The Death Card

As I sit to gather these words on Saturday morning, at this very same moment, my biological family have gathered themselves to lay to rest my brother, from whom I was estranged, and who died last Tuesday of pancreatic cancer, just three days after brain cancer took Sweet Pascal. I actually wrote a very long essay about my brother in 2023: The Twins. I just read it again, for the first time in a long time, and I’ve got to hand it to myself—I nailed it. My feelings then are my feelings now.

It’s very sad he died so young but, as with Pascal, I am so grateful his suffering is over. When I received the news he was gone, I reminded myself to pay attention, to see what feelings arose, to heed the advice of Rumi: regard emotions as metaphorical house guests and invite them all in. What I noticed instead was an absence of feeling, a blankness. I figured it was about 100% likely that I was dissociating and, honestly, I was grateful I could slip so easily into that white space of nothingness.

The nothingness in turn reminded me of my Aunt Barbara, of whom I had not thought in a very long time. Bobbie, as she was known, was my father’s only sibling, seven years his junior, and, simply because she existed, his bête noire. In 1996, as I was preparing to write my first book, a memoir with a strong focus on my father’s violent abuse, I called my aunt to ask her for her thoughts. She recalled him beating her up. She remembered how he and their mother, my grandmother, were a club of two that left her feeling perpetually excluded and wishing she had never been born. She remembered visiting him as an adult and how, any time she would try to hold one of us kids in her arms, he would sidle up to her and hiss, “Put the baby down, Barbara.” (Although he did still “allow” her to visit, unwilling to give up the chance to exploit her husband’s electrician skills on one or another of his ongoing projects.)

I knew my father couldn’t stand his sister even before she verified it. In our house growing up, there was much eye-rolling around the topic of Aunt Barbara, warnings to not be like her. We were brainwashed to be dismissive of her long before we had the cognitive skills to discern for ourselves what kind of person she was. That phone call I made when I was researching my memoir broke my heart. All those little Avon gifts she’d given me and my sisters over the years. All the nice things she said. I don’t think I ever received any of those things without subconsciously thinking a little less of them than I should have, just as I’d been trained to do. I had no idea how hard she worked to try to be closer to us, and how she was thwarted at every turn by her rage-a-holic brother.

I am now right around the age my aunt was when I interviewed her. (I was thirty-two back then.) She died a few years later, very unexpectedly, literally hit by a truck. I felt the blankness then, too, upon receiving word of her death. And then, another feeling, something like alarm, something in that neighborhood. What was wrong with me, not responding to this sad news?

I was just then at the beginning of a very long therapy journey. I did not yet know important things like how non-response is itself a response. I had barely begun the elaborate unboxing of my PTSD (more accurately my cPTSD). I didn’t know what ACE was or that I would, unfortunately, get the sort of high score better reserved for math quizzes and English papers.

Palpable grief did eventually visit me over my aunt, a delayed reaction that occurred while I was sitting at the tiny Dobie Theater watching director Preston Sturges’s 1944 film, Miracle at Morgan’s Creek. I’ve been a cinephile much of my life and Sturges is held by some to be a genius, hence my attendance. “Genius” was hardly my takeaway, and during a particularly misogynistic scene—is it possible a male character actually kicks a female character in the ass?—suddenly I was utterly overcome with emotion. I suppose that scene might have conjured for me the stories my aunt had told me of being brutalized by my father. Or maybe it was a more direct hit, memories of how he had brutalized me. Whatever it was, there I sat in the dark, watching a “comedy,” wanting to bawl my eyes out.

Curiously, I also felt this urgent compulsion to acquire and listen to—loudly and on repeat—Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan. I gave into that urge, dashed over to Tower Records after the movie—(did I get up and leave in the middle? I can’t remember. I sure hope so)—and found a CD copy. I think the need to listen to that particular record likely was because it was the first vinyl record I ever bought for myself.¹ I was 15 when Budokan came out, and I think the flash of rage I felt in that theater—thinking about my cruel father training us to be mean to his sister, my kind aunt—asked from me that I react as a 15 year old would, loud, defiant, blaring rock and roll.

As much as I would have loved to slam a Guinness in honor of my brother, I gave up that delicious Elixir de Diablo long, long ago. So I did the next best thing. I made a loaf of Guinness Bread and ate SO MUCH of it. Rest In Peace, Brother.

So as I sit here today, a quarter century since my aunt’s untimely death, feeling utterly blank over the untimely death of my brother, who had, as a child, been my closest sibling not just chronologically but emotionally, too, I wonder: Is there a near future scene awaiting me, in which I will be caught unawares out in public somewhere, and find myself buckling under waves of grief?

Will, for example, I catch a ubiquitous Beatles song wafting out of a public speaker somewhere and recall how my brother played every Beatles record so many fucking times in a row that I couldn’t even listen properly to the White Album until its twentieth anniversary? Will that be what takes me down? Something else?

