It’s a funny thing getting to know new people, always the same questions.
“Where are you from?”
“What do you do?”
“Do you have brothers or sisters?”
It comes up every time without fail. I hear the sibling question and I have a visible pause, an unsure pause of how to answer a seemingly innocuous question. You’d think it would get easier over time, but it doesn’t.
I am one of eight siblings. Easy enough, right?
3 stepsisters; 2 half brothers; 1 half sister; a brother and me.
The stepsisters are from my stepfather’s first marriage. The half brothers from my fathers second marriage. I’ve never met my half sister…she was conceived around the same time as my brother, we share the same father. My brother, Andrew, was the first born of my generation and died in a car accident when we were children.
For all intents and purposes I am an only child, raised singly in a household with my Mother and Stepfather.
One would think the easiest response would be to simply state that I am an only child. During my pause, that’s exactly what I am considering… but it feels dishonest. I can’t deny my brothers life, no matter how short – no matter how long ago. I throw the rest of the siblings in the mix to create a diversion, to ease the uncomfortable shifting of the inquisitor. Smoke and mirrors… my most effective tactic.
I figure if we converse about the crazy blended family I am suppressing the sympathetic murmurings of “I’m sorry” and “That’s awful”. I don’t want anyone to feel badly and I know it’s within my control to avoid the subject altogether but it just feels wrong. I weigh it up every time and his existence always wins – I can’t deny my Brother that.
This February marks what would have been his fortieth birthday, seven of his lifetimes have passed since that 5yr old blonde tow-head with the big brown eyes changed our lives forever.
I have spent 35 years imagining what he would have been like, what we would have been like. I have made him play many roles in my imagination (all against his will, of course). He has been my protective older brother, he has been a faggy gay boy, a square conservative married with 2.5 children a dog and a Volvo. Yup, just to get back at him for trapping my fingers in the door jamb and for not letting me play with him and his friends… He has been a stoner that wouldn’t leave the house, a homophobic jerk but mostly he has been my best friend. The one solid fun guy left on this planet that loved me for simply bearing the name of sister.
Self-involved as it may seem, I always made it about me. How my life would have been different… how having an older brother would have made everything easier. In my mind I wouldn’t have felt so alone or quite so lost.
He gave me the false belief that I was invincible… I could go anywhere, I could do anything and I could take risks other people shouldn’t. I convinced myself of this loosely based on the laws of probability. What were the chances that a mother would lose both children to tragic accidents? I pushed the envelope over and over again always with an odd sensation of being protected.
I was angry that he left me so abruptly. Did I say angry? I was pissed! I’d spent my first three years following him around, trying to be like him, doing whatever it took to get his attention. He went to pre-school so they had to send me early because apparently I just wasn’t having it. If he went…I was going too!
We fought over the top and bottom bunk, we fought over toys…he meticulously set up rows upon rows of tiny plastic soldiers and I, being the younger annoying sister, would knock them all over with the dramatic sweep of my arm… And then, he left. Gone.
Even now the grief shocks me. It’s a crashing wave that takes me down with it, for everything I lost; for everything I could have had. He is a phantom… my personal missing limb… I feel the pain of not being able to gesture with a sweeping open palm and announce “This is my brother, Andrew”. I feel the pain of not having the pleasure of tormenting him for being forty first.
I assumed his place in the birth order, now the eldest of the cousins. There were eight cousins and for every cousin there was a sibling…Eifion had Emma, Ben had Lucy and Sarah had James.
Eifion came into the world on the heels of Andrew’s exit. I nominated myself (in my own childish mind) into the role of elder and teacher. He was my boy and I use the term teacher very tongue in cheek… we rode bikes,played together, made up games, bought ice pops in every color and flavor and then spent hours experimenting with a variety of slush cups that inevitably all tasted the same. We stole bottles of woodpecker cider and got drunk in his room, hiding the evidence in his underwear drawer. I was long gone by the time my aunt decided to put his laundry away and he got to shoulder the bust alone.
We tortured our younger cousin, Emma. The most gorgeous, delicate little girl you ever saw. Laura Ashley had Emma in mind when she designed those lovely feminine floral prints and ruffled collars. How did we torture her? She followed us around just as I had followed Andrew. We refused to play with her; we teased her and made her cry… she tagged along anyway. If I twirled my hair, she twirled her hair. If I sucked my fingers for some childhood comfort, she followed suit.
The truth is, I adored her just as much… in a different way.
She was a tough cookie, boy could she fight. Like a little wild cat, scratching and hair pulling, screaming the whole while. She learned her feminine wiles early. She was as pretty as a porcelain doll and when Emma cried, adults melted. We couldn’t compete with that.
