My younger brother passed away on September 7, 2023.
Grief is a deeply personal journey, one that often brings up complex emotions and memories.
For me, losing my younger brother was a journey through a turbulent past, marked by strained relationships and circumstances beyond our control.
Our story began in a family defined by dysfunction, with a mother who sowed division between us. From the earliest years, it was evident that we were bound by blood but separated by an invisible barrier. I could vividly recall my mother’s fervent wish for a son when she was expecting. She asked me to “pray for a brother” and I obliged, hoping to grant her wish. My mother’s favoritism towards my brother, simply because he was a son and I a daughter, left me with a lingering resentment and jealousy. It was a toxic environment that festered for years.
At the age of 21, I made the difficult decision to marry, leave home, and start a family of my own. That is what a good girl from a Chinese family does – leaves home to get married! My brother was just 16, and our paths diverged in ways that I could never have imagined. We lost touch, and the chasm between us grew wider with each passing year. Then, I relocated overseas with my own family and the chasm grew further.
It wasn’t until 2016 that we finally reconciled. Unlike me, he was very close to our parents, to say the least. It is very sad that he has always been a sickly child. When he was three months old, he contracted asthma through an inexperienced au pair, and our young mother (at that time) I was mostly left as a “latchkey kid” each time my parents rushed him to the hospital or to go consult a physician.
I have no idea whether he was constantly ill when he was doing his undergraduate studies in the UK for four years. By then, I was estranged from the family and living my own life, raising my own children with new added responsibilities.
By then, life had taken its toll on my brother’s health. He had suffered a stroke in 2011, followed by a heart attack in 2016. Yet, our attempts to rebuild what had been lost were met with resistance. Whether it was the protective nature of his wife or the emotional distance he had cultivated, our connection remained fragile. The truth was that we were two people who had grown up in the same house but had lived vastly different lives.
There was a palpable divide, an unspoken barrier, and a shared history we couldn’t quite confront. I grappled with the question of what to say to him, how to bridge the gap without dredging up the painful memories of our tumultuous upbringing.
Recently, my brother passed away in the ICU at the age of 58. It was a loss that left us all devastated. In the wake of his passing, I felt a profound sadness, not for what had been but for what might have been. The regret was not over missed opportunities to mend our relationship, but rather the deep understanding that some divides run too deep to ever fully bridge.
I came to accept that time might have softened the edges of our strained connection, but it couldn’t rewrite our history. Some wounds, inflicted in the crucible of childhood, never truly heal. While I mourned the loss of my brother, I also mourned the loss of the chance for us to ever be as close as siblings should be.
In the end, his passing serves as a stark reminder of the importance of healing and reconciliation while there’s still time. But it also teaches me that sometimes, despite our best efforts, some chasms remain unbridgeable, and the only thing we can do is carry the profound sadness of what might have been in our hearts, along with the love we always held for a brother, even if we couldn’t express it as we wished.
Time has a way of healing old wounds and life goes on. Here is to you, my dear brother, Patrick. May you find eternal peace with our mother. Till we meet again.
I love you.
