What's your why?

Yesterday marked five years since my older brother, Jay, left this planet.

We had a complicated relationship rooted in a disconnection that oddly served as our connection. We were polar opposites on the political spectrum, on matters of race and equality, on the validity of climate change, interests, personality, and on and on. He turned all of my shyness, my fear, my skepticism of others on its head with his charm, wit, humor, and chattiness with his friends or with the guy in front of him in line at the convenience store cashier.

There was no better Dad to daughters than he, a characteristic unveiled in him that I never thought could be part of his persona. At his wake, people kept coming into the sanctuary in droves, and I was floored. I had no idea how beloved he was in his community, among his tribe. He really was everyone’s best friend.

He was arrested for an OUI a decade before his death. He called me then, asking for $1000 to help with the legal fee. He blamed the entire incident on the police officer that pulled him over a half mile from his house.

When I visited rarely, he fuelled his conversation with Leinenkugel’s, stocked to the brim in the extra fridge in his man-cave. That habit didn’t change until a few weeks before his death.

On a mild Saturday afternoon in December, my niece phones me. I stepped outside into a brilliant snow-reflected sun to hear her say, Dad has cancer. Five weeks later, after a miserable course that included seven biliary stents, two bouts of biliary sepsis, hepatic encephalopathy, two rounds of chemo, three weeks of radiation, jaundice-induced pruritis, and constant nausea, he died.

Jay lived with many demons in his head. He was externally happy-go-lucky but riddled with self-doubt and regret. He was physically abused as a child, and that on the heels of undergoing open-heart surgery when he was five years old. He was a bed-wetter and had nightmares about anesthesia well into adulthood. He never delved into healing of that enormous burden of trauma. To admit to any of it, I think, threatened his unsteady emotional house of cards too much.

He made his own treatment plan, and those basement fridge beers were the mainstay.

Jay became addicted to an addictive substance. The addictive substance was a great medicine for what ailed him and he relied on it because he didn’t know that there was any other way through. He didn’t know that he could live a life of greater peace and ease, and that he had everything he needed, within him, to find freedom.

He didn’t know, fundamentally, that none of any of this was his fault. None of it.

I share some of Jay’s demons, but I have come to know that self-doubt is not my fault, that addiction is not my fault, that my thoughts can be re-wired, and that my emotions, all of them, all of them, are safe and normal.

This is forever work and I continue it now, in part, for Jay.

What's your why?