I don’t recall what we had done to piss her off, (probably a game of hide and seek where she hid and we didn't seek), what I do remember is Eifion and I lying on the floor, chins propped on hands, watching television. In flew this tiny wild banshee dressed in pink. Her delicate feet were flying as she hauled off and kicked her big brother right in the mouth. Before he could even react to the split lip, her eyes got really wide and she started to cry. As the adults came running to see what the hullabaloo was all about, Eifion sighed and returned to watching the TV. He was yelled at for upsetting his baby sister as she was comforted – all the while throwing covert smug smiles his way.
I loved being loved by Emma.
We shared a bed on sleepovers; she would curl up and wrap her arms around me. She giggled and told me she loved me over and over. My torturous humor was in full force even back then…
“You know what I think of you, Em?”
My memory can still hear her sweet girlish hopeful giggle
“What, what do think of me?”
Then I’d force out a “toot, toot’ fart as I dissolved into hysterics and the banshee went wild! Clawing and scratching her displeasure at my uncouth answer.
I make it sound like we excluded her, we really didn't. The three of us would roam all over Epworth Village. We played in the churchyard across the street making up games and daring each other to do silly things. We rode donkeys on Scarborough beach, we searched for special rocks and shells washed up and worn by years of sand lapping waves.
Eifion and his friends started a break-dancing crew... built ramps for skateboarding tricks that graduated into BMX stunts. Emma and I tried to be a good audience, laughing at their tomfoolery.
I wanted Eifion's Star Wars figurine collection so badly… he had the whole deal, (including the millennium falcon!). We set up zip lines across his bedroom so his collection of action men/GI Joe’s could infiltrate the storm troopers in a sneak attack.
Then...strawberry season. Three cousins let loose in strawberry fields with baskets and instructions to weigh in our pickings on our way out. I don’t know that we ever actually paid for picked strawberries… what I do know is that we would eat as many of them as our bellies could hold and our red stained fingers and cheeks were a dead give away that we weren’t so much as picking strawberries as we were eating them as fast as we could find them.
I’d give anything to bring those days back.
The days before Emma went to boarding school, before we all started to grow up… before we lost Eifion... the same way we lost Andrew.
No Mother should lose a child. No child should grow up unable to reach a woman named mother, so consumed by grief that there is nothing left. No family should lose their two eldest boys and two sisters should not know that same grief.
But, it happens. Sadly it happens every day.
June 1991: I was twenty years old, Eifion…soon to be eighteen and Emma was fifteen.
Emma was home from school for the summer, I was a nanny in Connecticut and Eifion had graduated from skateboards and BMX bikes to a motorcycle he loved to ride all over the flat Derbyshire countryside.
The same day Eifion lent five pounds to a buddy and headed to Scunthorpe, I took myself to a midnight movie. It seems surreal that as I watched Madonna and her entourage try to deep throat bottles, my family was in fracture.
I left the movie theatre and walked along the river overcome with emotion. I was crying and I didn’t know why, I knew I had to call home – right there and then.
From a parking lot in Westport CT, I called my Mother in England.
That’s the day my heart broke into a million fragments and it’s never been the same since.
I mean, you live with it but… there’s the before and then, there’s the after.
In one unstoppable moment I lost my brother and my mother. Him physically and her, well… Fate deals the hand and we are left to play the game. I lost both cousins that day in June 1991.
I’d like to imagine that grief brings a family together, but in my experience it doesn’t happen that way. It sends you to your own corners. The comfort of strangers is easier to take than the comfort of looking into eyes that bear the same brand of heartbreak.
Emma and I have never discussed losing Eifion. It’s a minefield that cannot be negotiated safely. Every once in a while we’ll tell stories or say “Remember when…” but those moments are rare and fleeting.
Intellectually my heart says, gather everyone you love close and cherish the precious time you have with them. Emotionally, I am my Mothers daughter. My heart dictates that in the game of loving and losing, the pain of loss is too great a risk to take.
Yes, I will hang upside down from a bridge in my underwear…but to break down and love people that leave too soon… I don’t know that I am capable of that dare devil feat.
I love fiercely, never lightly and I would give my life to protect my family… but this leaving too soon business has got to end.
My visible pause as a stranger asks me… “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” allows me the opportunity to acknowledge my brothers life. This most simple of questions doesn’t afford the room to pay tribute to the million thoughts and memories that come with it…
Living in my heart: Andrew, Grandad, Aunty Lynne, Eifion, SueB, Jenna
Can y’all stop leaving so soon?
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