The Last Ones Standing

My beautiful, funny, brilliant Aunt Julie died last month. She was 99 1/2, and in the last weeks of her life she was clearly ready to go. I have been, I think, mourning her loss for the last six years, as age and dementia took her ship further and further out and away from the shore where I watched. In the end it was more about relief, and managing the sorrow of the rest of my family. There will be Aunt Julie stories told for years, and she will live on with us.

But this leaves my brother and me as the last ones standing in our family. No one else in the world knew our parents the way we did (and even we are not immune to the parallax effect). We were there when my parents were at their best, we had an unparalleled series of adventures in their wake, and we had a front row seat for the slow, unhappy decline of their marriage and my mother’s health. My brother and I were there for all that. But more than knowing our parents, my brother and I grew up in the family that they created. And no one else knows the lore and culture of that family. Just us.*

I was thinking about all this because of a piece in the New York Times about sibling estrangement.  It’s about the pain of being estranged from someone you spent the first part of your life with. In the article, some of the siblings could not understand what had happened. Others viewed being estranged from a sibling as the only way they could protect themselves. The causes? Wildly various: In some cases a dispute over inheritance. In other cases behaviors that once seemed small grow greater until one sib simply cannot cope. Sometimes there is a history of abuse–by a parent or by one of the siblings–that has made it impossible to reconcile. I cannot quarrel with any of the choices these siblings make. They know what they know, and they are taking care of themselves and their families.

But you lose something when you cut a sibling out of your life. My brother and I are in as different as two humans can be, politically, philosophically, attitudinally. And yet we get along pretty well. This is deliberate. No one else was in the room where it happened, as it were (it being our childhood). There are lots of things we remember very differently (that parallax effect), but the thing is, we remember. And we can talk about them. Sometimes we will run aground on some point where one of us looks at the other in wonderment: “don’t you remember that?” or “no, that’s not the way it happened.” But it doesn’t become a fighting issue for us, because aside from valuing each other as interesting humans, we value each other as the last witnesses.

When my brother and I are gone no one will know what my mother’s voice sounded like, or the odd tuck my father would get in his jaw when he was trying not to laugh. I remember things from the vantage point of being the older one, and a girl, and to some extent his guide through the world. Clem remembers things from being the younger one (he remembers things I told him about TV shows we watched that I have no memory of; he appears to remember me being a far better Big Sister than I do).  And for every one of my “Raised in a Barn” anecdotes I’m sure he has one that I don’t recall, or that is told from his very different vantage point. Which is, in fact, great.

But we’re the last ones standing. My impulse to tell those stories probably comes, a little bit, from the fact that when we’re gone, all that lore and culture will at best be second hand stories our kids tell. If they tell them. Of course, my kids already have their own stories about the lore and culture of the family they grew up in. And someday the two of them will be the last ones standing.

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*My husband and I rewatched A Hard Day’s Night the other evening, and it occurred to me again that whatever sometime interpersonal issues those four guys from Liverpool might have had, no one else in the world could understand what it was like, being in the center of the huge creative and cultural maelstrom that they created. Just them. I think that even before John Lennon’s death they had begun to realize how unique that relationship was, and I believe the two remaining Beatles recognize it now.