My Dad & Brother

I headed out to the rural parts of Ontario last weekend to visit my father in hospital.  He has been battling various types of cancer for a few years, but the illness now seems to be taking a greater toll.  I am sure that the steady stream of pharmaceuticals are also inflicting some sort of hell on his brain and systems.  He was not vocal at all, only managing a few mumbles, though since the visit, he has been more communicative.

My step-mom fed him soup and ice cream,  I have to say that watching one's formerly vital father being fed is not a pleasant sight.  It reminded me of when I fed my children.  It's the same really: they turn their heads to refuse the offering; they decide they want more; they change their minds. He looked weak and frail, something I could never have imagined when I was young.

My dad's future is uncertain.  Doctors are reluctant to offer an estimate on his remaining time, but seeing as though the cancer has migrated to his spine, his time here would seem to be severely limited.  Even if he rebounds, he will not go home.  My step-mom can't control him.  It may have been the drugs, but he recently moved some furniture out of the house and threw a plant out the door as well. Even when he was at home, he wanted to "go home" and waited for the movers to take his stuff back to his real house, in his real town, and be with his real wife.  This may be Capgras Syndrome, wherein those afflicted feel that a family member is an impostor.

My mother has been in a nursing home for two or three years, since she broke her hip.  Her mother, now 90, is also in a nursing home.  She has no idea who anyone is anymore.  And then there is my brother.  The good news is that the doctor was proven to be completely wrong in his diagnosis.

My brother, once thought to be on his deathbed, executed some sort of remarkable recovery.  He can walk with the aid of a walker.  He can talk.  He has problems with short-term memory.  His is weaker on one side.  He remains, it has to be said, susceptible to further strokes.

My brother, should he continue to improve, will be placed in a rehabilitation facility. My dad, should he improve, will end up in a nursing home for some period of time.  Most of my family will be in institutions.

Sometimes, Doctors are Wrong

Soon after visiting my brother in the hospital, he developed a fever.  This turn of events seemed to strengthen the belief that the doctor had been quite correct.  Everyone thought that this would be the thing to end it all, but then something almost miraculous happened.

After ten days of unconsciousness, he "woke up."  This is amazing, unexpected news, but it is not exactly as good as is sounds.  He cannot speak.  He can only open his eyes for a few seconds at a time.  His is so weak on the right side, that he cannot really move his right arm.  He cannot swallow, meaning that they have to keep a tube in his throat.  He cannot eat because his stomach will not function properly and nothing is kept down.  He is on oxygen.  Of course, since he cannot speak, it is unclear if he is suffering from any brain damage, aside from the obvious speech issue.  He did manage to shake his head in reply to some questions.

What lies ahead, should he continue to come out of this, is months of rehabilitation and a long, slow recovery.  I am not sure that recovery is the correct word since he will most likely have limited mobility and a poor quality of life.  The doctor emphasized that my brother remains in grave condition and that he is very ill.  The doctor is uncertain what lies ahead.  In fact, his original prognosis might still hold true.

So, again, we wait.

I Have two Brothers but I am Brotherless

My brother is going to die.

It's almost impossible to describe the overwhelming sense of sadness in that hospital room.  With my sister, step-mom, my brother's step-daughter, and her child, we stood around trying to make sense of it all.  Five days after his hemorrhagic stroke, he is still unresponsive.  The doctor described two possible outcomes. The less likely is that he will surface and, in the best possible scenario, will de disabled and have massive brain damage.  The other - more likely scenario - is that he will slip into a coma and die of something else, like an infection, perhaps pneumonia.  So certain is he of this outcome, that we all agreed with a "do not resuscitate" plan.  In short, my brother is going to die, but we don't know exactly when.  It could take hours or days or weeks or longer.  But, the timing is irrelevant: my brother is already gone.

The average hospital bed is not up to the task of containing a 475+ pound man.  By some estimates, he is over 500 pounds, but that won't last, not in a hospital bed, especially since his stomach no longer functions: the food forced into him by a tube is regurgitated immediately.  My brother fills the bed completely, like a child lying in a bed made for a toy doll.  Cables and tubes connect him to an array of medical instruments:  a heart rate monitor, a blood pressure cuff, two IVs, and a respirator with its long tube running down his throat.

Throughout the day, I experienced a deep sense of guilt and anger.  My brother is such an asshole.  It's difficult to write that about a family member, one who is on the verge of death, but he is an asshole and it has always pissed me off.  I was supposed to be his friend.  I was supposed to be close to him for my entire life.  We were both supposed to have kids who would play with each other and come over at Christmas.  We were supposed to go to the beach together.  Or, he was just supposed to be around, to be an unconditional friend, to a part of my life.  Instead, he bailed on his entire family, after being a jerk when he was an adolescent.

His three kids (the first of whom came when he was only 16) were sexually abused; the mother and step-father were sent off to prison, the kids being distributed to various foster homes, never to be seen again, though we are looking for them.  Sure, he paid some child support, but only after court orders, and then that dried up when he went on a disability pension.  He made no effort to find them.  He didn't try to obtain custody after the trial when their step-father was found guilty of sexual assault and the mother found guilty of permitting it to happen.

