My dear brother

No, not the one who lives in interesting places. Not the one I've never met. The other one, whom I mentioned several months ago. He was feeling fairly awful last night, so called me.

I think that one of his concerns is that he's so cut off from our family (with very good reason on both sides) that I'm one of the last thin threads he has. He seems obsessed that our father is old and is about to die with no resolution to their tortured relationship. ("I hate him, but I also love him.") Given that our father is in his mere mid-70s and that his self-abusing parents lived to much riper and older ages, I think that scenario is unlikely to play out anytime soon. It is however, possible that, as my brother fears, he will never see our father again.

In this crazy paternal family of mine, I've learned that our tribe consists of very good story tellers. They can horrify you, push all your buttons, get you all riled up, and then when you talk to the next person you are horrified all over again. There aren't just two sides to every story, more like three, four, a thousand, all the sides of a well-cut diamond.

My brother is tortured by his past. And I imagine that many of the things he remembers happened. Actually, my father has told me some of the same things, but seen from the other side of that diamond, filtered by different light. And they are horrifying in both tellings. My brother kept saying things like "I know you just ate dinner and I don't want to sicken you, so I won't tell you any details." And then he'd tell me another story. I don't think you can make any of these things up.

I do know from my father, though my step-mother was always way too polite to say so, that he was not a nice man back then. He was not gentle, he was not kind, and he was in fact, quite the opposite. His rages were so ferocious, and he was so well (or badly) matched to his second wife that he sent her original children to live with their father because he could not stand to see them live their lives cringing and hiding. I suspect things got much worse before they started to get better, just as my brother came onto the scene and started to develop memories.

The problem is that I can't fix this for anyone. I know that. I can make peace with myself and with those around me, or at least make motions in that direction. That's all. I can't carry messages to our father. (As I said last night, "you know who gets hurt when messages are carried back and forth? the messenger."). I can encourage my brother to continue writing and to continue making art. I've seen only small smatterings of his writing, and it is very good. And if his ability to make art is half as good as his mother's, he is a very fine artist indeed.

Some of the art work he's described, though, is filled with such awful images that I'm not sure I want to *see* it, exactly, though I can imagine that it is a very healing process to make it.

In some ways, I feel very lucky that my parents broke up when I was so young, allowing me to escape my father's worst years. Or if I didn't escape them, I at least have no memory of them. For all the horrors of my own early life, they pale next to those of my brother.

I somehow had the resources and help to pull myself out where I mostly function, or at least play a functioning adult on TV. I've come to believe, perhaps unfairly, that no matter what you've been handed, it is up to you as an adult to find a path through. You can find helpers along the way, certainly, preferably professional ones. You probably can't go back to the source for validation or reconciliation, especially when there's a good chance that the source has no memory of the awful past.

And so, one of the many painful parts of all this is hearing how much my brother needs validation and reconciliation from our father, something that is so unlikely to ever happen. And really, I think that's why he's been in touch after all these years -- both to see if I have any memories that match up and to see if I can act as a bridge to our father. I can't. And I don't want to.

After we hung up, Robert came into the room and said "There now. Was it easier to talk to him this time?" No, I replied. "Oh, well, then you have immense patience." I don't know about that. I know that I have some amount of compassion and a lot of sadness and exhaustion. After a conversation like this, I feel like the chalkboard against which fingernails have been scraped. And yet, I did not live through the horrors or the torture, so have very little to complain about in comparison.