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He died of natural causes in 2007. When he died, I didn't feel grief; I felt relief. To say we were not close is an understatement. My entire life, he was the bane of my existance. His inability to get it, whatever "it" was and then his anger and tantrums when everyone around him got it, made us all, family and friends, walk around him on eggshells. You never knew what would set him off and having been set off, there was no reasoning with him. And when he did calm down and you asked him what had made him so upset, even if it was days later, he would get upset all over again like whatever it was had just happened; so we learned not to ask which meant none of us knew what the original problem had been.
He was always this way. My mom tried to get help for him, but nothing seemed to work. I knew something wasn't right, but I was shut down whenever I tried to talk about it.
My experience with my mother, aunts, uncle and my friends' parents was that members of The Greatest Generation were secret keepers and by that I mean that they just didn't talk about things the way that Baby Boomers and subsequent generations do. They were very much "what happens in this house, stays in this house" and they didn't really talk about serious problems with their friends and certainly not with their minor or young adult children.
Recently, I came to realize that my brother was probably an undiagnosed autistic person. This has caused a seismic shift in the way I think about him. He was suffering, too. When I was a kid, a teenager, a young adult, I never heard the word autistic; none of my friends had and perhaps, my mother hadn't either. Maybe if that generation had been more open with each other, we would have been pointed in a direction that might have helped us all.
I remember my aunt, after overhearing my cousin and I discussing our menopause, saying to us that she wished she, my mom and their friends had felt comfortable enough to talk about things like that. "None of us talked about it and we just suffered in silence, wondering if we were going crazy." That's how they were about everything, especially things that caused embarrassment or shame.
This realization made me miss my mother terribly. Some of you may know she passed away September of 2018. If she were here, I would want to discuss it with her because I don't think she ever reached that conclusion. I do believe in an Afterlife, and in that Afterlife, I believe one becomes her best self and you know the answers to all the questions you had in this life. I believe that she and my brother now know why things were the way they were. I'm fortunate enough to have realized it in this life.
Because I did, I went to the VA cemetary yesterday where my brother's ashes are interred to wish him a happy birthday and to let him know that I finally understand that what I perceived as his willful meaness and hatefulness was truly out of his control and I'm sorry that no one figured out that he was autistic.
May he continue to rest in peace.
He was always this way. My mom tried to get help for him, but nothing seemed to work. I knew something wasn't right, but I was shut down whenever I tried to talk about it.
My experience with my mother, aunts, uncle and my friends' parents was that members of The Greatest Generation were secret keepers and by that I mean that they just didn't talk about things the way that Baby Boomers and subsequent generations do. They were very much "what happens in this house, stays in this house" and they didn't really talk about serious problems with their friends and certainly not with their minor or young adult children.
Recently, I came to realize that my brother was probably an undiagnosed autistic person. This has caused a seismic shift in the way I think about him. He was suffering, too. When I was a kid, a teenager, a young adult, I never heard the word autistic; none of my friends had and perhaps, my mother hadn't either. Maybe if that generation had been more open with each other, we would have been pointed in a direction that might have helped us all.
I remember my aunt, after overhearing my cousin and I discussing our menopause, saying to us that she wished she, my mom and their friends had felt comfortable enough to talk about things like that. "None of us talked about it and we just suffered in silence, wondering if we were going crazy." That's how they were about everything, especially things that caused embarrassment or shame.
This realization made me miss my mother terribly. Some of you may know she passed away September of 2018. If she were here, I would want to discuss it with her because I don't think she ever reached that conclusion. I do believe in an Afterlife, and in that Afterlife, I believe one becomes her best self and you know the answers to all the questions you had in this life. I believe that she and my brother now know why things were the way they were. I'm fortunate enough to have realized it in this life.
Because I did, I went to the VA cemetary yesterday where my brother's ashes are interred to wish him a happy birthday and to let him know that I finally understand that what I perceived as his willful meaness and hatefulness was truly out of his control and I'm sorry that no one figured out that he was autistic.
May he continue to rest in peace.
