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Ever have an unsolved mystery in your family?
Some mysteries are never solved….
My oldest brother passed away this week. His house is six blocks away from my own, but we only spoke once in the last 40+ years. We were not enemies-we were just strangers to each other. That is how the poor soul wanted it.
When I was nine or ten my twenty-year-oldest brother abandoned his new wife and new-born infant to literally disappear. No one knew why. No one knew his fate at the time. No one ever heard from him again. For four decades we had no clue whether he was alive or dead.
A few years after the advent of the all-mighty Google, my sister and I found a property he had purchased in his own name. The address was just six blocks from where I had recently moved to-in a city far from where we both grew up.
He was alive...and living just a few blocks from my house. It couldn’t be true. I jumped in my car, raced the six blocks to his house, and then parked across the street not knowing what to do. After about twenty minutes he came outside to go to the car.
Yup, it was my brother. I hadn’t seen him since he was twenty, he was then sixty, but he had the same exact face as in all the old photos. I couldn’t get out of the car to go talk to him. I was too overcome with something or another.
My sister flew up soon thereafter on a visit, and we both decided to drive up the street to his house. We caught him outside walking his dog with someone who turned out to be his girlfriend.
There followed ten minutes of him calmly and politely denying he knew who we were, who our parents were, or that we had ever lived in the same house together.
Baghdad Bob.
I was ready to leave, but my sister doesn’t take no for an answer. She detailed each event in his life growing up until finally his girlfriend, who was as surprised as us by his response said, “that’s your sister and brother, I’ve heard you mention their names before.”
“Oh,” he replied in the same calm and polite voice, “I remember now.”
Okay. We exchanged phone numbers.
As my sister and I drove home my own formerly life-long obsession with finding out the whys and wherefores of his disappearance totally evaporated. “We’ll never find out exactly what happened. He’ll never tell us. He doesn’t want any contact with us. Whatever his hurt is, it is too deep and permanent.”
My sister valiantly tried for months to establish some type of relationship, or at least civil contact around holidays. Nope. Wasn’t interested. Was never rude or unfriendly, just not with that program whatsoever at all.
Now, some ten years after that only contact with him, he has died. My brother. My neighbor. He has died a stranger, but that is exactly what he wanted for himself. Somewhere along the line, for reasons no one in my family can fathom, he decided it was better to be a stranger than to be known.
Perhaps it remained a mystery to him as well as to why he abandoned his own child and family.
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