If C.S. Lewis was right that “The death of a beloved is an amputation” — and I believe he was — I lost my first limb in my teens or early twenties, when my brother disappeared. Corporeally, he still existed, and still exists today. He snored in the bedroom across the hall from mine, monopolized the family computer for hours at a time, and opened and closed the front door endlessly to go outside and smoke, having acquired the habit during one of his early psychiatric hospitalizations. He said it quieted the voices.
My brother, who we’ll call Felix, was impressively fast. He flew around the field — both soccer and track — and was a blur on the ice when he played hockey. He partook in dangerous stunts, throwing himself down staircases for laughs and swinging as high as he could on our backyard swing set before catapulting onto the nearest Fisher-Price playhouse. In his room he blared the Top Gun soundtrack, racing toward the danger zone while wielding a PlayStation controller. But none of his athletic pursuits ever lasted long, despite the efforts of his coaches. Felix had an unusually nervous constitution and couldn’t handle structure or the mere thought of expectations.
He was quick-witted, too, my favorite verbal sparring partner, and the sort of good-natured class clown even teachers found amusing. In the company of his reprobate friends, he sometimes took things a little too far, getting our entire family kicked off AOL a few times due to misconduct in chat rooms. Felix was a benign presence at school and in the homes of his pals, but at home we saw a side of him the outside world rarely did. From an early age he exhibited behavioral problems consistent with oppositional defiant disorder.
Our parents struggled to deal with his outbursts. I wasn’t much older than him and was not a demonstrative child. This was new to them. Early and often, our mother blamed herself more than Felix for his wayward behavior, establishing a pattern that ensured he was rarely held accountable for his actions. She attended parenting workshops, read books encouraging consequences my parents lacked the resolve to enforce, and briefly enrolled him in therapy. When there was a family session, I tagged along but had little to contribute; Felix’s anger was rarely directed at me. His problem was with parental authority.
It was a series of pregnancies our mother had in the early ’90s that really sent Felix over the edge. He enjoyed being the baby of the family and basking in our mom’s adoration. He made it very clear, physically and verbally, that he didn’t want younger siblings, though he adapted peacefully to each new arrival. But his feelings of entitlement persisted and manifested in obnoxious new ways that our mother unwittingly encouraged. He expected everything in our family to be equal at all times, so as not to hurt his feelings. When milder manipulative tactics didn’t work, he played dirty; suicide was a frequent threat.
If someone else received a gift, he expected one. If I was homebound for six or eight weeks following surgery, he didn’t think he should have to attend school, either. When Felix didn’t get his way — and of course some of his demands were too outrageous to be met — he made the rest of us pay. His refusal to be ignored resulted in strife between our parents and resentment on my behalf when we were all punished for his behavior. Our plans were often canceled or modified because of his tantrums. When he demanded to know why I never got in trouble, our parents yelled in unison “Because she doesn’t misbehave!”
His acquisition of a girlfriend at age 15 gave us all a welcome reprieve from Felix’s nonsense. He’d been impervious to punishment before (if he was grounded, he would relentlessly harass our parents until they caved and let him leave), but they finally had the upper hand when the girlfriend entered the picture. She lived 20 minutes away and he needed a chauffeur to and from dates, which was all the leverage required to more or less keep him in line for a year or so, until they called it quits.
Felix was never the same after that. He and his friends had become consummate potheads and presumably tried other drugs together; all but one of the boys from that group ended up with serious mental illness, always with features of paranoia, within the next few years. My brother was the first domino to fall. He’d long been prone to depression but he’d eventually snap out of it. Not this time. He took to bed, where he has spent the bulk of his time for more than 20 years now.
He began hearing voices and attempting to harm himself. There were hospitalizations curtailed too abruptly by insurance companies, and medications that didn’t work or that he didn’t want to take. He stopped his meds once in order to drink with his friends, resulting in his lengthiest hospitalization yet. Dramatic weight gain erased the six-pack he used to flex while urging us to hit him as hard as we could. (I never took him up on it.) His impulse control eroded almost completely, making him a social pariah to former friends. When he wasn’t obnoxiously overactive, he was practically dead. At one point, he was legitimately catatonic.
I wish I could say that I was there for Felix throughout the worst of it, but I wasn’t. Our once-close relationship was frayed by then. He wasn’t treatment-compliant and I was fed up with him putting himself above everyone else. During the short periods when he was functional, he remained alarmingly emotionally manipulative toward our mother. His increasingly dire situation consumed every moment of our parents’ time, which meant I had to pick up their slack. The amount of care I provided for our youngest siblings was so substantial that as adults they’ve described me as more of a second mother than a sister.
It took a few years to bring him back to something approaching normal. Not his old normal, which was gone forever, but the new normal that he (and the rest of us) have lived with ever since. He went through a lot, much of it terrible and unknowable to anyone fortunate enough to have retained their sanity. The medication to which he eventually surrendered keeps him far more docile than Old Felix, which means he’s repaired his relationships with his immediate relatives to the extent that he can. Sadly, I’m the only of his siblings who fully remembers Original Recipe Felix, and the youngest recalls nothing of him at all.
Felix and I used to stay up late together on the weekends, having sleepovers in each other’s bedrooms, reading Dojo Rats books and watching Saturday Night Live or Bruce Lee movies. He was the first sibling I came out to, and he pretended he already knew, admitting years later with a laugh that he had no idea “and just wanted to look cool.” He is frozen in time as a teenager and each year on my birthday says some variation of “Man, you’re old,” looking perennially surprised, and a little skeptical, when I remind him that he was born the very next year.
Though I first mourned his loss two decades ago, it’s in some ways a continual process. Felix will never live independently and has watched as his siblings moved out, built careers, settled down with partners and reproduced. He is the burnout brother-in-law and uncle who stays up all night playing video games and watching zombie movies, who still wears his hair like he’s in a high school rock band, and whose concert tees are generally a couple sizes too small. We were each other’s first best friends, favorite co-conspirators, and near-constant witnesses to each other’s early lives, little of which he now remembers. That’s OK. I can remember for both of us.