Be Real, Be Loved, and Belong

It seems appropriate that my brother passed away only days before Halloween. As a child, he loved to dress up as someone else, and as an adult, he always hid who he really was, saying what he thought you wanted to hear, hiding his true emotions, revealing as little as possible of his inner life. Perhaps it was his fear of rejection. Certainly it was part of masking his struggle with alcoholism.

Since he left this earth, I’ve been consumed with the details of his death.

When my husband and I went to the rest home where he’d spent the last thirteen years to clean out his room, I was not surprised to find empty bottles of vodka secreted in every pocket of every coat in his closet—enough to fill a husky garbage bag. By the time we were done, all we had to bring home were pictures of his children, a denim jacket requested by his son, and the watch his ex-wife requested for said son. Not much to show for sixty odd years of life.

And yet the whole time we were cleaning and purging, both residents and staff stopped by to express their condolences, saying things like: your brother was a really good friend, or he was like a father to me, or I’ll really miss him, he was so kind and generous, he knew how to make people smile and laugh. Their words in a major key were totally dissonant with the minor key he’d always played in my life.

Putting together a eulogy to be shared with these fellow rest home residents, I began with the crisis point in my brother’s life when his alcoholism had stripped him of his job, his family, and a place to live and how the Catholic rest home had welcomed him as one of their own. Since then, people at the rest home came to know him as the bingo meister, or the guy hunched over the intricate puzzles in the day room. They knew him as the cat whisperer of the home’s pet, Miss Willow, and as the backyard gardener, who also acted as the dreaded cigarette butt police.

I wrote some things they probably didn’t know about my brother, I suppose to illicit their sympathy. Like me, he was born out of wedlock in the 1950’s when illegitimate children were given away as quickly as possible. I was in a foster home for nine months before I was adopted. My brother was in two different foster homes, one abusive before he joined our family as a frightened little four-year-old clutching a red tricycle. Much later I learned he chose our family over another only because my parents said he could bring his tricycle with him.

It took so long for my brother to be adopted because, in between foster homes, he lived with his mother who couldn’t bear to give him up. But finally, at a point in time and culture when it was impossible to keep him, she dropped him off at the adoption agency and said she was going to California and would come back for him. When he first slept in the little room next to my parents’ bedroom, I sometimes heard him sobbing himself to sleep. I learned much later that when my mom would go to comfort him, he’d ask her how far away California was.

I wrote that as kids we were never close. We fought over stupid stuff like whether to watch The Flintstones or The Patty Duke Show. He was a boy, I was a girl, and we had our own set of friends. He loved board games and would play Monopoly for days with the little genius who lived across the street. One Christmas, he got a minibike, a kind of baby motorcycle, he used to take to the pine barrens at the end of the neighborhood to race around a sandy track he made with a pack of other boys. As a high school kid, he was on the track team and was a wrestling champion. One summer he worked on the dairy farm of a family friend and loved it.

My brother could sail a boat and paddle a canoe. He made canoe trips down the Mohawk with friends, camping along the shore. He rode his bike sixty miles north into the Adirondacks and spent the night in the wilderness. He could play a guitar and was in a band with his buddies. He married his high school sweetheart. He was a great guy!

However, I confess when his alcoholism really took hold as a young adult, I didn’t like to be around him. He didn’t feel safe, so I saw him less and less.

Once he was at the rest home however, we spent lots of time in the car together going out for lunch or shopping for treats and necessities, and we talked as we’d never talked before. We talked about the past when he was a locksmith. At the height of his career, he was the chief locksmith for Albany Med, the biggest and best hospital in the tri-city area. When he got fired for his drinking, he had his own locksmith company. He bought a camper and enjoyed taking his little family on adventures to Atlantic City and the like. He had a pool in the backyard for his kids, and he was the go-to fix-it guy for all his neighbors.

All this to say, writing his eulogy made me realize even if his alcoholism had headlined every neon memory associated with his name, there was so much more to the man who lived and died in the small room across from the nursing station than his alcohol abuse.

I guess, if I really believe that God’s grace can never be earned or lost, I can’t measure his life as the sum of all its parts, computing his positive qualities and deeds against his negative like a simple math problem.

So let me add this, a few days before he died, never being “religious,” he asked the hospice nurse for prayer which surprised me. I came the next day and prayed a good-bye to a brother who could no longer open his eyes or speak.

After he passed, one of the nurses took me aside to tell me my brother died with a smile on his face, his eyes open wide.

I can only hope it was because he saw the angel sent to carry him to his true home with God. A god willing to adopt any soul who reaches out unmasked about his or her desperate need to be loved just as they are, desperate for a permanent place to belong, longing for the savior who has known them fully even before they were born into this scary, broken world haunted by death.

So, my friends

be real,

be loved,

and belong in Jesus.

He is the way home to paradise.

Jesus: “Don’t get lost in despair; believe in God, and keep on believing in Me. ² My Father’s home is designed to accommodate all of you. If there were not room for everyone, I would have told you that. I am going to make arrangements for your arrival. ³ I will be there to greet you personally and welcome you home, where we will be together. ⁴ You know where I am going and how to get there.

Thomas: ⁵ Lord, we don’t know where You are going, so how can we know the path?

Jesus: ⁶ I am the path, the truth, and the energy of life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. ⁷ If you know Me, you know the Father. Rest assured now; you know Him and have seen Him. John 14: 1-7 (VOICE)

Cover photo by Luke Southern on Unsplash.