In the humid heat of July, I was upstairs in our guest room making the bed for relatives coming for a family reunion. Standing by a chest near the foot of the bed, the smell of old woolen blankets packed away for the season brought me back to my childhood bedroom where those same blankets had been kept in my grandmother’s cedar chest. In my reverie I could hear the whirr of the fan on a summer night in the window at one end of the upstairs hall. My memory wandered to the bedroom at the opposite end of the house that became my mother’s sewing room after my brother left home.
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In my mind’s eye, I could see my brother’s dresser, transformed into a treasury of seamstress tools and material. The bottom drawer replete with fabric scraps from every piece of clothing my mom ever made. Middle drawer full of patterns. Top drawer: needles and pins, spools of thread, measuring tapes, scissors, and a small white triangle of tailor’s chalk.
Perhaps that dresser never would have been emptied if my mom hadn’t moved to a condo in a retirement community near me. Perhaps she never would have left her home of almost 50 years if my brother hadn’t been taken in by a rescue mission also near me when he was homeless due to alcoholism.
His stay at the rescue mission was short, however, because he somehow smuggled in vodka. The mission was a dry facility to protect its residents also suffering addictions, so my brother was asked to leave.
With no place left to go, my husband and I picked him up and brought him home with us. At the time, we were living with my elderly father-in-law in an old farmhouse. There was room for my brother, but the situation was less than ideal.
My mother didn’t want me carrying that burden, so she offered to house my brother at her condo as long as she could.
One afternoon he was home alone. Alone because she had gone to Tanglewood for a concert on its wide sweep of lawn with little old ladies from her new cul-de-sac. They had taken the community van, so her car was left in the driveway. My brother, who had long lost his license, drove it to buy a pack of beer and a fifth of vodka. Upon his return, he told the neighbor who waved at him from her porch that his brown paper package contained porkchops.
My husband and I dropped by my mom’s place later that afternoon to drop off some clothes my brother had left at our house. When he saw us, he staggered, trying to hide the vodka in his back pocket, and slurred, “What!”
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Smashed and belligerent, I knew he couldn’t be in that state when my mom came home, so we took him to the local emergency room, completely ignorant of the futility of our actions. They weren’t equipped to admit him. He languished on a gurney in the ER hallway and was back at my mom’s within hours. My mom couldn’t house him except as a short-term guest per condo contract, and honestly, I couldn’t handle his chaos. So began the gargantuan task of getting him housed elsewhere.
I was starting from zero. I didn’t even know the term behavioral health. Every desperate phone call deepened my understanding of the bottomless pit that is homelessness. No one wanted a man in his 60’s, with mental and physical deficits due to decades of alcohol abuse. Not a vet. No interest in being sober. A dead end.
Finally, I took him to another ER at a much larger hospital where, again, he lay on a gurney parked outside the central administrative area for hours. He became agitated and tried to climb off the rumpled sheets. I couldn’t contain him. A burly male nurse came alongside, “Sir, I need you to get back on the bed.” My brother struggled, and the nurse gave him some Ativan to relax, a drug I’d never heard of. At last, a doctor, a woman, came to his side. I quietly begged her to admit him otherwise he’d be on the street.
She registered my panic and whispered, “Go home, honey. It’s gonna get ugly as he sobers up,” which was ironically the answer I was hoping for. She was going to keep him, and that was the beginning of finding him a permanent roof over his head.
Coming back to the present, I stood by the open window, wondering why this traumatic scene had roared back to life on such a placid day in July. Then, taking a deep breath filled with the scent of newly mown grass, I recalled the green lawn surrounding Tanglewood and realized July is the month when the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra comes to that bandshell tucked in the woods of the Berkshires.
Somehow the body remembers, and the mind is always retelling its stories, looking for ways to stitch old wounds.
Last July, I also started going to a local Recovery Church and began to understand the impact of living with a brother who suffered from the disease of alcoholism. A brother I couldn’t connect with, a brother who couldn’t tell the truth because he had so much pain and so many secrets, a brother I never really knew, an enigma, a manifest code I couldn’t break, a person I couldn’t fix, a door I couldn’t open because it was locked from the inside.
Days after being flooded with these memories, the relatives came. We went to the reunion, and I chatted with family members I’d never met. They shared stories I’d never heard, stories providing a fresh perspective on other family members I’d judged harshly.
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All to say, there’s so much more to a soul than meets the eye. Perhaps it’s never too late to tailor our stories to fit a more generous version of past events and relationships.
“Make allowances for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.”
Colossians 3:13 NLT
BTW, you can find Recovery Church Northampton @ https://www.recovery.church/church-location/recovery-church-northampton-ma
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