The Living Blaming the Dead

Posted on December 22, 2002 in Anger

When my mother was here the other night, she mentioned that my brother felt good because he’d “settled things with his father” before Dad died. And she added, he wondered if I had.

I didn’t reply. A few moments later, when she talked about the troubling decisions she’d made when she cleared my grandfather’s house when he died, I told her that I wasn’t ready for her to die yet. I wasn’t ready to go through that.

It’s not the dead who give you the most problems from unresolved questions. It’s the living who try to pin things on the dead and who won’t take responsibility for their actions who bug the hell out of me. Mom and I are doing OK. It’s my brother who keeps weasling about on this topic.

As the official family nut case, there seems to be at least some back room discussion about what made me the way I am. It’s all being blamed on Dad now, especially by my older brother who I feel deserves a larger share of the blame than my father does.

My mother also asked me why I kept the secret of his breaking my arm with a baseball bat for so many years. To be quite honest, I don’t know, though one suspicion is this: my brother, who is six years older than me, had a privileged position in the family. I think the reason why I didn’t report it is because I didn’t think I’d be believed. They were all the eldest in the family and I was the youngest. My father, actually, was the most generous of the three towards me as a younger child. My mother and my brother considered me duplicitous and evil.

When my mother got involved in a dispute that I had with my brother, she would rule in his favor. My brother knew this and called on her often when we had a fight. There was always the implicit threat of violence, secretive, and petty belittlements. I don’t really like talking about it, but to understand me, I guess I must try to partly put this out even if I couch events in generalized sentences.

Snatches of events:

• He loved to engage me in games which were beyond my level, saying that I was “smart enough” to master them. He’d play with me until I got good and then stop playing that game for another. Robbie, you see, loved an unequal challenge. More on this.
  
• Once when I was beating him badly in a game, he called mom in and got her to declare that I was cheating. This is from the guy who, if the dice did not suit him, rolled them again.
  
• Once he told me that because he was in charge, that I had to take off all my clothes and go outside. He locked the door.
  
• He used to overpower me and use my hand to hit the dog, a form of play that ended when the dog bit him. Again, he took full advantage of his six years.
  
• We won’t go into much detail about the scene he made at my wedding rehearsal dinner, except to say that he managed to turn every single member of Lynn’s family off to him. For the first time in his life, he made the mistake of playing to an audience which would not buy his bullshit. Since then, our encounters have been limited.
  
• I gave my mother my cat. Once I came home to see her at the same time as he was there. I started to play with the cat — roughhousing as the two of us were used to doing (she’d grab my hand lightly in her claws and gnaw at the knuckles, never drawing blood). “See,” he said. “She hates you.” “No we’re playing,” I replied. “No, she hates you.” I stopped and went to my room. After a few minutes the cat left the room where my brother was and curled up with me.
  
• This is the brother who told me that I don’t feel like a brother because I don’t booze up.

That’s all I dare remember for now, but as long as I have to hear about this bully and his theories, as long as he’s not willing to start apologizing without demanding “equal time” from me, I don’t want to have anything to do with him. It’s pretty slimey, I think, that he’s trying to blame my current sickness on Dad. Dad was no saint, but in some ways he was a better man than this brute was or ever will be.

The cost? After my mother dies, I won’t have a family.