The beginning was very subtle. A short email from my estranged older brother asking me to clarify something about my wedding 40 years ago. He and his wife had different memories. She claimed to recall being with me as I got ready. He said she wasn’t even there. He was correct. I responded with no small amount of trepidation.
This email was followed a few weeks later by one in which he inquired if I remembered a particular Easter back in Farmingdale, NY, when I was a little girl and wearing a white dress while playing with a bunny in the back yard. I had no recollection.
A little history. My brother and I first mended fences ten years ago during the year my father was waging his losing battle with bladder cancer after many years of estrangement which began with the 2004 election and his aligning with the Swift Boaters. I recall my shock when he picked my daughter and I up in New York City and he had Rush Limbaugh on the radio. We stayed with them for about five days and Fox was on almost constantly. There were numerous political arguments. It wasn’t pleasant.
When my father became ill, I would fly back to New York for two week stints and my brother would come by a few times a week. We spoke on the phone regularly. After my dad’s death, as executor of the estate, he started making decisions I didn’t agree with, which issued in another period of strained relations. By the time my mother passed five years later, we were civil with one another but after her death things moved south again. My younger brother and I both flew back to California the day after the funeral, leaving him with the sole responsibility of cleaning out the house, which was quite large and contained many valuables. I still feel guilty about that; it’s one of those things for which I need to make amends.
The email exchange requesting clarification about my wedding was followed shortly thereafter with a short email about the difficulties he is having coming to grips with aging. I sent along a copy of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which seemed germane to how he was feeling. He loved rereading it and said that the hardest thing for him was to come to grips with the fact that all of his memories would die with him. I suggested he read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. He right away ordered Swann’s Way and struggled with it for a few weeks before giving up. That’s okay, I said. I don’t think I would have been able to tackle Proust at all were it not for the required reading in a Comp Lit class in the 1970s.
I then suggested he consider taking a memoir writing class, told him about how helpful it has been for me, that I’ve taken three of them so far. That unfortunately, all of my writing is on a hard drive which I can’t seem to access from my latest computer. He shared that he once lost a book he was writing: it was there on the computer one day and gone the next. He wasn’t interested in memoir writing, but he thought his younger son might be so I told him about the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City, which offers virtual and real time classes.
In the next volley of emails, he relayed that he had been to dinner at his older son’s and had raved about the beautiful dinner plates only to be told that they had been a gift from me. You always give such wonderful gifts, he said. He also mentioned that the older son was going to take a fiction writing workshop at Gotham. Both a little confusing, I wrote back, because I had no recollection of purchasing plates for the older son but had purchased dinner plates recently for the younger son’s wedding, whom I had thought was the one interested in taking a writing class.
Mother’s Day rolled around. A few days later I received an email from him asking if I had found my Mother’s Day gift. He had sent me a copy of All The Beauty in the World. I hadn’t even opened it as it had arrived with some other Amazon packages which I’d placed on the dresser of my bedroom. It’s the story of a man who quits his job and takes up a position working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
I have found some joy in these interactions. They are all brief, allowing no room for contention. We never touch on politics. He is extremely conservative and I don’t know if he is supporting Trump and I don’t want to. Finding out that my younger brother is MAGA signaled the end of that relationship, although it had been frayed for years.
It’s been rather special, this reconnecting and it’s fascinating to me how much touches upon or reawakens memories. That we both can have different recollections and yet it hardly matters. At the heart of this reconnection is a rich sentimentality, something we lost over the course of our lives but in old age we both seem equally eager to reestablish.
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