Still Smiling

I realized I forgot a birthday this month, my brother, Bill. He has been gone a long time, but I think he is making his presence known lately. Little things like finding a poster he and my brother Sam painted my mom for mother's day, my nephew taking his picture down from the wall.

I think I was in 6th grade when my parents decided to become foster parents. My mom said that her family always took in her friends that needed places to stay as a kid and she wanted to do that too. So this teenage boy a couple of years older than me came to live with us. It was immediately apparent that this wasn't the kind of kid I would hang out with in school. I recall being at war about accepting him in, and losing my place as oldest. We would get along and then fight just like with my real brothers and sisters, but it was always a more tenuous relationship than I had with my younger sister and brother.

He got in some kind of trouble, I don't really recall what, but the result was he went to live in a group up in northern NM. We would go for weekend visits and I remember going to his GED graduation in Espanola. When he aged out of foster care he came back and lived with us. It was okay for a while, but eventually he started drinking and the alcoholic gene ran strong in his family. One night he was in very strange mood, locked in the room he shared with my brother blasting metal, my parents were out somewhere and I found a bottle of vodka in the freezer and of course mentioned it to them when they got home. The evening ended with him punching my dad, a scuffle and him being kicked out. My mom helped him get set up at an apartment and he still came to family functions. He would straighten up for a while and then he would start drinking again. He started going on binges where he would lose memories of a whole week, doing things like selling his car and having no memory of it. Still practicing tough love, they didn't bail him out and pay his rent when he had nothing left, and because of the past incidents they didn't let him move back in with us. I recall giving him a hard time when I went to go pick him up for Christmas dinner about it. You know in my self rightous 16 year old girl way, overall I was probably a jerk. He ended up living with his paternal grandfather, who I guess was a piece of work himself.

I still vividly remember coming home from a school trip in early January walking in the door and knowing something was terribly wrong. He had decided enough was enough and ended his life. I was pissed, how could he do that to us? He really had screwed up this time. Guiltily, and quietly, I also felt relief for him. Despite the fact that I had always been told suicide was wrong, I had seen his desperate struggle, his fear of never being able to break free of his family curse. I wondered if he was better off.

Watching my mother struggle with his choice, and her feelings of what else could she have done was hard. While she never hit bottom, I knew it nearly killed her. Years later when discussing another suicide, and when I encouraged her to offer comfort to the mother, she said something to the effect that her friend had lost a child while she was just a foster mom. I asked her if she had really loved him any less than us, because I don't' think she did, many people would have given up when he left for the group home.

You want to know something, I can't be sure I ever called him my brother all those years ago. I probably always referred to him as my foster brother, keeping some distance from him. Something that still cuts me to the quick today. I can forgive myself for being what I was, a teenage girl who had this kid living in her house. I don't think I was cruel, but not always as nice and giving as I could have been. Yet it is hard to recall my actions, and not feel ashamed, through the eyes of a more understanding adult.

The grief has found me throughout the years. The first time I went back to the same funeral home for my boyfriends grandmother a few years later, the tears I barely cried at his funeral found their way out. When a girl in college was freaking out about a suicide and grieveing for a kid we didn't even know, I was angry people made such a big deal about suicides. (Bill's was the second in a week that year, we think he partly did it because of the first.) When I went through my own worst depression and was thinking of how I wasn't so fond of life anymore, and there was no hope of recovery, the first hand knowledge of how much pain I would cause my family,helped me from doing anything rash.

Today I feel sad at all the joys in life he has missed, because I am sure if he was here, he would be involved in birthdays, holidays. I wonder what his kids would look like. I would be ribbing him about being old and almost forty.

In a moment of sadness, my mom wondered if being a foster parent was a mistake. I told her no. While it was hard, painful and often not beautiful, it was the right thing to do. Malathionman wrote an excellent post about his kids, who are adopted from the state. His post reminded me of how worthwhile these parents are. Yes it hurts, and the struggles can be awful, the outcomes often not ideal, but can you imagine if he hadn't made that rash mistake? I have hope for Alissa, Austin and Sarah. You may not be able to make all there problems go away by loving them, but you are still blessing them.

Tonight we made had a as scrapbooking event at church the theme was family. One of the best albums I saw had pictures of a now broken family and this quote... “Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.” Dr. Suess*