Chapter 1
The Challenges of Sibling Relationships
I just talked to Scott. He's unbelievably upset. I don't know. I don't know what to do . . ."
The trembling, panicky message on my voice mail is from my eighty-nine-year-old mother. She's talking about my elder brother, who is sixty-one.
"He's just a wreck, and so am I. He sounds awful. . . ."
"I don't know what to do," she continues, with the same high-pitched terror. "I don't know what to tell him. Uhhh, I don't know what to tell you. Please call me back so . . . so we can do something."
We! So we can do something?
"I hope."
With those two choked-out words, she is covertly acknowledging that my brother and I have been estranged for decades.
Then she signs off with the same words she has trained herself to use. Through most of my life, my mother has struggled to express her feelings for her children. She's not sure how to give my brother and me the very thing she lost as a twelve-year-old child, when her parents sent her, all alone, from Nazi Germany to America: a mother's love. About ten years ago, though, she began to change. At that time, she seemed to make a promise to herself: Never hang up the phone on one of your children without saying, "Love you. Bye."
After clicking off the frantic voice mail, I say the words out loud, reintroducing myself to the concept.
"My brother."
He has been excised from my life for so long that I don't even remember the origins of the rift. Was it a fight or some crisis that set us on our separate paths? Did I mistreat him or his family in some way? Whatever I did, his punishment seems profoundly disproportionate to whatever crime I might have committed.
Yet I doubt it was a single, calamitous incident. Instead, our break was a process of accretion, hurt piled on hurt, slowly building a hard shell of separation.
Indisputably, we were never close as children, and I always yearned for a deeper relationship with my brother. I suppose I was missing what I never had. In fact, we were always near-opposite personalities. I was introspective, self-reliant, invested in a few intense friendships. He was an adventurous risk-taker who couldn't wait to break from the family and live his own life. While Scott sought affirmation outside the family as the leader of a large circle of friends, I stuck close to home, trying desperately to repair my mother's damaged self and my parents' failing marriage. I was hoping that eventually I would be rewarded for my efforts with the family I needed.
Instead, all these years, I've lived in a cycle of injury, anger, and pain-a chronic state of powerlessness and grief. The ache hovers at the edge of consciousness: sometimes the barest wisp of longing, sometimes an ominous pileup of thunderheads rumbling through my mind. I've pushed the pain away, but every now and then, when I notice someone on the street who looks like him, I lose myself, staring at a stranger, not wanting to let the image go.
Some nights I dream about him. In the morning I lie in bed, sifting through memories, replaying moments from our shared past, wondering what I did to drive him away.
How, I've often wondered, can a person erase blood? How can I deny the existence of the only other person walking the earth who knows where I came from? Who can cross-reference my memories? Who shares my story? And most important of all: How can he deny me and my family?
The breach began when Scott and I were in our twenties. He was a newlywed and I was busy making my career as a reporter at a newspaper. I would call him occasionally, but often he wouldn't call me back; I assumed he was busy with his new life. At that time, I didn't give our limited contact too much thought. But when we would see each other, I was struck by the fact that we were traveling in two distinct orbits, and increasingly we were becoming remote to each other. Our conversations relied on superficial topics: "You get a new car?" "You doing golf lessons this year?" "I ran into Mark Leavitts at the mall yesterday. Wasn't he in your class?" More awkward than connected, we couldn't find anything to say to each other.
Maybe when he's older, I'd tell myself. Or when he has children . . . or when he feels successful . . . or when Dad is gone . . ." He was also estranged from our father. Neither Dad nor I lived comfortably with the absence of a relationship with Scott, and I held tightly to the tantalizing possibility that maybe, one day . . .
As we both welcomed children into our families, our scanty, sporadic conversations dwindled even more. I invited his family to birthday parties when my children were young, but they rarely attended. When he reciprocated, we went a few times, but the cousins didn't really know one another because they never spent enough time together to build a relationship and, consequently, none of us felt comfortable at the event. Eventually, we quit going too. At weddings or funerals, the distance and divide deepened. I would gaze at my brother across the room, looking at the stranger who once lived with me during my most formative years.
Months, years, and decades piled up. The shell grew into a wall of silence, impenetrable and insurmountable. I began to give up on my fantasies, trying instead to extinguish my feelings, and then to convince myself I didn't have a brother. It was just easier if he didn't exist; I was sure he would never be a part of my life again.
Now, after all these years, I try to reintroduce myself to the idea of him. I hear myself say again, "My brother." The words sound so foreign in my voice.
Who is he? All I know is the framework of our lives. He was the only other child in our deeply dysfunctional childhood home, a place steeped in our mother's Holocaust past-about which she never spoke. Neither did anyone else. Yet her loss and despair hung everywhere, as obvious as the stench seeping from the kitchen garbage can.
I suspected our estrangement was tangled up in that history. The bitter irony was that the Holocaust had robbed my mother's generation of their families; yet my brother and I, who could be in each other's lives, had somehow re-created the same loss. I wanted a relationship with my big brother in part to help me sort out our difficult parents: an unknowable mother, a tyrannical father. But, driven to bury our painful past, both of us escaped to college and never looked back-certainly not at each other. Instead, we lived in a legacy of familylessness.
Few pictures or mementos exist to document our shared childhood. Oblivious to building a family, our parents rarely took pictures of the four of us together or even of my brother and me as we passed through childhood. They rarely organized holiday gatherings, birthday parties, or vacations. They never encouraged us to watch out for each other in life.
