When I'm sick and I spend a day at home I find myself alone with my thoughts, which is never a place I should remain for any extended period of time. It's part of the reason I try to surround myself with distractions, but those occasionally fail me, and I find myself waxing wistful about old times within my head. Some of these memories are an endless source of amusement, and to that end I am always glad I've spent the time going through my personal vault, but there are dark corners in there - unavoidable shadows that creep up the deeper you poke around, until you hear that tell-tale click of a latch on some unseen door and you know that you're stuck there for a while, playing some sick game of tag with your own feelings of guilt and remorse.
It's not my fault that my brother fell ill with cancer. It was not wrong that I survived and he did not. It just is, like a force of nature - no positives or negatives intrinsically attached. But leaving him to go back to work, returning every weekend to find a bigger divide between the two of us as he went from bad to worse...those are choices that I made. I'm the one who slowly started to question if I should even bother coming back at all, wondering what good it did, and contemplating just abandoning the entire situation like something you see and then try to forget. The efforts that I made during that period essentially amounted to being a presence; a figure in the background moving out of the way every half hour so that my parents could help Sam throw up again.
When Sam talked to me, he was annoyed, pushing, for quite a while. His demeanor changed somewhat when my parents made him realize what he was doing, but then there were other problems. There was the time Sam forgot who I was - by that time the cancer had spread to many parts of his body, including his brain - and asked me when his brother was going to show up, like I was some kind of nurse. I really wanted to escape that time, to just make the whole thing a bad dream and wake up. But it was also an important moment. Sam was a creature of routines his entire life. My weekend visits were expected, if not almost required for his sense of normalcy. He forgot me at that time, but he remembered later.
If I have a sense of guilt about anything, it was the end times, when I wasn't there at all. Two weekends in a row I missed going back. One was so I could spend time with friends - a break I felt like I needed to prevent me from going insane. And then the next was so I could move. Neither were reasonable excuses for not being there in hindsight.
When I think about my brother, I have such a sense of joy at all the ridiculous, irreverent, and funny things that we did together. But there's also a melancholy because of the pain he endured. And remorse that I wasn't there for my best friend; somebody I love very much to this day. My parents were there with him, and held him - literally held him - at the very end. I was putting dishes in a box. And that is something that will reduce my very emotional core to a shambles every time I think of it, no matter where I am or what I'm doing.
--Lee
