My family nearly disintegrated completely between when I graduated high school and college, though it is better now than it has been in a long time.
My mom left my dad just before I finished my senior year of high school, though it was no surprise to my two brothers and I. He's never forgiven her. I watched both my grandmothers taken by wasting diseases, and my grandfather lose his cognitive functions incrementally due to micro-strokes. My own father has been hospitalized repeatedly in recent years owing largely to his disinterest in taking care of himself.
My youngest brother did the most damage though.
He developed some serious mental health problems just before he finished high school (he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder a few years later). He went from binge drinking, to hallucinogenics, eventually to heroin. He would go on to take damn near everything of value I owned and pawn it while I was at school. He stole from everyone in the family when he could, regularly threatened our parents, once tried to stab me when I grabbed him by the throat while trying to throw him out of my mom's house.
Despite it all, he always tried to hide his addiction from me. He would get upset with my mom if she mentioned it while I was around. He always told me he was clean, or trying to get clean. We had been about the best of friends growing up. He looked up to me, always sought my approval.
My dad and I had gone to see a movie with my other brother. I was about 3 minutes away on my route home when my dad called me hysterically saying the Dave was dead, and that I needed to come back. He was sitting on the front steps wailing. My other brother got back a few minutes after I did, just after the police and EMT's. We stayed there until around 3:30 in the morning. I drove home and didn't sleep, my parents hadn't been on speaking terms for a long time so it fell to me to tell my mom her son had died. I was 26 and had to tell my mom that my little brother was dead. I'm almost certain it's the worst thing I'll ever have to do (I sincerely hope it is).
That will have been 5 years ago this July. My parents are still largely broken. I haven't actually talked about any of this since it happened. I've internalized, kept my head down, and tried to carry on. I threw myself into the job I have, that I hate.
I didn't ever cry. I almost did, once, the morning after, but it's never really happened.
I still have bad dreams pretty regularly. Not as often as I did, but it's not unusual to be nearly asleep, between conscious and unconscious, and be rattled awake by the thoughts.
This attenuated account is by far the most I've said about any of this. It seems strange that the most devastating event I've endured would go unmentioned, but it's also a function of having hardly anyone in my life who has known me long enough to have even met my brother. I feel detached from my earlier life, and in many ways detached from myself (which was what I was originally intending to write about, next time I guess).
