Knockout punch

I got home from the day's tasks last evening and thought I'd stop long enough to watch a movie. Hadn't ever seen Star Wars Episode III and so I switched to that channel and....I still haven't seen it. Well, I woke up for the last hour or so. Whatever. Nothing about that franchise will ever hit me the way it did when Janice Pecher and I sat in the tiny cinema at International Village in Gettysburg PA and watched the original, reciting the introduction words aloud just two beats ahead of their appearance on screen, so that it really irritated other people in the theatre, because that's what teenagers do. That, and pledging our undying love to Harrison Ford.

But then I stayed awake for another movie I hadn't ever seen, Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood's oeuvre these last 10-15 years makes me glad he's put it all on his sleeve and let us watch. What a story.

But it evoked something very unexpected in me. One of the oldest wounds I've carried in this life. Something about the scene where he disconnects Maggie's air...took me back to the week my brother died. I've talked about this before, and in the last year there has been a comforting sense of reconnection with him as though he was never truly lost to me. But there's a deep wound in me about the days between his accident and his subsequent death, and it's about my unwillingness to forgive.

And all of a sudden I am faltering about writing it down, so this may be the skeleton version. In that last week of Barry's life we spent quite a bit of time at the critical care unit. He never regained consciousness before he died. And we would spend long hours in the ICU waiting room, taking occasional turns going in to visit. My foster sister at the time was a particularly needy person and my father especially was very attuned to this in multiple supportive ways. One of those ways is that during that week, I wasn't ever allowed to go see my brother without taking my sister along. She was too afraid, she said, to go in alone. So if she wanted to go in, I had to go with her and stand there while she was fearful and useless and all contact was inhibited. When I tried to slip in alone, my father lowered the boom on me and directed that I don't go without giving my sister the opportunity to visit since she couldn't go alone.

The time in that room felt powerful and important, and I wasn't prepared to say the most intimate things I wanted to say, or touch or hold my brother with all the whimpering self-absorption in the room. So I never got to say anything that I really wanted to say.

I remember riding home from the hospital one of those nights, with my face pressed against the cool window glass, feeling just quietly sick at heart because I so badly wished I could talk to my brother. I don't know how anyone else in the family experienced it - I've never asked and I don't remember how everyone came and went through those days. I hope at least that everyone else got to say what they needed to say, and that no one else experienced the despair that grew in me as the grains of my brother's life slipped away and I never said one important word.

I suppose I haven't talked about this much (except to therapists) because the adult Peg thinks it unseemly. After all, that week wasn't about me for damn sure. I think I'm not angry anymore, but I have kept my silent distance from my sister all these years since so that I don't test that theory overmuch. I still need that protection. What remains is just a place that's numb and empty and there's nothing especially wrong about that. And when I think of how much regret there is in me around this experience, I realize there are about a million more regrets since. But most of those are regrets because there was an element of my own bad judgment, something that I signed up for that allowed me to be injured or experience harm or loss. Realizing as I do now that the love didn't die with my brother and that it's accessible and real right up to this day 30 years later, I am a little puzzled at how bitterly I have wept over this particular ancient chapter tonight.