Ann C. Averill Author

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.

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.

All summer the West burned, the South succumbed to hurricanes and Covid, and the East Coast sobbed with rain and flash floods, as if nature itself was manifesting all the emotions whirling through me after my brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

When I talk about my relationship with my brother, I’m apt to say it’s complicated. After a lifetime lived with alcohol as his master, my relationship with him has been reduced to little more than a healthcare proxy and financial fiduciary to keep him from being homeless.

I wish I could say I feel more compassion for him now that he’s a toothless, emaciated, old man with pain in his gut, but if I’m honest, I resent the burden of handling his affairs, as well as the anxiety, regret, and disappointment his drinking spilled all over my life.

Recently, a friend challenged me that although I preach the sovereignty of God, I wasn’t trusting God with the brother he chose for me. Yes, I believe God is in control. Yes, I know I’m being selfish, but how do you change your feelings? They just are. And at that moment, I didn’t care.

I was so tired of the shadow of death. I needed to get off the merry-go-round of doctor appointments and trips to the Emergency Room, so I put on my pajamas in the middle of a Sunday afternoon and flopped on the couch to watch junk TV.

I clicked to a remodeling show called Save My Reno where in twenty minutes, a master carpenter and designer team up to help homeowners remodel ugly, dysfunctional rooms into beautiful spaces they couldn’t produce on their own.

As I watched uninterrupted, I recalled a time before TV remotes when my brother and I argued over what cartoon to watch. I clicked the dial to my show. He clicked to his. It was the battle of the dial until he left the room and returned with a kitchen carving knife. Needless to say, we watched his show, and even before he started drinking, even before I was old enough to understand the pain he carried, I had reason to fear instead of trust him.

You see, I was adopted as a baby, and spent the first six years of my life as an adored only child. My brother was four when he joined our family and had already been in two foster homes, one abusive. Of course, I didn’t know this as a child, but I was acutely aware of the new stranger who slept in the little bedroom next to my parents, and cried himself to sleep.

On the outside our family was the perfect Leave-it-to-Beaver home, but on the inside, I could never connect with him. We developed separate sets of friends, and by middle school, he was sneaking alcohol to his friend’s tree fort at the end of the street.

My thoughts turned back to the TV. As I clicked through YouTube, I stumbled upon a fabulous street busker, Allie Sherlock, singing “We’re Far from the Shallows Now.” Far from the shallows reminded me of the summer our family sailed a small boat to Martha’s Vineyard. It was a foggy day, and when we were out of sight of land, my father got out a chart, put my brother’s twelve-year-old hand on the tiller, and taught him how to navigate to the island we couldn’t see. I was amazed my brother could do it and terrified that my father had put the steerage of our tiny vessel in his untried hand.  

My binge watching concluded with a movie about the real life events behind the creation of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Apparently, Charles had a complicated relationship with his ne’er do well father because, after Dickens senior was put in debtor’s prison, Charles was sent to work as a child in a boot blacking factory. According to the movie, Dickens originally intended his short book to end with Scrooge meeting justice, for being a miser. Then his young house maid urged him to show both Scrooge and Tiny Tim a happy ending.

This reminded me of all the awkward holiday meals I spent with my brother and his family while we were both young marrieds back at our parents’ home. My brother would arrive already quietly inebriated, and crawl off to the basement or the garage to have another, then another beer to avoid his alcoholic wife’s relentlessly ragging. Finally, assembled at the table, I couldn’t eat fast enough to end the whole ordeal.

After a long day of escapist television, I finally went to bed where my brain and heart often do their best sorting.

Next morning, in that blurry space where dreams still make sense and daylight has not fully crept over the window ledge, I realized I was a Scrooge unwilling to forgive my emotionally crippled little brother for all the damage his alcoholism did to our family dynamic, and I asked God to renovate my heart in this final fluid space where my feet can’t touch the bottom.

Since my junk TV Sunday, I’ve talked to a hospice social worker about my complex feelings for my brother. I told her so much more than there’s space for here. She assured me, all my emotions are normal. We can carry both negative and positive sentiments at the same time, and neither invalidates the other. She told me this is all part of the grieving process, a process of resolving my relationship with my brother that will probably continue long after his death.

I share my experience because I know I’m not the only one, dealing with drinking, disease, and grief over all that alcohol can steal from those who consume it and those who try to love them.

You may be at a different stage in your relationship with your loved one and their addiction, but, I’m thankful for this last chance to show compassion I couldn’t conjure on my own, for the brother God chose to be mine.

So, I encourage you dear readers with this. Now that he’s an old man close to the edge of the cliff, his once distant children have gathered around him with visits and phone calls as never before. He seems at peace with his disease and its outcome. We’ve shared old family photos of the Leave-it-to-Beaver elements of our childhood.

