1969

When my mother died three years ago, there was no funeral. At age 85, she had few friends left and was the last of her siblings to go. We weren't close with our cousins, so it was just me and my brother, Brian . . . and I knew Brian wouldn't make the trip, so what was the point of having a funeral? I emptied the safety deposit box, made the arrangements with the funeral home, and cleaned out her condo.

Actually, I'd seen Brian only a few times in the past decade, even though he lived just a couple of hours drive away. But when we were little, we were close, or as close as it was possible to be in our family, where my mother and father had an uneasy detente, and the only time we saw each other was briefly, at the dinner table.

Brian was also a voracious reader, and he let me read everything on his bookshelf--Asimov, Heinlein, Mad Magazine, Salinger, Playboy, Faulkner. I listened to his albums on the stereo: Jefferson Airplane, Jeff Beck, Mothers of Invention, Coltrane. When our parents went out of town, he let me smoke his pot and didn't rat me out when my boyfriend came over.

In 1969, Brian went off to Carleton College (it was that or Oberlin), but something happened to him, and he had to come home. My parents were very hush-hush about the whole thing, even more than they normally were, but I gathered they were taking him to a psychiatrist. He'd shaved his head and was terribly skinny, like the people I'd seen in pictures of concentration camps.

1970 

It was bad for a while, but gradually, Brian got better. Our parents moved to the east coast, while we stayed in our home town and went to the university there. We lived near campus in two studio apartments in the rabbit warren of a converted Victorian house. He kept an eye on me, but not too close. I cooked for him occasionally.

Brian graduated summa cum laude in political science. He'd taken the civil service test on a lark, and when he was offered a job as a programmer in a city a couple of hours away, he took it. No one understood this--he was so brilliant. Wasn't he meant to do more than this? But he stayed with Department of Army, working his way up the pay grades.

During that time, I saw Brian every once in a while, but not as often as you'd think, given that we lived so close. When I did see him, it was clear to me his life had become very circumscribed--work, stamp collection, electronic equipment, work again. He never married or had a girlfriend, or seemed to have any friends at all, for that matter. He never went anywhere. I was concerned about him, but I had my own life, chaotic but vigorous.

He hated his job right up to the day he retired at the age of 54 with full benefits, which is something you can do if you've put in your time with Department of Army. Now it was over. And he went on a manic. The fact that it was a manic was abundantly clear to me--as clear as it is to me now that what he had suffered in college was a major depressive episode.

During the manic, he decided to move back to our hometown, where our mother now lived, and made the mistake of trying to befriend her. My mother, a narcissist, was a disappointment to him--but then, so was I. Eventually, he moved back to the city where he'd worked.

Shortly after he did, he met a woman at a singles event sponsored by Mensa, the organization for people with stratospheric IQs. Apparently, he'd ridden the manic to a point where he seemed well, or well enough, and the woman moved in with him. She has been his devoted partner ever since, taking care of him through his inevitable depression, his late-life diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and several hospitalizations.

Last year, two years after our mother died, I drove over to see Brian, and his partner made us a lovely lunch. I arrived about 11 o'clock. Brian seemed old and fat and very sedated--and the contents of the pill sorter box I saw on the toilet tank were alarming, worse even than my own. We ate lunch, but afterward he said he needed to nap. It was clear that he wanted me to leave.

Not too long ago, I got the idea that my 16-year-old son and I could drive over again--that way, my son could get some highway miles in on his learner's permit. I e-mailed Brian to suggest the idea, but he e-mailed me back: We have other plans for the weekend.

I knew that to be a lie: Where would he go? What would he do?

So I replied: I'm sorry it won't work out, but would a visit be possible some other time?

And he said no.

I was shocked, but never one to leave well enough alone, I called him. In a weak and watery voice, he answered yes and no to the questions I posed, with looooong pauses between answers. In the middle of the conversation, I realized that I was manufacturing the dialogue, guiding Brian toward an explanation of why he might not be able to see me that I could wrap my head around, something other than the fact that he just didn't want to--or couldn't.

I suppose I could turn up on Brian's doorstep with candy or flowers or fruit, but who would I see after his partner opened the door and I stepped inside? My brother is still my brother, but he is also gone. Almost, it seems, as gone as my mother and father, both dead.

I know Brian is very, very ill, and unlikely to get better. Even so, I long for the old connection, for the brother who ridiculed me fondly, who let me tag  along and read his books and smoke his pot.  The picture of us together, brother and sister, is a persistent one. It's  painful, but I doubt it can be extinguished.

1961