Brother

I went on and on last night on the phone with my brother about how awkward it is now to be responsible for Aunt Lois, the untenable position we've been put in of trying to respect her Christian Science beliefs and trying to be real--that she can no longer live by herself in her much- too-big-home-for-her home in Palm Desert, that she can no longer drive her gold Lexus, and that she needs professional care--when her belief is that she's just fine, that nothing's wrong, even though she fell at age 92 and has great trouble walking and doesn't know where she is at least half the time...

...I went on and on about how frustrating I find the situation, how self-centered Aunt Lois can be, how ungrateful and confused, how weird it is to be responsible for another's life, how much time it takes to manage her affairs, how possessive I've become of my own time and how the time I spend on Aunt Lois takes me away from my new effort to be responsible only to myself.

My brother listened. He's a really good guy with a really big heart. He's very smart, he's much smarter than I am, he's smart like our mother was smart.  We're almost complete opposites. If we were together in the same room you wouldn't know we were brothers. We don't look alike, our body types are dissimilar, our aesthethics. Almost everything about us is different. We've always loved each other, but from a distance. We seldom talked, maybe 3 or 4 times a year on holidays or birthdays.

We talk almost every day now, or email.  I'd rather talk to my brother than anyone else in the world, other than Lea Ann. We have short talks and long talks. Sometimes I can hear him through the phoneline shaking up a martini while we talk. I ask him if it's me or Aunt Lois who is driving him to drink, and he laughs. This thing with Aunt Lois has brought us together. Everything that kept us apart dissolved when she fell.

I told my brother last night that Aunt Lois is talking again about 'going home,' which means Palm Desert and her old life which is no longer a plausible place for her to live. She needs to accept the fact that she lives now in San Francisco at a Christian Science home with nursing care called Arden Wood, that this is the best she can do under the circumstance and that she's done very well indeed. 

It's a beautiful place, I might go back to Christian Science if I knew I could live at Arden Wood near the end of my life. But she's just staying in her room, she's not reaching out, she's isolating. She tells both of us that almost everyone at her new home is named "Barbara," that there are "too many Barabara's" and that she wants to go to her church in the desert. "It's such a lovely church," she says.

When Aunt Lois fell two months ago and my brother and I became more and more responsible for her life, I started thinking about who and what is important to me in a way I hadn't before. I now have an entirely different value system from the one I had eight weeks ago, I look at the things I do and the people Ihave in my life from a different perspective.  It's most enlightening, I have to say.