metanoia's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Junie This morning on the way to work, I was thinking about my brother. I was wishing I could have had a deeper relationship with him in his later years. I am speaking of Jr. (I called him Junie for many years - the good years), who was the eldest sibling. When I was a child, he would visit the house quite often (he was 22 years older than I) and play fantastical games with me. He was an actor and an artist and would play with me in fantasy wonderlands. Often he would share acting lessons that he was taking and we would "act out" together; breathing, emoting and screaming at the top of our lungs. We would play "opera" where he would sing LOUDLY like a tenor, but nonsensical words, and I would play the soprano to his tenor and sing LOUDLY responding with nonsensical words. Other times we would speak backwards to each other "doing you are what?" or spell everything "w h a t a r e y o u d o i n g question mark... What glorious times we had... He never liked or approved of any of the boys or men I dated or eventually married, and we drifted apart to the point where, in the last 10 years of his life, I felt I could never "reach" him at all when we spoke. He said some hurtful mean things to me, and held his true self from me. I am not sure if he did it consciously, however. His life had become so empty to him, I believe he saw everything as a sad charade; even our relationship. 8 months before he died, he had a stroke. It affected his left side, and he could speak, however the "person" I knew was no longer "there". When I would mention it to others who knew and loved him, they were surprised and said they had not noticed it. Maybe no one else noticed it, but I did. My Junie had finally gone...gone where?... gone away. He lived until November of that year, but I had begun grieving for him much sooner than when his body finally left this world. I began grieving when the boy/man I knew was no longer "there"; I could not even see him through the glass. The stroke "took" him. Everything after that was just part of the grief process. 10:49 a.m. - 2006-01-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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