And yesterday, sitting next to my brother, quietly doing a puzzle together, we rejoiced that I found the top to the mast of the ship sailing into the sunset. And he found the lighted window in the distant mansion at the head of the bay.

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21 (NIV)

Cover photo by Dikaseva on Unsplash

Remember playing in the neighborhood as a kid? Where were you in the pecking order? The bully or the bullied? It was complicated wasn’t it?

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Summer 1962. Every house is manned by a mom. Every kid is roaming the neighborhood looking for something to do. I ride my turquoise Schwinn over to my best friend Linda’s which means I’ll have to play with her older sister Laura too. Laura is only a grade ahead of us. She has her dad’s bushy curls cut short while Linda looks like her pretty mom. Most important, Laura has a secret power to somehow make you do stuff you don’t really want to do. It’s like she has a dog whistle and you’re the dog.

Linda and I want to make up commercials in the empty TV console in the basement, but Laura says let’s ride bikes. We ride over to Helen Thompson’s. Helen, Linda and I want to play in her woodsy backyard, but Laura says let’s play badminton. Helen gets the racquets out of the garage. Linda and I want to be on the same team, but Laura says that’s not fair. I have to be on her team, and Linda has to be on Helen’s. We play in the sun till Laura says let’s get a drink. It’s like Mrs. Thompson can hear the dog whistle too. She offers us not only Tang, the astronauts’ favorite, but Pecan Sandies, Laura’s favorite. It’s like the whole earth orbits around Laura.

We go down into the cool basement to play house. Laura takes all the clothespins, the clothesline, and some old blankets to make her house. Linda gets the space under the stairs.  Helen, beneath the workbench. I get the corner by the oil tank. 

When Helen pulls the red wagon for her car, Laura grabs the handle and says, “Thanks for sharing.” 

When Linda takes some canned goods off the shelves for her kitchen, Laura says, “Hey, I already called those for my grocery store.”  We all know she didn’t, but no one crosses her. And we all know where we’ll shop.

By the time Mrs. Thompson serves us tuna fish sandwiches and potato chips for lunch, huge thunderheads have formed. Heat lightening rumbles in the distance. My legs stick to the red vinyl seat of the dinette set.  It hasn’t started to rain, but we know it’s coming. 

After eating, we head upstairs to Helen’s room over the garage. Laura herds us into the huge closet under the eaves. Laura asks Helen to get a deck of cards, and she fetches. Linda and I squish under the sloping ceiling. Helen crouches below the dresses.

Laura sits upright by the door, shuffling the deck. “What shall we play?”

Linda raises her hand like we’re still in school. “Crazy eight?”

Helen cracks a smile. “Gin rummy?”

Laura deals. “How about strip poker?”

I didn’t know how to play, but it’s easy. When you lose a hand, you have to take off a piece of clothing. In shorts, blouses and barefoot, it doesn’t take long before we’re all sitting in our underwear, all except Laura who has only taken bobby pins out of her hair. I’ve never seen Laura use a bobby pin before. But she says they count, so they count. 

That’s when the thunder cracks. We all jump and instinctively get dressed. It’s the break that overrides Laura’s secret power. A cloudburst pounds the roof, and we pour out of the stifling closet. A breeze blows through the bedroom. Helen smacks the western window shut and mops up the deluge with a dirty sock. Lightning flashes, and we flow downstairs. I’m sick of Laura. I wish she’d fall off the face of the earth.

I blast out the door and hop on my wet bike. Muddy spray pocks my legs. Who cares? I want to get home where Laura can’t boss me. My kickstand scraps the dry concrete of the garage, and I look back at Laura peddling hard in the opposite direction. Linda eats her wake.  Why did we all have to strip when Laura didn’t reveal a freckle? What is she hiding?

As a child, I never guessed Laura could be afraid like me. Afraid without her beautiful sister, no one would want to play with her. Me, afraid if I didn’t put up with Laura, I’d lose her sister as my friend. How ironic, Laura’s fear turned her into someone nobody could like. Mine made me not like myself. Both of us aching for a friend we could trust. How do any of us break free from the horrible gravity of our own solar system?

Now I know, it’s the overwhelming, never ending, perfect love of God that frees both bully and bullied from having to win the approval and affections of others.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Looking for God in all the Wrong Places: Coming of Age and Coming to God During a Cultural revolution

Cover photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

I’ve always known I was adopted.

But in 1963, at age ten, headed home from a summer vacation at my grandmother’s farm, I learned, for the first time, I had another name when I was born. Here’s the story.

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At the end of August, we’re headed home from Virginia on the new interstate, but it’s still five hundred miles in our maroon Ford station wagon with no air-conditioning. We leave the Blue Ridge Mountains, climb through Pennsylvania coal country, cross the mighty Susquehanna, and stop at a gas station in Port Jervis. I’m lounging in the way back in a nest of luggage when my dad gets out and talks to the gas station attendant who pumps our gas, checks the oil, and washes our windshield with a squeegee.

