Lee and me: The beginning of the end.

And then there was one. The fact that five of the seven that comprised my family were already dead was indisputable. The sixth, my only full-blood brother (the one with the same blood mixture as me) was what I had come to think of as “pretty much dead”. But not dead. It was just him and me. Twenty-five years ago, he overdosed on our father’s end of life cancer, pain-relieving liquid morphine. Yes. He drank it. He hid in the closet, unscrewed the lid and started swilling it with the corpse just a few feet away. I understand why he did it though. We both suffered a ton of trauma in our mixed-up mixed-race family. The legacy of colonialism, genocide, rape, relentless poverty, etc. It was too much to hope one narcissistic do-gooding white savior mom could wrangle our culled together tribe into something amazing. I’d be satisfied with just alive. Bitter? Yeah. It really hurt to watch my whole family die.

Back to my brother. His overdose put him in a coma for four months, nuked his brain …bad. He woke up paralyzed from the neck down. He could talk, though. In fact, he was quite chatty and joked around with the long running staff as well as the new turnover of orderlies and nurses at his nursing home. At first, I didn’t want to visit him. Having unsuccessfully tried to wrestle the remainder of the morphine from his lips (he wrenched it back and desperately sucked down the rest in front of me) rightfully put me off. Plus, I’d just had a baby and had a son about to start preschool. Small children’s needs took priority for a decade.

Besides, based on how difficult it was to keep alive wealthy, high tech, quadriplegics (Christopher Reeves, Steven Hawkins), I didn’t hold much faith in the ministrations of the a publicly funded rag-tag facility he landed in. He had other serious health issues too, such as Hepatitis C, cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes, etc. In other words, I thought for the first decade that he would die at any time. And YET…he lived for twenty-five years. Holy cow! By default, rather than design I became his go-to for all things decision-wise. I really hadn’t wanted that. At times I wished I could have not been so connected to him.

We had suffered the same super awful trauma as children (yes, the very worst; sexual molestation) yet somehow, I ended up having to hold down the family reputation as “the one emotionally well-adjusted child.” This is a direct quote from my mother and a complete lie. And Lee’s designated role as the “bad seed” was also a lie – he was a deeply wounded soul.

That said, I used to be so jealous that he got to screw up over and over. Blatantly skipping school, using drugs, staying out all night and collecting bootleg albums (courtesy of our middle brother who worked at a famous record shop off Telegraph Avenue) by talented soon-to-be-dead people and first edition comic books. He was cool and had fun. I was relegated to secretly huffing rubbing alcohol and feeling horribly guilty when I couldn’t pull straight A’s at school. Well, as it turned out, the neighborhood moms looked out for me (too late to prevent some of the worst stuff, but still critically important in the long run), while precocious young Lee ran with the older more seriously deranged Berkeley 1960’s guys.

Some of those dudes gave him acid when he was fourteen. Lee had a bad trip courtesy of my perpetrator-family-men (that’s a whole long story in of itself for another time) …and ended up jumping headfirst from the top of a telephone pole. After hours in surgery, I was brought into the ICU to help rouse him to consciousness. It was known that he and I had “a connection”. That time, even though he broke his neck and smashed his elbows to smithereens, he learned to walk again and go on to more notorious misadventures and crimes.