Member-only story
I Stopped Judging My Brother When He Came Home In A USPS Box.
It was a cold January morning. The grey skies outside matched the heavy gloominess I felt inside. From the corner of my eye, I caught the USPS truck slide right by the kitchen window. My heartbeat quickened and I raced out.
I accepted the 14" x 10" box from the mailman and signed for it. I gauged it’s weight, 10–15 lbs of substance that once was my brother. A whole life of moments and memories now whittled down to a bag of ashes in this little box.
My brother was 6 years older than me and it’s sad to say that I don’t even have a single childhood memory of us ever playing together. I don’t know if it was because he was a boy and I was a girl or the age difference, but our childhoods were like two ships passing each other at sea.
As we grew, distance further separated us. We grew up on 2 different continents to pursue higher studies. He was away in boarding school and then later at college. It was the pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-everything era. We kept in touch through real letters and very rare phone calls.
It would be a long 7 years before we would meet again. His annoying little sister was now a grown married woman. We met as strangers, each unaware of the painful and pivotal moments that had shaped the other during those missed years.
But we were siblings, we had lived together under the same roof for years, shared the same upbringing, lived with the same crazy relatives, kept mum about the same family secrets and had the same set of whacky genes.
Like two halves of a ven diagram, our lives would forever be merged with each other no matter how vast the distance or time.
We slowly reconnected where we left off but it was not all smooth sailing. We had our disagreements and frustrations with each other.
My brother suffered from low self-esteem, a byproduct of his childhood. Like invisible handcuffs, it held him back in everything. Those self-fulfilling prophecies are not an urban myth. They will fortunately or unfortunately come true.
He became what he was told. You will amount to nothing.
I wanted him to look at his reflection in the mirror, and see what I saw- infinite goodness and…
