Under my brother's wing

The fruits of facing (big) mistakes

It was 1969. A few decades ago, that was all I needed to say, and the story would already be told. Liberation was in the air – political, sexual, lifestyle, psychedelics.

Liberation, though, is not freedom.

Liberation is the sense of freedom that comes when whatever held you in, back, down, or away is released - and you expand. It’s heady, and it’s temporary.

The work of true freedom comes later, when the high is gone and you are now navigating a strange new world.

So, it was with my story. I chucked it all, but it all wasn’t gone, just out of my mind. And “it all” included my brother. It took half a century to repair the tear.

I was 23.

Right out of college my boyfriend and I had “shacked up”, a rebel move back then. I was slated to attend one of the top MFA programs in theater when we fell in love, or at least fell in bed with one another. I gave up my dream and followed him into his. The 60s had unhinged us all and I was only loosely wedded to any life direction.

I went from loosely wedded to my life - to profoundly lost. Floating above myself, I could not believe what I saw, a shadowy, unhappy young woman winding my life around a man - just as I had been trained.

On the road

We’d both lost our jobs, so we did what the psychedelic subculture did back then - chuck it all and go on the road. We put our furniture out on the sidewalks from whence it had come, sold our old Volvo 544 and bought a 1957 Ford Econoline van which we outfitted with a raised platform bed, curtains and an 8-track cassette player bolted to the cab roof. As I said it was 1969 and I was 23.

I have such a poignant photo from that day we took off. My older sister is in the background, grasping her coat around her and looking into the distance. We didn’t know she had the same bipolar gene I did, and would attempt suicide a year later. She was just sad and in her own world. My mother stands apart too, in her stockings, pumps, and sheath skirt with a handbag hanging from her crooked arm. She also had a distant look in her eye. Something was happening that was not supposed to happen. Her daughter who’d just a few years ago was top of her high school class, was throwing her life away.

My brother is there too, but he’s not in the picture.

I am, of course, in my own giddy bubble. I was off on a great adventure, unaware that I was running from that sad family with nothing to offer me and would, 50 years later, need to rewind the tape and include myself again in my brother’s and sister’s lives.

Life review

Fast forward to 2023. I’d made a life out of one bold inspiration after another, with enough smarts and high-minded values to have, helter-skelter, garnered some of the successes my mother had hoped for me.

The pandemic was receding. In 2020 I’d started a podcast, What Could Possibly Go Right? with some of that manic certainty I’d brought to other wildly successful ventures. After 3 years the podcast had run its course, and I would turn 78 in July.

Thus began the process of reckoning with my life, from 23 to 78, a 55-year loop out into the big world and now quieting down into my elder years.

Looking back over those years, I saw what I had done. Not my resume, but what I’d buried to keep on keeping on. I hadn’t had a bipolar depression for 15 years, but now one roared in and I went into the shadowlands. It was my time to be with the selves left behind, my own and all those others I’d discarded on my way to the next big thing.

I’d barely spoken with my brother in all those years. On quick visits to the East Coast for work, I’d have lunch with him, chatter about my life and hear what was up with his. It was perfunctory, though it always evoked the bond we’d had as children in our parent’s loveless marriage.

We’d spent hours giggling in the canvas kiddie pool together under the apple tree in the back yard. I’d snuggled into bed with him, watching his tropical fish, when I felt scared. I admired his dedication to his hobbies, like his darkroom under the basement stairs where he developed his black and white photos. He was also a rare stamp collector, each stamp in a glassine envelope, and sold them mail order. At 13. He was my big brother, and I loved him.

That bond never broke, but I had missed his whole life - his marriage, children and grandchildren.

In the depression of my 78th year, an anguish arose about how I’d wasted that precious gift of having a brother who cared for me from the day I was born.

After an inner reckoning with what I’d lost when I left him behind, and after relieving some of the shame of tossing him out along with the rest of my family, I wrote him and asked for a zoom reconnection.

He popped up on my screen in my zoom room. After all those years, there he was.

“Hello gorgeous,” he said and off we went, reweaving the fabric of family.

This summer, 2024, I flew to the East Coast to see my brother and sister, now quite woven together through emails and phone calls.

I spent 5 days at his Long Island home in an over 55 community. We had one full day together while his wife was off with friends. Our conversations went deep. We eventually got to the story of my leaving New York, and him. I listened intently, and felt intensely, as this now old man told me how it felt to him that I left, that he never had the sister he wanted, who would also marry and have children and grandchildren and gather for holidays with his family. He let me see his sadness, and I got to feel my sadness as well.

I then told him about my sadness. I recalled when he went to High School when we moved to a new town. I felt I’d lost him to his new friends.

As we moved deeper into our sense of loss, we talked about my father’s suicide when I was 13 and he was 15. I learned how that impacted him, how he lost a sense of security and confidence and orientation. I talked of my own sense that my father never quite claimed me as his daughter, so the suicide didn’t impact me emotionally as it had my brother. As we talked, we realized that my father’s suicide was like a huge boulder dropped into the small pond of my family. It alienated us all from one another. It’s when my brother and I first lost one another, and the tiny tear in our fabric grew as we grew older.

We talked about how to renew our bond. He didn’t seem to want to just forgive and forget.

“I’m a package deal,” he said, “you have to love my wife and children and grandchildren.”

I said I would.

“You have to start by remembering everyone’s birthdays.”

I said I would.

It was not one of those Hallmark moments. It was a cautious step.

I have your back

Several days later I took a Lyft to JFK airport, bound for home. In the gate area there was only a small charging station for everyone’s phones, so I set mine on the shelf, plugged it in, and sat down, keeping one eye on the phone, the other on my belongings.

A phone started to ring. It took a moment to realize it was mine. I answered. My brother was on the line.

“I want you to know I have your back. I know you have friends, but it’s hard to be a single woman growing old without a family. So I want you to know that I have your back and whatever you need I’m there for you, and that comes not just from me but my whole family.”

I breathed in, sighed out, said thank you, I love you, hung up and cried.