I am angry with my brother for ruining so much of my childhood.  From his violent behaviour toward me to the theft of family possessions, he was a complete bastard.  What can you say about someone who would steal from his own family? At least my other brother, the one who left home when I was 4 years old, never stole from us.  He sold drugs and paid the price, and then I never really saw him again. He disappeared and I have seen in a handful of times, and only twice in the past 25 years, maybe 5 times since I was four years old.  It's like he was never my brother.  He is a mystery to me and I can't even say that I know him.

In the hospital, staring at him in the bed, I was inexplicably on the verge of tears, for a man I never liked, for a man that failed to be a brother, who was a terrible son, a lousy human being, and a disinterested father.  He spent his life barely able to survive, finally ending up a on disability pension because he was too obese to work.  He has sleep apnea, hypertension, diabetes, asthma, troubles with blood clots, and a weak heart. By all accounts he ate massive amounts of unhealthy food and had an immense passion for smoking.  I still insist that this is the outcome he wanted: he wanted to be pitied, to be the village freak, and he did it.  In the end, I might compare him with Ignatius J. Reilly, but without the creativity, or maybe Homer Simpson, but a Homer without any sense of responsibility or love for anyone other than himself.

You may think this uncharitable, but it's true.  The way he spoke clearly indicated that he loved attention.   If he was sick, everyone knew about it.  Everyone knew how many pills he had to take each day because he displayed them in his apartment for some sort of pitying effect.

After a conversation with the doctor, we went to have lunch, and then drove to his apartment.  It's difficult to think about him as being dead, when his is still alive and breathing, but we were forced to investigate the bills, to pay the landlord the overdue rent, to plan for the emptying of the apartment.

The floor around his bed is scarred with burns from cigarettes that fell through his hands as he drifted off to sleep.  Miraculously, there was never a fire.  He gave up smoking six months ago when he needed oxygen.  The bedroom has six oxygen tanks; he has a night-time breathing apparatus.  Another oxygen machine sits in the living room.  I looked around the dismal place and was stunned to see a shelf of family photographs.

I didn't speak to him over the past 25 years, maybe once or twice.  I was angry with him and could never understand how my father could have forgiven him so easily.  My mother too.  But, I guess that's what parents do.  Standing there, staring at the photographs, I began to feel angry with myself for being the holdout, especially when my sister said she had been speaking with him recently.  And then, I saw two photos of me and my two kids (whom he has never met) on a shelf along with recent photos of my sister.  My sister had sent him photos and he ran out to buy frames so he could display them.

I felt like such an idiot.  In the back of my mind, I always assumed that our paths would cross, that we would speak again, that we could forget all of the garbage of the past, but now that's impossible.  He is dying in a hospital, and I am pissed off, but I am not sure if I am angry about him dying or for him failing to be a brother.  How is it that I ended up with two brothers who walked away from their family and never tried to keep in contact with any of us?

I got back in the rental car and headed back to Toronto, feeling a profound sense of loss for a brother I hardly knew.

Brother

My estranged brother has had a stroke.  This is both odd and not odd.  It is odd because he is young, only 17 months older than me.  On the other hand, he is morbidly obese and he leads a very unhealthy lifestyle.  (You can read more about my brother here and here).

He remains unresponsive in a hospital bed, about to be shifted to a different hospital where a neurologist can examine him.  Initially, we were told that the prognosis is grave.  Currently, I have no idea and am just waiting to get the updates.

Endings/Beginnings, part four (see parts one and two and three)

Some of you will remember the short piece I wrote about one of my brothers a couple of years ago. It is difficult to add to that, but I could begin with the fact that he is now collecting a disability pension and doing some under-the-table taxi dispatching work. He has unpaid bills all over town, but people are still civil to him. After all, he is a celebrity, if a minor one. How many people can say that they know a man who weighs 400 pounds?

The most amazing thing about my brother is that he is still alive. He should be dead. Somehow, his body remembers to function. His heart still goes and his lungs, battered by thousands of cigarettes, still work. He continues to use the cane, but now he has a reason. In high school, he walked with one frequently, arguing that it relived the pain of ambulating with hemorrhoids. His wife, the one he married after the mother of his children was imprisoned and the kids swept away into foster care (it never crossed his mind to take them in and be a father to them) has been placed in long term care with early-onset Alzheimer's. She is in her fifties.

I suppose I should point put that she is much older than he. If you ask me, his attraction to this woman was based solely on the fact that she had daughters that were nearly his age. It was another thing that made him freakish, another thing for people to talk about behind his back. He had no other way of making any sort of impact, so he went for freakish acts, like force-feeding himself into obesity and, if he can manage it, an early death. Some day, he will be found prostate on the ground in his motel room, a half-eaten doughnut protruding from his mouth.

Yes, I see a bad end for my brother, but I believe that he hopes he will look down on his enormous body from above, just as we normal people believe that one day we might observe our own funerals, and delight in the fact that he lived out his childhood fantasy and become the man in the wicker chair.

