oh heavenly day

The longest 2 weeks of my life has now gone by just like that. My mind and body is exhausted. After getting back home (as in my sister's home) from our brother's funeral and cremation and eating a bit of food, I crawled into what I dubbed my "little abode" which was really my sister's office and took a much needed nap on my yoga mat-sleeping bag set up, still in my all white funeral attire.

Within those 2 weeks, I reflected on the relationship I and my family had with my brother - the good and the bad. My brother led a quite complicated life. He was in and out of jail, could never hold a job, and seemed to constantly be in some kind of trouble. Back when I lived with him and our parents (when all my other siblings had already moved out), my main gripe with him was his laziness. But I was also getting worried about his growing substance abuse which ultimately - later - led to his houselessness.

As I flipped through family photo albums and phone scanned pictures of him when he was younger for his funeral slideshow, I wondered what life could've looked like for him if he hadn't gone down on the path that he did. My brother was artistically talented and business-minded. Maybe he could've gone to art school and maybe he would've been making a decent living selling his art online.

Throughout his adulthood, he received a lot of help and chances to reroute his life, even when he was houseless. My family to his friends and friends of friends all helped him in some shape or form. But in the end, the drugs deteriorated him. He became more incoherent and unrecognizable. By then, I no longer felt any connection to my brother. I recall, even before he became houseless, during a funeral when he walked in and my brother felt like a stranger to me. It was a weird feeling to experience.

There were good memories, mainly when I was younger, like our family trips and just growing up together with our other siblings with all of our inside jokes. Though, our 11-year age gap and different lifestyles definitely contributed to our lack of closeness. Still, I wished better for him and wished he would one day have an epiphany to get his life together. Unfortunately, that moment never came.

Despite it all, it still hurts to lose my brother. There is some solace in knowing that he is no longer suffering, that he is no longer in pain. And my mom, who took it the hardest, does not have to worry anymore about his whereabouts and whether or not he's ok. She's hurting a lot, but I also hope she too can find some sense of peace.