Thinking of loss

Since November there's been a lot of loss surrounding my family and I. In November, just after I had left my non-lucrative sales job, my Aunt Judy died of breast cancer that she had been fighting for 2 years. Due to my financial situation, I couldn't go be with my mother for the funeral. But I talked to her almost every second night on the phone.

She was very shaken by Judy's death. She was my mom's kid sister- and they had been very close while growing up. But there were years where they did not talk, due, mostly, to the manipulations of their step mother and their younger half sister.

Mom has been very concerned that my brothers and I aren't very close. We aren't. I'm not much like my older brother; my younger brother, too. They are both very happy, warm, loving fathers to my 2 nieces and nephews- but their families and wives and in-laws keep them pretty busy in the Maritimes, while my studies and work and play have kept me in Montreal most of my adult life.

When we do see each other- I do have so much to tell them- if I can get them alone for a moment. I want to hear them talk about their daily joys with their families, the fierce passions that lead them to wed their wives, their satisfaction in their jobs. The softness of their mornings together. I want to be convinced that if my life became like theirs that I, too, could be happy. Could be peacefully contented.

I want to hear it so badly. I want something akin to their lives for myself- I want to have a home and be loved unconditionally, to have and be an ally to my wife, to have security and raise beautiful, smart children who love themselves and their friends.

But they never say it. When I do try to evoke the discussion, I get nothing but the Disney tour of their lives. We tour from one posed photo to the next.

So, I leave- distant, I fill in the details of their lives with cliches I've seen on sitcoms. I don't call them often when I'm away, and I don't send them birthday cards very often.

My mom had a heart attack last year, followed just recently with my father's cancer scare. I went to be with them for a month. And I saw that my parents are just as distant with my brothers as I am. They try, they try so hard, but my brothers are oblivious to the pain this is causing them.

My mom and dad are worried that once they are gone that we brothers will all end up as strangers- that there will be nothing left of our family- in any real sense. That we will be diminished without the loving, close relationship like she had with her sister.

I wonder if we have all lost out on something already.