On the Upcoming Death of my Brother the Jerk

Let’s get the really hard stuff out of the way first:

My brother is old enough to be my grandfather. (I’ll get into how that happened some other time.)

My brother is a complete, total and utter jerk in so many ways it’s almost impossible to describe.

My brother has been unceremoniously dumped by his wife of over 20 years. This has not helped his personality one little bit.

My brother beat his wife and daughters. This leads to certain questions about his wife and why she stayed with him, but I’ll get into that later, too. Or maybe not.

My brother is going to die soon.

Oh, not tomorrow and probably not next week, but if you get too far beyond that things get iffy.

His health has never been good. Or at least it hasn’t been good for long enough that I don’t think his kids can remember a time when he wasn’t on some kind of lung medication or... what do they call them? Nebulizers? The spelling on that doesn’t look right. It’s always been known that he has something called COPD, which just sounds like a new-fangled name for emphysema to me.

Just before Christmas this year he also had pneumonia. Not something someone with lung problems should have. He had a very bad case. In fact, I don’t think he realizes how sick he was. One day, while he was in the hospital, his doctor called me so we could talk about his medical problems and his recovery after being discharged. The doctor mentioned my brother’s heart condition.

What heart condition? I’d never heard of such a thing and in fact had been assured on several occasions by both my brother and sister-in-law that his heart was "fine". My brother’s doctor here on the mountaintop assured me that not only did my brother have heart problems, he in fact had a moderate to severe case of congestive heart failure. I began to wonder why he had never been medicated for this... it’s not rocket science.

I know from congestive heart failure. My mother died of it - at the ripe old age of 78, mind you. And Preachy’s father had it, though I never knew the man personally. He died from something else. It’s one of those chronic problems that can get you, but doesn’t have to, and is often the result of a career of smoking. (I hope to have slid around that by quitting some time ago.) Nevertheless, it can be severely debilitating and this is what has happened to my brother.

Congestive heart failure has an arc. From the incipient little symptoms (breathlessness, fatigue) to the kind of major symptoms that now afflict my brother. He can barely walk without becoming very out-of-breath, even with an oxygen tank at his side each and every minute of each and every day. His complexion has taken on a greyish tinge around the face and a slightly yellowish look on his hands, evidence of his failing peripheral circulation. He complains constantly of the cold and although I am not one to say that it is not cold here on the mountain in the winter, I have seen him complain of the cold in a room I personally knew to be 70F.

With these and other things in mind, it is very clear to me that my brother doesn’t have much time left on the planet. Oh, I figure that if he suddenly woke up and began a pro-active regimen of cardiac and pulmonary therapy (and presuming that absolutely nothing happened to further compromise his health), he might have as long as five, maybe six, years. I don’t think this will be the case. Given what I know about my brother - and I know a fair amount - he might have another year or two. Maybe not.

However long, these will be months or years in which he will be continually filled with hate for his almost-ex-spouse and daughters. (This is how he sees things: THEY did something to him. He never hurt them in any way, even when you show it to him in writing.) He will waste what little money he has paying lawyers to get custody of the family dog, while watching his already marginal relationships with his daughters go right down the tubes. He will fill his life with hate and judgment for me because I will not put up with his violent temper or actions and, most especially, because Preachy and I will not pay for him to exercise his spleen on the legal field.

It is all so, so sad. I don’t believe my brother has the power to do otherwise. He has always been violent of temper and I can’t say I was surprised to hear about some of the other violence in his life.

Nevertheless, my brother is going to die, severing my own last link with my parents. Especially my mother. This leaves me feeling pretty dreary. My mother and brother share some positive personality traits, although these days they are very hard to find. Every now and then I see flashes of the "old" brother (and the mother), the guy with the wonderful sense of the ridiculous who could laugh and laugh and laugh. Who hated to hurt people and who hated to see people hurt. Who worked hard and who was always able, when times got tough, to pick himself up by his bootstraps and carry on with a smile, making his and others’ lives better as he went. My mother was the same way. She made her own life better by helping others to make their lives better. She never went, in her declining years, into the dark hole of hate that has seemed to consume my brother.

My brother is going to die and I can see it coming. So can everyone else. He can’t. He doesn’t understand and I have learned that trying to talk with him about it only scares him. Scares him so badly, in fact, that he is liable to become violent... at least verbally so. At first, I thought it was my responsibility, since I am his sister, to take the bull by the horns and help him deal with this - live the best life he could, health wise, for as long as he could. But his fears took control. It’s too big an issue for him to be able to deal with. It’s not something he can feel as though he’s in control of. By contrast, his hate allows him to feel as though he is in control of his divorce. Go figure.