My mom gets out too, herds me and my brother to the grimy gas station office and obtains the keys to the restrooms. We walk around the side of the building and my mom unlocks the one toilet Ladies room. I go first while she hands my brother, still sleepy, his cheek imprinted with the pattern of the vinyl back seat, the key to the men’s room.

There’s only two and a half years between us, but I’ve always known I was adopted as a nine-month-old baby, he as an instant four-year-old. I envision my parents adding water to a package of sea monkeys and voila, Bruce. We look nothing alike. I’m a strawberry blonde. His hair is dark brown and curly. Because his skin never burns, he calls it fire-proof.

I carefully place toilet paper on the seat before tinkling, and a thought pops into my head. When my brother was adopted, he was already Bruce. He got to keep his name and the red tricycle he had at the foster home. I’m named after my memaw, whose real name is Annie. I must have had a different name when I was born. Surely, I wasn’t baby X for nine months.

I explode from the rest room, “Did I have a different name when I was a baby?” The question pushes itself out of my mouth before I understand all I’m asking.

My mother hands me a stick of Teaberry gum, snaps her purse shut and says, “Yes, do you want to know what it was?”

Something about her face makes me slow down. When we’re all done with the restrooms, I let Bruce beat me to the way back, so I can sit in the back seat closer to my mom.

As my dad starts the engine, I realize there’s more to a name than just the name; it’s everything behind it. What does it mean if my name is Darlene or Lulu? What kind of parent names their kid Denise or Ermintrude? What if my real mom is mean like Mrs. McGinty, the playground supervisor? What if she has a moustache or wears a hairnet like the cafeteria ladies? What if my real dad has a temper like Bill the bus driver who tells us kids to sit down and shut up or we’re going to be penalized, a word that sounds an awful lot like one I know you’re not supposed to say?

Still, “Yes, I want to know my name,” comes out of my mouth. Instinctively I want my mom to tell me I’m a long, lost princess like Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia, an old movie I watched on TV with my Dad.

But before my mind can fully prepare for a former identity, she says, “Your name was Leslie.”

“Leslie,” I voice my long-lost name, the l’s curling off my tongue like a melody.

“Do you want to know more?”

I swallow and nod.

“Your mom was petite like you, and you have your dad’s coloring. Do you want to know more?”

I nod again, mesmerized by facts only now crystalized.

“They met in college.”  She continues. “He was an engineering student. She was a music major. They weren’t married, so they couldn’t keep you. Your father’s family was Irish Catholic, and your mother was from old New England stock. That’s all I know. Oh, and your grandmother was some sort of journalist.”

Old New England stock makes no sense to me. Stock is the broth my mom makes by boiling down beef bones and chicken carcasses. My mind moves on to Irish Catholic. All I know about Ireland is that’s where leprechauns live. Linda and Laura, my best friends, are Catholic. That’s why they can’t play on Wednesdays after school because they have to go to something called catechism.

Bruce interrupts my train of thought by asking about his parents.

My mom tells him, “Your mommy was very pretty. In fact, she was a model, but your daddy already had another family, so they couldn’t get married, and keep you. Your grandfather was a full-blooded American Indian who owned a hardware store.”

This last part, the Indian part, is what grabs my attention. I look at my brother in disbelief as if I’ve been living with Tonto, from The Lone Ranger, and no one thought to tell me. And I can’t picture Geronimo behind a hardware counter.

I cycle back to Memaw’s name, Ann. I lean over the front seat to ask my mom, “What does Ann mean?”

“It means grace.”

“Like a ballerina?”

“Yes, but also like an unexpected gift from God. Your other grandmother was named Grace because she was born after her older sister died as an infant.”

I sit back. “Do you know what Leslie means?”

My mom turns to face me. “Sorry, I don’t.”  She snaps her purse open and hands me a pad of paper and a dull pencil with a smeared eraser that won’t erase. “Why don’t you and Bruce play Hang Man.”

I draw the empty gallows and six blank spaces for the letters of my secret word.

My brother looks over my shoulder and guesses the vowels one by one. I write an E in the second and final spaces and an I in the next to last space. He tries a string of consonants before he’s swinging from the hangman’s noose.

When I fill in the blanks with Leslie, he says, “That’s not fair. It’s a name.”

He’s right, but I don’t care. It’s my name, and I needed to write it down, to try it on. Am I the same person under another name? My mom said she doesn’t know the meaning of Leslie, and neither do I.

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This is an excerpt of a memoir I’m working on that portrays how God has carried me since I was conceived and adopted me into a new identity in Christ solely by his grace.

Cover photo from Boston Public Library on Unsplash