and I’m always afraid I’ll bump into him. I’ll be driving my car, with my clean clothes on, and credit cards in my wallet, and know that I could provide for him if I had to, but I choose not to because I can’t go down that road with him. I can’t be his caretaker and expect to ever be happy in any way. I know what he does to the people that take him in. I watched my mom and other family suffer through the chaos. That would not be me.
I know I did the right thing for my life by severing ties earlier this year, but it still does nothing for my guilt. Everytime I let myself think of him, I feel guilt that I couldn’t save him. I tried for years. Mom tried until she died. Our brothers still try. We all have tried. We’ve all failed. None of us can save him.
My brother has been drowning his entire life, and there was nothing any of us could do. Sometimes we watched from the beach as the tides took him out farther, other times we swam out and pulled him out of the water, still other times we got a boat and went and picked him up. The problem is, no matter how many times I, or another sibling or our parents, pulled him out of that water, he threw himself back in, all the while screaming, “HELP ME! SAVE ME!”
What do you do with a person like that?
Our mom’s brain tumor and what it did to her had been enough for me for an entire lifetime. I couldn’t handle watching my brother slowly die of his own form of self-inflicted cancer, too.
Facebook told me he read my message a few days after I sent it. I had written it in a fit of rage after one of the worst weeks of my involvement in his life. He had called me at work, and frantically told me that his dealer had put a hit on him since he couldn’t pay his debt, and that he was going to die that day. Then he hung up. I never got a hold of him after that. I frantically called the police, and the phone number he’d called me on. I called all of our siblings, and warned them. Then it was radio silence for 7 days.
That entire week I wondered if he was dead, if it was a manipulation tactic to get me to talk to him (I’d been pulling away from him ever since he showed me the meat cleaver), or if it was a hallucination of his from a drug cocktail. He was constantly mixing street drugs with his bipolar medication, and god only knows what that did to him from time to time.
After a week, he finally called me. It was as if no one had said they were going to kill him at all, and that conversation had never happened between us. He wanted his mail.
“Oh, so nice to hear you’re safe and alive!” I said seething with sarcasm and anger.
“Oh, yeah, that was weird of me. But… do I have any bank statements at your house?”
THAT’S IT?! THAT’S ALL HE HAS TO SAY? That was the last straw. I severed our relationship a few hours later. The entire week I hadn’t heard from him, every time my phone rang I felt like I was going to vomit the contents of my stomach. I was just so sure that one of those calls would be the morgue, and I’d have to identify my brother who I can hardly even recognize some days. I had already told myself that no matter what he looked like, I would identify him by the tattoo on his right hand. It says, “no h” in a bold serif font.
It was supposed to remind him not to use heroin, but it appeared to be quite ineffective considering there were track marks all along that arm above the tattoo.
The drugs and pain have been constants in his life ever since he was a teenager. He was never a super happy kid. He had great moments, but he was always so angry. He wasn’t like me or our other siblings. We could get things done, and do as we were told. He just couldn’t. Everything was a fight with him. Rules were meant to be ignored.
As he grew older and stronger, fights between him and our stepdad became a regular occurrence until the police were called and abuse charges were filed against our stepdad for using excessive force on a teenage kid. The only problem was, if you didn’t use that type of force, you never knew what would happen because when the angry kid exploded, he fought with blind rage and reckless abandon. He was violent, dangerous, and scary, and sometimes you had to diffuse the bomb before it exploded… and with a kid that size with that strength, it wasn’t easy or pretty. I’m not sure who was right when that happened, I just knew I hated when he was living at home.
Our days of playing together ended, and, while we still got along, we were quickly going in separate directions. I got straight A’s. He failed every class on purpose. I got a job to pay for college and a car, and educational trips, and he skateboarded and got arrested for fighting, trespassing, vandalism, etc. I made plans for the future, he took every drug imaginable to forget he was alive. I moved out, went to school, made a lot of friends. He stayed home, got suicidal, and disappeared into addiction.
It’s baffling to think how this could be his life when I grew up at the same time as he did. We had the same family, the same deadbeat dad, the same mom and stepdad, and we were almost the same age. He was born 18 months before me. We grew up at the same time, yet, at some point, I kept going and he stopped and began wishing, and trying, to die.
Sometimes when I am driving near downtown, I do my best not to look at the homeless people on the sidewalk. I tend to see his face in every single one of them, and I’m always afraid I’ll bump into him. I’ll be driving my car, with my clean clothes on, and credit cards in my wallet, and know that I could provide for him if I had to, but I choose not to because I can’t go down that road with him. I can’t be his caretaker and expect to ever be happy in any way. I know what he does to the people that take him in. I watched my mom and other family suffer through the chaos. That would not be me.
I know I did the right thing for my life by severing ties earlier this year, but it still does nothing for my guilt. Everytime I let myself think of him, I feel guilt that I couldn’t save him. I tried for years. Mom tried until she died. Our brothers still try. We all have tried. We’ve all failed. None of us can save him.
My brother has been drowning his entire life, and there was nothing any of us could do. Sometimes we watched from the beach as the tides took him out farther, other times we swam out and pulled him out of the water, still other times we got a boat and went and picked him up. The problem is, no matter how many times I, or another sibling or our parents, pulled him out of that water, he threw himself back in, all the while screaming, “HELP ME! SAVE ME!”
What do you do with a person like that?
Eventually, you do what I did. You muster up all the courage you can, and say, “It is your life, and I’m being selfish by trying to make you live like any one else.” Then, you tell them how much you love them, how much you hope for their successes, and you walk away. You leave their life’s destiny up to them, and you let them make what they will of their time here.
At some point, if we’ve all stopped trying to save him, he’ll learn that he’s capable of saving his own life, right?
Maybe…
Or, he’ll die.
At some point, if we’ve all stopped trying to save him, he’ll learn that he’s capable of saving his own life, right?
Maybe…
Or, he’ll die.
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