A Eulogy for My Not yet Dead Brother

I wrote my brothers eulogy six months ago, on another sleepless night spent wondering when I’d get the call. I hadn’t spoken to him since Christmas, but the slow suicide of someone you love is not something that can be ignored. Even if you ignore the person themselves.

Addiction faded into our lives. For as long as I can remember, my brother was drunk, high, or stoned. It was the norm in my family, to expect so little from him. He smoked weed every day, but, oh, it’s just weed. He drank red wine by the bottle, but who doesn’t love wine? By the time we realized that this was not just anything, it was too late.

He hid behind his ill health, a cloak he created by rotting his body for more than a decade. A hopeful manipulation that fooled even himself. As he sunk deeper into addiction, the hospital staff came to know him by name. They told us he wasn’t ill. At first, we couldn’t believe it. Days and nights spent in A&E telling them he must be sick, look at him! We argued with staff in corridors as he writhed on the bed in pain, staging pseudo-seizures. After years of sitting by his hospital bed and accompanying him to doctors appointments, the cracks began to show. He wasn’t ill; he was an addict.

Being the sibling of an addict is a unique feeling. We grieve before their death, for the person we used to know. We are angry for what they put our family through, for seeing our parents suffer. The guilt for not doing enough, because nothing is ever enough. But we still love them. I was angry for a long time, but that’s the lazy way to deal with addiction. Years have passed and I’ve begun to learn compassion.

For an addict, rock bottom keeps getting deeper. For the family, too. More often than not, rock bottom is death. None of us had a great chance with a family history of addiction, anxiety, and depression. A broken household with a turbulent past. A useless Father. But no one thinks it’ll happen to them. I’ll never know why my big brother was the one to fall when the rest of us picked ourselves up. I choose to understand that I can’t understand. I choose compassion because it feels better than brewing a seething hatred. Because I don’t need to make my big brother feel unloved.

A once fierce woman now tiptoed around the child she bore, in the hope that she wouldn’t rattle the cage. She lived in fear that one wrong word would make him go too far, that she could be the reason for his suicide.

The brother I knew became a small part of who he was. The fiercely smart, talented musician had been replaced. I no longer recognized his eyes, his body gaunt and sickly. Every time my phone rings, I wondered if today is the day I’d have to pick up the shattered pieces of my family. The day I would have to hold what was left of my mother together.

My big brother’s death will haunt every moment of our lives. There isn’t a day we don’t think of him, think of what more we can do. He will always be an addict, just like my father, but I hope I’ll see the day that he is an addict that isn’t using. I don’t have any answers; my understanding is surface level. We did everything, tried everything, except letting go. I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do but we have to leave him to pull himself from the dirt. When, if, he does, we’ll be there.