And we haven't. But even though he has drifted far away from me, I'm constantly reminded of him. Almost every day, someone casually mentions "my brother" or "my sister"-ordinary words that prick me like a tiny electrical shock. I never say anything; I wouldn't want anyone to feel self-conscious about the expected, natural order of family. Still, when I hear innocuous comments-"We're going to my sister's for Thanksgiving" or "My brother's coming over to fix my bike"-my teeth clench and my fingernails dig half-moons into my palms.
Envy courses through me when I see brothers and sisters watching their children's baseball games together. Or having a meal at a restaurant. Or even texting each other. I feel as if I've been expelled from siblingdom. For me, there are few family celebrations; Thanksgiving is a stress-filled scramble to fill the chairs at my table.
I am not an only child, but I suffer the isolation of one.
I seem to carry this embarrassing loss alone. When I run into people who knew Scott and me as kids, they naturally assume that we've remained connected. "How's your brother?" they'll ask, unwittingly sinking a dagger into me. My features twist as I dodge them with a casual: "Fine. Fine." Then I quickly, skillfully redirect the conversation, asking about their family, avoiding the natural follow-up question: "What's he doing now?" Because I really don't know.
Of course, I'm aware of his outlines: a long marriage; two successful adult sons, both living near their parents-and near me. And every so often-even though I've asked my mother not to discuss him and his family with me-she can't help but share big news about his family. A few years ago, she told me that one of my nephews was planning to marry. Knowing it would be a large affair, I felt a stirring of hope: Maybe this would be my "one day." Maybe my family would be included. Soon I was checking the mail every day for an invitation that never arrived. On the wedding day, I mourned my losses even more intensely, learning again that when estrangement endures, the injuries multiply with every birthday, holiday, family occasion-and every new generation.
To manage my grief, I have strategically avoided certain places in my daily life. I always detoured, often inconveniently, from the street where he lives; I didn't want to see his sons shooting hoops in his driveway. I rarely shopped near his home because I didn't want to run into him or his friends. When my children were teenagers, I dreaded attending their sports events at his sons' nearby high school. Over time, my off-limits zone has expanded farther and farther out, and the "avoid" list has grown longer and longer. It's a relief and a respite that he doesn't have a Facebook page.
My fears were not unfounded. Two decades ago, the high school my brother's boys attended organized a large arts festival that introduced students to various career paths. I was asked to share my experiences as a writer. After my presentation, I was told to pick up my stipend check at a table near the school's entrance.
When I approached the table, staffed by several members of the school's PTO, I scanned the adults and stopped, stunned, at a pair of familiar dark eyes. I needed a moment to place the face: my own brother!
"Hello," I mumbled awkwardly.
"Hi!" he said cheerfully. At first, I couldn't tell if he even recognized me, or if he was just acting as if we didn't know each other. But he didn't ask my name; he handed me an envelope, saying briskly, "I'm PTO treasurer. Thanks for coming today." Then he turned to the next person in line, again introducing himself as treasurer. As he rifled through his pile of envelopes, he asked the presenter, "What's your name?"
That was the last time I saw my brother.
And now-after all this elaborate work of forgetting and avoiding and trying not to care-now what?
Turning back to the phone to return my mother's call, I tap on her name to call the number I know better than my own: ten digits we were assigned fifty years ago, when area codes were introduced, when we moved into the house where Mom still lives. That phone number is a tether to my childhood memories.
At the moment, though, I'm feeling anything but nostalgic.
"Well?" I ask my mother, barely concealing my anger as she answers the phone. "What do you want me to do?"
I've always felt she gave in too easily to Scott's cutting me off. I resented her for accommodating him, letting him off the hook, attending family events when she knew I was excluded. If I were in her place and one of my children shunned a family member, I would simply refuse to attend. My philosophy is that my children are free to be as distant or close to one another as they choose, but I expect every family member to be invited to all family events.
But my mother had her own rationalization, an explanation that never varied: She didn't mean to hurt me, but she felt her relationship with my brother was tenuous. "If I don't go to his house for Passover or the boys' birthday parties," she would tell me, "I'll never see that part of the family." Afraid of losing her son and grandchildren, she was willing to risk her safe, reliable relationship with me for the crumbs she might collect at my brother's table.
And now-now that he's drowning in troubles-I'm supposed to help her by rescuing him.
My brother was barely a teenager when he fled the family. He organized so many outings to parties, sports events, movies, and other activities that he seemed to come home only to sleep. I suppose he was escaping a place where he felt small and unacknowledged. He lived in the shadow of our highly accomplished, thoroughly self-absorbed father. Dead fourteen years now, Dad had dreamed his only son would follow in his giant footsteps by becoming a doctor. But Scott didn't share that dream; he dropped out of the University of Illinois during his junior year, abandoning premed for a career as a commodities broker.
During his decades of trading, he rode wild swings from stupendous financial success to bankruptcy. Not long ago, my mother confided that he was struggling with grave money problems. The ever-increasing risks of high-stakes trading had engulfed him in a tsunami of financial and personal ruin, resulting in his current severe depression.
"You have to do something," my mother sobs into the phone.
"I can't, Mom," I choke, swallowing my own tears. "I just can't."
"But you have to!" she wails. Her sadness and desperation stun me. Like most children whose parents lost everything in the Holocaust, I have tried to shield her from more pain: I can't stand to hear her suffer.
"But Mom! You know I've barely talked to him for forty years. And whenever I've tried, he always bails on me."
"I . . . I just don't know what to do," she says through unrelenting tears.
Listening to her sobs, I wobble. I want to ease her pain, yet if I reach out to him, I'm afraid I'll pay a terrible price myself.
But here's the thought that always haunts me, driving me to do what she asks: her life has been so much worse than mine. I hate to be the source of her grief. I worry about the cumulative effect of all she has endured. Will this rob her of years? Deprive her of any joy-even the smallest bit-that she might find in her remaining days?
