I knew him so well

My brother died on a Thursday at the break of dawn just like what he told me many summers ago, he was 54. But I think I lost him years before that, when he started drinking, the bottle did not just took his life, it took away the husband, the father, the son, the friend and the brother that I knew so well.

I was three or four when I came to the realization of this person. I came to him asking him to fix my toy. He was a tower of a man, fidgeting with my toy for minutes until he came to the conclusion that it was beyond repair. He smiled with his huge ears extending further almost like a comic character, and showed me how to play with a spinning top. I looked at him in awe, this is my brother, he will not let me down.

Did I felt let down because he became an alcoholic despite his achievements, became a lawyer, a public servant, a brilliant legal mind? To feel "let down" is to expect something from that person. To be on a receiving end of an expectation. I didn't have any expectations from my brother. I only have acceptance. Acceptance that the person he was outside was not the person he was inside they are two separate and different person and how the two co exist into one being and still managed a spark long enough for everyone who loved him to see this person, boots and all with his alcohol addiction, a speck of a man we all loved, stood by, prayed for, reached out for, made efforts to intervene for him to stop drinking.

The keyhole to this person and situation is love. No matter how hard it is to look at someone we care for submerged into their own addiction, it does not urge us to look away, and if we cannot the see the person we love in his physical sense because it is hidden by slurs, clumsiness, incoherent conversation, we search for that person that we knew and usually we find that in our hearts, irrespective of what our mind would often tell us that he is not worth the time and effort because he refused to help himself and we do not have to be reminded where it will end up to.

Our heart is the ultimate barometer of our attachment or detachment to other people and usually the difference between attachment or detachment is a just one act that will be forever etched in our hearts that gave us this sublime, pure joy or pain. That act for me was when he tried to fix my toy. No matter what he did from then on, I've made up my mind that he will always be my big brother, right or wrong, like in the Hollies song: he ain't heavy, he's my brother.

Only when you are forgotten that you cease to exist.

Learn more about this author, Rose Manila.
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