Short Essays and musings about family, philosophy, death. Read online

Corb's Bad Luck

  My brother's wife recently passed from this life to the next. God bless her on her journey. It has been a long and winding road. My brother's children can be comforted always in the fact that they did their best in the midst of a hard situation. God bless all. Although it was well past time, everything has a season. 

  To be honest I don't know what to say but I have the need to say something. I guess I have to share my brother's story to really spell it out. My brother had always been secretive. Why? Just his naturebut a little sinister too. Our family came from a long line of bootleggers who just skirted the law. We broke the cycle. The bootleggers, right out of a reality show, were on my Mom’s side, her brothers. Dad was never even a possibility of entering the business. Now, my brothers, a couple of them anyway, possibly were tempted.

  As brothers, as we say in the South, were thick as fleas. My wife would say rather sarcastically, "one would sneeze and the other would be there to hold the handkerchief." With the loss of his wife, 94, and her finishing her last days in a nursing home, sad; but before then,  there is a story. My brother was a long time bachelor with no idea of marrying as far as we knew. When my older brother, the patriarch of our family,  discovered the seriousness of a possible romance, we decided to visit what we thought might be his soon to be wife. Our visit did not end well. She didn't care for our interfering and was not reticent in telling us. It really was none of our business. Irritated, my brother Raz said, "I will tell you this. We will knock our brother in the head, throw him in the trunk of the car and you will never see him again." He would have done it. What we came to discover is that they had already married. This did not "set well" with my older brother but he got over it. 

  They were quiet a couple. My brother was handsome: slim, a white mane of hair. A striking couple. For several months, they had a good life and although initially the brothers were somewhat skeptical, it passed. Here is a "funny," in an odd set of circumstances, we discovered that the wife was ten years older than my brother. Not a big deal if you are 20 or forty even, quite a big deal if you are seventy. What to do? Nothing. In telling our brother about her real age, he made light of it. 

  Jet setting, enjoying a type of became their lives. It was the order of the day for our brother and his wife. The brothers, 4 of us, rejoiced with him in this new good life. Enter tragedy. The wife had a massive brain aneurism. Death was imminent or so we thought. No. She lived. Then came another one. This is it. She lived but became an invalid. Loss of her legs, wheelchair bound. My brother became a full time caretaker. I would visit and leave totally down in the dumps. His wife seemed to adjust to the new confined life. She was a voracious reader. Her daughter, from a previous marriage, would send her boxes of books and she would spend her time reading or watching TV. 

  My brother did an admirable job. They employed help. A couple which could serve as characters in a novel  themselves, became additional caregivers. The wife became more helpless. Our brother, mired in an environment with no real stimulus, went downhill himself. Regardless of our views, he was devoted. No, he would never put her in a nursing home. However, it is what happened. Very sad. Now she has died and we don't know how to react. God bless her on her journey.