I thought I was estranged from my siblings, until 1993, my brother, Paul, had been abandoned by his wife and he was not told why, within a 24 hour period she was gone and he was stunned. He had no idea why she decided to leave him, in fact he thought things were going well for them. He found that she had left him because she thought she was in love with a woman at her place of work. This news absolutely crushed him because he loved his wife very much. He called me one day, I was living in another city, and asked if I would come to Austin where he lived so that I could attend a session with him and his psychologist, a woman.
During this session it was revealed that when I was six years old and he was 13, he had sexually abused me. Now I had grown up with this knowledge and because the abuse was very benign, meaning there was no physical contact of any kind, I felt that this had not in any way disrupted my maturation, instead I blamed all my emotional problems, deservedly, upon my very dysfunctional mother and father. This abuse of all their children is what probably led to my brother's natural curiosity, as abstracted as it was, of sexuality. My father routinely got drunk and had violent sex with my mother, this disturbed my brother quite a bit. But his abuse of me was as I said benign and in point of fact I had no reaction to it at all, rather I thought of it as a game between the two of us.
I became afraid and disturbed only after my brother came to me very shaken one day and made me promise never to allow him to convince me to play the game again, he transferred his fears and guilt to me. So I told my mother, the result was a horrible thing for my brother. My parents sent him to the parish priest who guilted him, a psychologist who guilted him and a result of all this led to a very abnormal adult sexual behavior, that is until he married. His wife was and was until his dying day his soul mate and the love of his life. I expect that he now has a new love in his spiritual life and that would be God.
I am a solitary person, I have never made friends easily and when I do I tend to keep the relationships emotionally distant, I grew up to be a manipulator, and in the family dynamic I was the scapegoat, a very hurtful position. Anyway, in 1993 I left my husband and moved to Austin to try and help my brother who by then was suicidal over the loss of his wife, little did I know I would never return to my husband and I lived in Austin for 17 years. The first three years I hated the town, but gradually I found that Austin was the most glorious place I could be. My brother was a musician there and often I attended his gigs, I made new friends through him that I did keep close and that I loved dearly.
My brother contracted cancer in 2006 and our lives were turned inside out and upside down, we suffered greatly, him from the disease which was diagnosed at stage four prostate cancer and metastasized to his skeleton and bones, and I suffered watching him and knowing that I would be losing him to death within a year or more. I t was the most painful time of my life. About three or four month after his diagnosis a mutual friend of Paul and his ex-wife contacted her where she was living in New Mexico, she had remarried and started a successful business. The friend explained Paul's illness and Barbara (Paul's ex-wife) wrote him a letter asking him if she might visit him the next time she was in Austin, she had a daughter living there and she often came to Austin. Paul was thrilled and excited and gave her permission to visit him.
When Barbara came for the visit, somehow she sensed that Paul still loved her very much and she instigated a sexual relationship with him again, this all happened before Paul was too very ill, Paul took it to mean that Barbara was going to leave her husband of four years in New Mexico and be with him until he died. He was ecstatic, she even mentioned the possibility of them living together in New Mexico because of her business. As it turned out she could not fulfill her promises to Paul and she started to see a psychologist whom advised her to end the relationship with Paul. Paul was, once again, devastated and hurt beyond belief.
Barbara did not stop seeing Paul however, but she did advise her current husband of her activities when she visited Paul, there were no more sexual encounters by this time so Barbara could be honest with her husband Thomas. There was much intimacy between Paul and Barbara in a spiritual way, but this was all Paul could do as he began to show the effects of the cancer in his body.
This time was for all of us a very sad, and exquisitely painful time. I'm sure Barbara suffered too. What she gave him was a beautiful expression of her love with which he could have forever, he never stopped believing that he and Barbara would be married, he never stopped believing that they were truly soul mates, and I think to this day Barbara may also think that they are soul mates.
I believe that Paul is now the sole property of our dear God and that Jesus Christ is Paul's soul mate and that Paul or whatever name God has given him, because if you recall your Bible, Jesus liked to re-name his disciples, is extraordinarily happier than he ever was on this earth. Praise be to God the Father Almighty and in the name Of Jesus Christ His only son our Lord. Amen.