Or has all that therapy worked? Can it be true that decades of crying in the chair and paying out the nose to sort through the wreckage of my childhood really did prepare me for this? Oh how I hope so. How I hope the thing I once dismissed as sounding preposterous—pre-grieving—is a real thing. Because I have been grieving the loss of so much for so long—most especially having been kicked out of the family as a teenager—that maybe my “reward” for having endured the steady thrum of background grief my entire adult life will be not getting blindsided by sudden crippling anguish somewhere down the road. Maybe I will keep calm and carry on

I do know, from dealing with so much death and other loss, that grief is the Baskin-Robbins of emotions. So many flavors! I keep reminding myself that every thought and feeling I do or do not experience right now is very likely tied into grief, whether that feels like the case or not. I am cutting myself slack.

Even though I was no longer speaking to my brother when he got his diagnosis—which, for what it’s worth, came last year on my 60th birthday: Hello? Could we be any more competitive?— I felt called to at least acknowledge his shitty news. I decided to make contact via the good old fashioned postal system, as that felt far safer than a phone call or even a text exchange. Besides, other than, “that sucks,” I really had nothing to say to him. I disagreed with pretty much every single thing he believed in from his politics to his child rearing to his Holy Rolling to the way he tried to shield his children from knowing me, just as our father had admonished his sister to put the baby down.

But I time traveled in my mind, back to when we were super tight as little kids, and I decided to send him two things—a sketch kit and a 1975 Bernie Parent Philadelphia Flyers trading card. When we were children, my brother was so creative, a wonderful illustrator and a songwriter, too. And how we loved watching violent sports together. It’s sad to me that I had to go that far back to land upon happy shared times. But my gift was well received. He sent a thoughtful thank you text. I’m guessing he didn’t call because he, too, had nothing to say about the current state of our relationship.

My brother gave me a gift, too, utterly unwitting in that it came very shortly after he died and he had zero awareness of it. Still though, an incredible gift! I received a message from B, my childhood best friend, who grew up right next door. She sent her condolences. As it happened, my brother raised his family in the house we grew up in, and so he had remained neighbors with B’s mother—I’ll call her Mrs. O’Hara—his entire life. Also as it happened, and unbeknownst to me before I got B’s message, Mrs. O’Hara, in her nineties, was on hospice care.

The timing of my brother’s passing then, with the message it brought in, alerted me to the imminent passing of Mrs. O’Hara. I was able to send a video message to her, in which I thanked her for all of her gifts, and for being one of the top three most influential people in my life. I always felt safe when I was next door, reprieve from the constant terror I felt in my father’s presence. B played her the video, reported back the sound of my voice had been recognized. Two days later, she died.

My father was very cruel to the O’Hara’s, too. It would have been entirely understandable if they had chosen to have nothing to do with us. That’s not how it went down though. Mr. and Mrs. O’Hara rose above the hatred aimed at them by my gravely mentally ill father, the rage-a-holic. They welcomed me always. I never once heard them say a single ill word about him. They simply allowed me to have a good time, something I badly needed, to counter the bullshit happening back at my house. And of the limited happy memories I have of being a child, more than a few of them took place in that house next door, often with the soundtracks to Broadway musicals playing on vinyl in the background. Oh I owe my passion for Broadway to Mrs. O’Hara!

So yeah, it’s been a pretty wild ride these past several days. A lot to think about. Or not think about. I keep giving myself permission to just see where the thinking and not thinking take me. And, because I really like for these posts to start conversations, I ask y’all—how do you deal with death? Estrangement? Big feelings? Are you a dissociater like me? Favorite Broadway musical? What’s your intergenerational trauma story—are you a cycle breaker?

JOY & BEAUTY DEPARTMENT

In honor of Mrs. O’Hara and to thank her for instilling in me an unstoppable passion for Broadway musicals, I have dug this one out of the archives. This is Levon back in January 2023.

Meanwhile, back here in the present, it took Mercy a couple of days to figure out her birthday gift. Now she totally has the hang of it.

LAWN MOWER REPORT

Turns out those beautiful purple wildflowers the dogs kept bringing inside are, in fact, toxic nightshades. The dogs are fine. The dog yard has been denuded of the lovely culprits.

FROM THE ARCHIVES—The Piece I wrote about my brother:

The Twins

NOTES:

Thank you all for being here and reading along and having conversations. I really appreciate that. If you can swing a paid subscription ($5 per month/$30 per year) that really helps me keep the boat floating over here. You can also help by sharing this with those you think will dig it. Thank you.

I have such a ridiculous number of upcoming free and donation-based writing workshops that I have created a dedicated page with all of the dates and sign-up information: SPIKE’S SUMMER WRITING WORKSHOPS SCHEDULE

If you’re doing a purge, please remember that I am always collecting clothes, bedding, hygiene items, eyeglasses, and water bottles to distribute to Austin’s downtown homeless population—aka The Neighbors—through my volunteer gig at Central Presbyterian Church. Shorts and shoes are the big need right now. If you have stuff to donate, just drop me a line and we will figure it out. Thank you.

1. Well, actually, I bought two LPs that day at the local chain store Two Guys, in South Jersey. The other was Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, another classic that, like Budokan, has stood the test of time. On a hot summer night would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses? (Oh Meat! You know I would!)