Are You Guys Brothers?

     Today is my younger brother’s birthday and my gift to him is not to make contact – no call, no card, and no-email message. His birthday will ultimately be far happier as a result, I think. Sometimes, the kindest thing we can do to a person is to leave them alone.

     When my father was alive, my brother Tom and I would often comment on how hard it was to find a Father’s Day card that didn’t express sentiments we didn’t have. Dad could be difficult to like sometimes. Not sending a card to him did not feel like an option. He wouldn’t have understood, and the family drama that would have been sparked would have been far-reaching and long-lasting. A good looking card with a blank space for writing “Happy Father’s Day, Dad, Love Brian and Ray” was sufficient.

     My brother and I are both at the same point in our lives with each other today. Once very close, we are now estranged, and the fear of family drama is no longer sufficient incentive to send a card that expresses a sentiment I don’t feel. In fact, it is the fear of stimulating family drama that prompts me to leave well-enough alone. My brother is happy in his life without a relationship with me. Why remind him, especially on his birthday, with guarded words on a blank card, that we are no longer close friends?

     Loose ends tend to bother me more than they do Ray, which is why I’m even writing about this now. I don’t like unfinished business in my life. I want to feel free to move forward without the thought that there is someone from my life who has been hurt or angry because of our relationship in the past. I tried, for instance, to locate on-line the male freshman from my college days in the late 1960s to apologize for fumbling through our first, and regrettably only, sexual experience. I wanted to make sure that he was not permanently scarred by my confusion, but I can’t find him. I also once wrote a letter to the Episcopal priest who was my first romantic partner. I have wanted assurance that he was okay and had forgiven me for breaking up with him and coming out publicly, thereby alerting his parishioners to Fr. Dan’s sexual orientation. He has never responded.

     But the freshman from Marquette University might now be heterosexually married and not want reminders of his homosexuality. Hearing from me might scar him in a way that I never did in the past. Fr. Dan might well have found a niche for himself that has helped soothe whatever anger he felt in the past. Hearing from me might be irritating, thus having an effect opposite to that intended.

     As I get older, I have learned better how to live with loose ends. I am coming to accept that when I die I might not be on the best possible terms with everyone whom I met in my life. With good input from Ray and from the Tao te Ching, I am learning that sometimes the most loving thing to do for others is to let them be.

     It makes me happy to hear from mutual friends how content my younger brother is with his life. I have never wished him anything but joy. Though we both share warm thoughts about sharing a bedroom and friends throughout our childhood, and though we both, while watching Brothers and Sisters on television, may have romanticized longings for a close family relationship, the truth is we push each other’s buttons, and we’re both far more at peace in our lives apart than we would be if we tried to maintain contact.

     This can be true not only with our family members but also with formerly close friends. The other night as we were walking through Provincetown on our way to dinner with our best friends, Tom and David, we ran into our former best friends. We haven’t seen each other since feelings were hurt on all sides at the time of their wedding a few years ago, and I have dreaded the moment when our paths might cross. I’m still hurt and angry about how I feel Ray and I were treated, and I don’t want to be friends again. But I also hate those loose ends, and I sincerely want them to know how much I enjoyed them and our friendship when it was good. But re-engaging them in a letter or on the street will only, I believe, create more pain, so the loving thing to do for them and for me is to wave, smile, ask how they’re doing, and keep walking.

     We’re all on the same life journey – me, Tom, Ray, my first sex partner, Fr. Dan, and our former best friends — facing the same obstacles to self-realization and actualization. An enormous part of living is negotiating relationships and managing feelings. For me, what seems to work best is to send loving thoughts to everyone, even those whom have hurt me, and especially those who I fear I may have hurt, but to keep walking forward without looking back and without distracting others with my need for closure. Our truth may set us free, but expressing it to others might well have the opposite effect.

     Right now, I hope my brother’s computer is filled with e-mail messages of love, his phone is overflowing with recorded renditions of “Happy Birthday,” and he is surrounded by dear friends who make him feel safe and valued. My gift to him is to think loving thoughts about him and to smile in silence.

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   Things Change, Like It Or Not

     Thirty-some years ago, the comedienne Lily Tomlin had a very popular character named Ernestine who was a bossy, snoopy, disrespectful, and cranky telephone operator. When dealing with unhappy customers, she would snort with derision and remind them that they were dealing with the phone company, an institution that didn’t care about the customer’s complaint because AT&T was “omnipotent.” Though she pops up from time to time in Lily’s work today, Ernestine retired from her switchboard “duty desk,” hopefully before her once powerful employer was no longer considered to be omnipotent. Today, it’s simply not the same AT&T. It’s been broken up, sold, changed, and must now compete with other communication giants. Things change, even those things like AT&T that we believed never would. That has certainly been true in my life.

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