Tag Archives: siblings

Yom Kippur Confession — Goodby to King David

David, Age 4

I didn’t need a brother.  I certainly didn’t want one.  I liked being the center of my parents’ universe, the special doll of my much older half-sister.  Besides, I already had cousins who were like siblings when we were together, who were kind enough to leave me to return to my charmed realm. 

What egocentric three-year-old in her right mind would want the disruption of a younger sibling?

And yet I got one.

At first, he was little more than a nuisance. Smelly, wrinkly, ugly red but inevitable.  I accepted him.  And I accepted that I was responsible for him.  I even loved him. Before I was 4, I was happy to help with the laundry, comfort him when he cried, give him his bottles, sing him to sleep.

The second year was fraught.  He was ill most of the time.  Tracheal bronchitis, pneumonia, flu, ear infections.  He sucked up every ounce of attention my parents had to give, and I was their willing accomplice.  We coddled him, nurtured him, protected him. 

The day he began Kindergarten, his inability to hear enraged the principal, who thought he was simply ignoring her when she called us in from the playground.  I intervened, yelling at her, taking her hand off the ear by which she was about to lead him into school.  He was my responsibility.  I had to take care of him.

By the time I was in 5th grade, we had moved twice – once to a new state and then across town to our fourth new school in less than two years.  David had evolved into a magical boy.  People loved him.  He was powerful, smart, witty.  Everyone he met was his new best friend. He no longer needed me, and it was a good thing because the fact of five subsequent siblings, a veritable separate family, required that I no longer attend to him.

Yet David was still the victim of multiple ailments.  He was inevitably the first one to get sick and the last one to be well.  I remained healthy as the proverbial farm animal, the last to get sick and the quickest to recover. 

I was jealous, and that year I impulsively succumbed to my jealousy. It was the first and the last time I was ever jealous of David.  The experience chastised me.

The Asian flu arrived in our town sometime between my birthday in early October and Hallowe’en.  Fewer and fewer kids were coming to school.  David was felled in the first days of the epidemic.  Our siblings who were not yet in school had runny noses and low-grade fevers, but they were not terribly ill.  I had no symptoms. Whatsoever.

Which seemed like a terrible injustice.

Because I was the designated caregiver, I volunteered to look after David, who was quite ill.  I took him his meals and sat with him while he moaned himself to sleep. Then I lay down next to him and breathed as close to his mouth as I could before I licked the plate and utensils he had used as I carried them down to the kitchen for washing. I was determined to have a bit of this flu for myself.

I was so successful I nearly died.  For six days I ran a fever over 104, and at the end of the week, I had a three-day nosebleed. 

I have never been so sick before or since.  The experience was a powerful lesson.

What I learned was what a hero my brother actually was.  He so often survived battles with bugs like the one that struck me, and he paid a price.  Hearing loss, asthma, compromised immunity.  Eventually diabetes. 

Through it all, he was ever cheerful, ever willing to go out of his way to participate in athletics, at which he excelled, ever warm and supportive to his friends and neighbors. Everyone loved David.  And they loved him for a reason. 

They recognized his genuine lust for life and his commitment to having the best it could offer him, even if he had to pay a price for the privilege.

As a brother, he was certainly not perfect.  I was nowhere near a perfect sister.  Yet we were one another’s permanency.  So long as we were in the world together, we knew that we were grounded in some kind of family.  By 1999, both our parents were gone, but I was not an orphan until David left last February. 

I didn’t want a brother.  I thought I didn’t need one. But I did.

I needed David.

Elegy

It’s an odd thing to be a sister whose little brother has died.

The sister is not the wife who tended to him for 42 years, who devoted her existence to making sure he lived longer than anyone could have predicted.  The sister is not responsible for orchestrating his diabetes care, his two kidney transplants, his quintuple by-pass, or for guarding his limbs with her life so that he would die with most of himself intact.

The sister is not the adopted son, the boy-now-man who needed a father and found in the brother a gently adamant hand that guided him through the tumult of adolescence and into an altruistic career.

Nor is the sister the granddaughter he took in at her birth, whom he nurtured, fed, coddled, and adored while his wife, her grandmother, worked to support them all when he had been forced into early retirement.  The granddaughter who ran to her Poppi whenever her feelings were hurt or her path confused her.

Or the 9-year-old niece who came to visit and stayed till she graduated from college, married a surgeon, attended law school, and settled in the heartland.

The sister is peripheral.  She has no rights to the mourning.  She knows that the wife, the son, the granddaughter, and the niece own the wailing rights.  And who is this sister to suffer from his loss?

After all, all this sister is is the grown-up child into whose hands her grandmother placed this brother when he arrived home from the hospital on his fourth day of life.  She is the person who hardly remembers life before there was this brother, whom she didn’t always like but never failed to love.

It was she who caught him when he fell off the neighbor’s garage roof pretending to be Davy Crockett on the trail of Big Bad Mike Fink. She is the one who ran to get Daddy when little brother climbed a telephone pole in the aftermath of a hurricane and tried to use his new tool kit to fix a live electric wire.  It was she who walked him to school on his first day of Kindergarten, when his hearing was still returning from near-deafness. She stood guard over him while he played with gusto, alone and jubilant, on the playground. When the principal called them in, and he didn’t hear, the principal grabbed his ear to pull him inside.  It was the sister who pushed the woman’s hand away.  “Don’t you dare touch my little brother,” she screamed.  “He didn’t hear you.”

No. She didn’t always like him.  At times she hated him. He could be a tyrant, barging in on her bathroom time, teasing her about her appearance, robbing her of time alone when she wanted to write. Then there was her abject jealousy. He was more popular.  He had a broader grin.  He was cute and funny.  Which she was not.  And he got sick.  A lot. Which meant people took care of him.  That’s why she crawled into bed with him and licked his breakfast fork when he had the Asian flu. It was her turn, and though she nearly died for her trouble, she was never sorry.  For once the brother tended to her and brought her soup and news from the schoolyard.  He found her shivering and brought a cover from his own bed. 

She coaxed him to read, to write, to expound his wisdom.  In his last year in high school, he spent a week with her in her New York apartment working on an essay and a speech he was to give in a competition.  He won the contest and got an A on the paper, and she was not the least bit surprised.  She always knew he was smarter than he thought he was.

The sister’s life did not depend on his, but then she always thought he’d be somewhere she could reach him. He could be a great comfort . . . and he could be a painful cyst. Either way, he was there. She always knew he might precede her into the void. She just never believed it.

So odd to be the sister whose little brother has died.