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Gone in the Night

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To M: I hope I hear from you again before one of us dies.

My last living sibling (whom I will call M) moved out of state without saying goodbye, without leaving a phone number or a new address.

Stunning. Grievous. I am writing this with all my willpower going to not breaking down.

I should not have been stunned, since I had been sensing conflict and instability in his relationship with his partner, whom I will call J. 

J and M had been together for nearly thirty years but were not married.  In our state, there is no common law marriage recognized and without a will or legal agreement, they are legally strangers for each other’s assets.

This part may be important for my brother financially supported for these years by his partner.  They lived together, helped each other out emotionally, socially, physically, and when he had money, financially. 

However J had the pensions and home and assets.  M had a few hundred a month I think.I am not sure. We had not lived together, my brother and I, for nearly 60 years.

That’s right.  This was a late life breakup, with J being close to 90 and M being close to 80 years old. 

At this point in life, an age difference can make a longevity difference, and as my husband put it, perhaps M was planning his next move, the next woman to support him, for a number of years already.  Perhaps knowing  J’s assets were given in her will to her adult children spurred him on, for right or wrong, one doesn’t become financially independent near 80 years old. Injuries and illnesses found both of them, but M did live with a number of women, one at a time, long term, where they mainly supported him, while M worked on inventions, playing music, and watching the stars.

Had she, J, been the one supported financially, I wonder how I would have felt.  But knowing that my own brother didn’t support his one child, did not pay his student loans, and so lived life furtively, is an added sadness and loss.  The thought of a fully functioning sibling, my last remaining one, is a dream that won’t come true unless he somehow avoids legal problems while making a lot of money selling his patents.  M lived his life in shadows at times, using pseudonyms since universities and courts might have been looking for him. He claimed he reconnected with his adult son who turned out to be too needy; again, this is something I do not believe, for I learned that my family members often lied. I thought everyone grew up not knowing what was the truth, but that is not the case it seems. 

For example, M told his last partner our father moved out for ten years and lived with his (possibly) male lover.  This is not true. I was alive then, as were my uncles.  Often during nearly a decade my father had terrible medical issues including paralysis and blindness (which somehow were cured), and was in a medical hospital.  But he was not living with his (possibly) male lover. 

Why would M say such a thing?  To engender pity, perhaps, and have a loving nurturing woman want to take care of him?  To “explain” the large differences in age between 3 of us sibling and M?  I would think being so injured and medically fragile for nearly a decade would be reason enough.

The truth is bad enough, that our father was a mentally ill raging violent alcoholic who mentally and physically abused his family members and stopped working in his early 40s, plunging us into deep poverty along with deep violence and terror.  Isn’t that bad enough? Why hint our father was gay?  Was that just to add to the story?  I am not sure.

So M is gone.  Just gone.  I don’t really know if he left in the night, but that sounded like a better storyline. See?  We all learned to be dramatic, all of us.

What is true is that M left without saying good bye, without telling me, his last sibling, that he was leaving.  I am not sure where he is living now, but have heard from J that he might be living with an old partner far across country.

What I do not know is true is how M’s marriage or any of his relationships really ended. I’ve heard dramatic stories putting blame on his partners. 

What I do not know is if my sister was abused by M as she claimed happened all the time.  On her deathbed, she would not tell the truth about this, and this has clouded my emotions and reactions to my last sibling.  Why would she lie?  Why did any of them lie?

I guess there was not ever enough therapy to go around for my family, and it seems I got it all!  I have discussed these matters with my therapists over many years, and we do not know the truth.

I did see physical and a lot of emotional abuse by our father towards my sister and brothers.  That abuse I witnessed.

To M: I hope I hear from you again.  We are both older. We have both suffered from being raised with poverty, fear, violence, terror, alcoholism, and abuse.  We have lost two siblings too young, and it is just us.  (I blame trauma for my younger brother’s and only sister’s early deaths. But that is another story too painful to write just now.)

To M: I hope I hear from you again, brother.  I don’t expect I will ever know the truth, but I know we are nearly out of time.

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