"...we see through a glass darkly...", or, What Do I Really Know?

Heavy rains pelted us in the chill of the early afternoon the day we scattered my brother's ashes onto his favorite railroad track in a small East Texas town. It was the final request he had made of his rail-fanning buddies, but it seemed rather surreal to me. Waiting in the rain, I couldn't bring myself to ask myself why he had died so young.  Instead, I wondered, "Why had he lived?" 

I knew that life had lied to him. His death at 59 was a mockery; he was more than just a social misfit weighing about 400 pounds. Mike was a very loving man and had a heart which included care for many other people who were considered outcasts, as he was.  He was genuinely perplexed as to why his family could hardly stand to be around him, but knowing his complicated past as I did, it made sense. Sort of. Beginning in childhood, Mike had been scorned by the two women who raised him, and in later life, by the woman he married. He had lived in severe loneliness and in despairing health, never recovering from a lingering staph infection a few years after undergoing the heartbreak of his unwanted divorce. 

Pain had always seemed to seek him out. Born prematurely in the early '50's, he had suffered brain damage that was nearly impossible to diagnose back then, but more than impossible to ignore. For all the charm I saw in his baby pictures as he played with his beloved trains, I knew also that he was a difficult person to be around. In spite of this, when he left home after graduation, he had made a place for himself in the Submarine Division of the Navy, where he had earned two masters degrees, an honorable discharge with full retirement, and enough money to invest in the train shop of his dreams. Brilliant but emotionally maladjusted, his life was an enigma to me:  I was conflicted about him and still am. I wanted to be close to him, but he seldom bathed, never brushed his teeth, and asked difficult favors of me. Similarly, he ran off everyone who tried to help him.  I did not know how to relate to him and I could not be there for him until the end was near.

However, I knew that I owed him my life. As a seven-year old, he had rescued the three of us children just before our schizophrenic mother nearly succeeded in killing us. Even so, I could never figure out how to have any kind of relationship with him as long as I knew him. Visiting him every night after work as he lay unconscious in the hospital the last month of his illness, I could think of few reasons for his life. I was very purpose-driven in those days, and I had long despaired over the apparent loss of his potential for a good life. Only later was I to discover how short-sighted my assumptions had been, for after his death, we found that he had a world-wide network of friends and customers focused around his train hobby. He had helped countless "little brothers" in the Big Brother program, and had a huge heart for messed up kids and many other causes.  He chose not to have children of his own because he knew that he could not be a good parent.

He had often shared with me about his disappointments about life, though, and, like the mourners around Lazarus' tomb, I had grieved with him. I was disappointed that his lack of social skills had disenfranchised him from most people and had kept us from a normal sibling relationship. I wondered, not for the first time, "How can people live all of their lives without anyone around to know that they have lived and died?" I knew that many did, and that my own natural mother had.  My heartache led me to wonder, "What happens to people who go through their whole lives, invisible, as Mike had been, without touch, without kind words, without anyone to play with and without anyone to witness the dailiness of their lives?"  

How could I even begin to understand my brother's pain? I felt close to despair; I would never know how profoundly he had suffered, but I suspected the extent of it, and it was like looking into a black hole of human misery.  Mike's was the pain of being thoroughly misunderstood and abandoned by life.  

He deserved to be mourned, to be missed. He had always deserved to be celebrated, but that also was not to happen for him. Mike was a person. That was reason enough to have known him better.

I think that I "see through a glass darkly" when I see at all.  But my brother's death reminds me to look outside of myself in a way that makes others feel more visible; if I see them clearly enough, as Mike did, they are even luminous.  

I can almost see my brother glowing...