Portrait of my Other Brother as a Middle Aged Man

At last, a sort of sequel to Portrait of my Other Brother as a Young Man.

The second time someone aimed a gun at my brother, he was lucky. His girlfriend had terrible aim and took out a window instead. That incident always reminds me of the rumours about my grade 8 science teacher who, either in a drunken stupor or a fit of impotent rage, shot his piano with an elephant gun. A few years earlier, my brother had been shot in the leg by an American hunter he was guiding through a northern Ontario forest in search of game.

So, a gunshot wound was added to a list of injuries that included a broken syringe in the palm of his hand, a spine in ruins from years and years of heavy lifting for a rail company, and dozens of bruises from hockey and bar fights. By age 40, his body was scarred and tattooed, weakened from drug use, heavy drinking, and smoking. And yet, at age 40, he became a father for the second time.

Of all the things in my brother's colourful past, it was fatherhood at age 40 that most irritated my father, a man who had four children by the time he was 33. He just could not understand the idea of 'late' fatherhood. "Imagine having a kid at 40! He'll be 60 when the kid is 20. What was he thinking about?" I wondered if it made my brother think about the child he had as a teenager, but never really saw.

For my brother, fatherhood couldn't have come at a better time. He left his criminal past behind, but retained a strong interest in booze and cigarettes. And, although he continues to drive without a license, he has tried to pull his life together. No more jail, writing bad cheques, smashing cars into gas pumps, dropping acid or shooting up. Instead, against the odds, he has custody of his child, even though he looks like a most ill-suited father.

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Portrait of my Other Brother as a Young Man: a sequel to Portrait of my Brother as a Young Man

When I was 5 years old my brother ran away from home. The police car idled in the driveway and I wondered if I could ask the policeman to turn on the siren. But then, my mother ran back into the house crying and the I heard the policeman say that if they brought him back, he would just leave again because he was 15 and the police knew what they were talking about. I learned later that my mother had flushed the LSD she found in his room.

The next time I saw him, he didn't recognize me. At 18, he had a pregnant girlfriend, a broken needle in the palm of his hand, from an injection gone bad, and a beat up electric guitar. He told me about flashbacks and angel dust while he played along with the songs on the radio. He could play Alice Cooper's I'm 18: " I got a baby's brain and an old man's heart, took eighteen years to get this far. Don't always know what I'm talkin' about. Feels like I'm livin' in the middle of doubt"

And, I remembered another Alice Cooper song, from the albums he left behind:

I ran into my room
And I fell down on my knees
Well, I thought that fifteen
Was gonna be a breeze
I picked up my guitar
To blast way the clouds
But somebody in the next room yelled
"You gotta turn that damn thing down"

In the morning, the police called. I sat in the back seat on the ride to the police station where I saw my brother. He didn't speak. The sound of handcuffs locking around wrists is exactly as it is on television. Everyone knows that ratchet sound of the lock squeezing tighter and tighter. I didn't know what trafficking was. I didn't know where the jail was. I never knew how long he stayed locked up.

I thought his girlfriend looked out of place carrying a giant paper bag with a colourful smiling Santa Claus printed on one side and "Merry Christmas" scripted in red on the other. In the dust kicked up by our tires, I could see her belly and her thumb in the air as she tried to hitch a ride to somewhere in the hot summer air.

(read part two)

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Portrait of my Brother as a Young Man

This post was inspired by Large Marge Hayes and a few posts at The Cynic Ward.

At age 15, my brother impregnated his 21-year-old girlfriend (ex-hooker; ex-junkie - or at least we thought she had moved on from soliciting and heroin). She took up a new line of work as a welfare mom. Don't get me wrong: I am not one of those conservative anti-welfare people. But, she clearly abused the system, and later, she abused her children.

This was in his pre-obesity phase, or his warming up to obesity phase, when he would consume one loaf of bread and half a jar of peanut butter every day after school. I think he admired a guy who lived around the corner from us. This man weighed at least 400 lbs and started every day with a case of 24 beers at his feet. In summer, he sat on a large wicker chair and downed them one at a time, never getting up to go to the bathroom, making me wonder if he had some sort of catheter system going. He rarely spoke and the kids would either tease him or watch him. Some tried to speak to him. My brother sat and chatted with him, but I have no idea what they talked about.

I think my brother admired this local freak show. If I had been entrepreneurial, I would have made an arrangement with this guy and sold tickets to his performance, which is sort of what it was. I should have built some sort of hut or got a circus tent for the backyard. I could have run pools on how much beer he could down and by what time of day. But, I am straying from my brother.

He got fat. He sought out the underbelly, and he fathered three children by the time he was 19 with a woman who encouraged him to steal, even from his family and from me. Eventually, her children were placed in foster care, when she and her new boyfriend were sent to prison.

Since then, he has held some essential jobs: gas jockey, slacker building superintendent who couldn't tighten a screw, and an overweight cab driver who can only walk with the help of a cane, or two. I still can't figure out how he gets in and out of the cab. I forgot to mention his hypochondria.

And that's the short story.

While the term redneck is not used where I come from, I think he has some of the characteristics.

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