My mother passed away 4 months ago. It wasn’t the first significant death for me in my adult life, but it has been the closest to me personally. I’ve had a few breakdowns since then, occuring with less and less frequency. I am so very grateful that I have my wife here to help me through this.
Growing up, we had a small core: Mom and we three brothers. There were other parts of the family, to be sure, such as my dad (for a few years, anyway)(stepdad, to be technical) and his parents, but the family that lived together day in and day out was we four. That was a long time ago, though. I left home and that small core 25 years ago. Middle brother himself married 19 years ago this spring. Baby brother now lives in another state.
Without Mom to hold us three together, I’m feeling fresh pain that the family I was raised in is now gone. I have my own family now, but we brothers just seem to have all gone our separate ways. Middle brother and I live just a few miles away from each other, but we have almost nothing in common, and rarely speak. I have much more in common with baby brother, but our lives are still fundamentally different (I’m married with a child; he’s single and likely to remain that way).
I had another small breakdown this afternoon, and in the middle of it, I expressed rage at my middle brother’s distance from me, a distance that I feel he has largely contributed to. The wife says I hit the wall 4 times; I just know my knuckles hurt. I honestly don’t know what to do to ‘mend fences,’ especially when my attempts to remain in my brother’s life are largely met with apathy and just plain non-responsiveness.
I’m not really looking for expressions of sympathy; I know that I’m supposed to be grieving. I’m not really looking for advice on what to do about my brother, either; I could do a lot more on my end to strengthen our relationship. I just…wanted to tell somebody. Thanks for listening.
In summary: grieving sucks, whether it’s for a parent now gone, or for a memory of family that hasn’t really existed for a long time anyway.