The letter unwritten.
10:19 p.m.
...and that got me thinking about my relationship, or lack thereof, with my other brother, the one who is almost equidistant in age between us and with whom I have not had a real conversation in almost seven years. My mom was telling me on the phone that she had one of those very frightening moments of memory loss--both for herself and for those of us who worry about her--wherein she couldn’t remember where her son was. She knew where he wasn’t, but it took her a while to remember that he in fact lives a 10-minute walk away, in the house where her parents once lived (she gave it to him--how generous is that?), is married, has two almost grown-up daughters, and she was very relieved. She told me that it made her realize how much she loves her son, and then she said, “I know you don’t like him, but I do,” and I had to correct her and say, “No, Mummy, it’s not that I don’t like him, it’s that he has made no effort to accept any of my attempts at bridge building since we had our argument and that he has rebuffed my offers of an olive branch each and every time.”
Then I got to thinking that maybe it’s time for me to write him another letter, one wherein I no longer pretend to be Mr. Nice Guy, but tell him in no uncertain terms what a selfish, arrogant schmuck he is for carrying this on as long as he has, even when I have given him an opening on several occasions to smooth over our differences without any need for apologies or forgiveness. This whole thing started with him telling me how I “hurt people”, and my thought is that it’s the right moment for him to hear that he has hurt me and people who are close to me in a knowing and deliberate way, unlike anything I ever did to him through ignorance. He lives by the motto that “he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it” instead of “he who keeps dredging up the past is doomed to alienate all his friends and relations.”
I would tell him in this letter that the only response I want is the correct one: that we live in the present with an eye to the future, that we bury the hatchet and get on with our lives. I do not want the kind of answer he sent when I mailed him a passionate plea, after the whole 9/11 tragedy when I saw lines of people begging for news about their missing relatives, that our own quarrel was pretty petty next to the real problems of these people, and he responded by mailing me back my letter with his comments interspersed in my text, rebutting all my points. It was the kind of comeback that would get an automatic buzz on a game show: “Wrong answer!”
I would tell him that the person he is hurting most is not me, but our mother, a woman of 87, practically blind, who wants nothing more than that her children should be friends and get along. Being an only child, she was determined when we were growing up that we have the kind of relationship she never enjoyed, and it worked pretty well, until my brother married a woman who took offence at everything anyone said to her, made mountains out of molehills and managed to alienate her husband from anyone who could have any possible emotional ties to him, whom she might deem a threat to herself. She hurt me, my other brother, my mother; I heard from a mutual acquaintance that she even tried pushing away friends of her husband’s whom she thought were too close.
But I will not write this letter. Short of getting cancer, or being severely injured in an accident, I can’t think of anything that might soften my brother’s attitude, that might make him realize that he really does love his sister and that our relationship is more important than any harsh words said going on a decade ago. He’s the one who threw my own words back in my face six years ago when he said, “Since when do grownups forgive and forget?” Well, my dear brother, that is exactly what grownups do.
<~~~ * ~~~>
