September 23, 1974

I haven’t posted anything in almost a year. Last thing I wrote on here was for the 40th anniversary last November 2023 of my father’s death.

I’ve been struggling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for most of 2024. And it only seems to be getting worse.

I have snippets of “happiness” but for the most part, I have been unhappy with my life and the way it’s going and the way I thought it would be for quite awhile now.

I go out and do some things that bring me small moments of happiness, but I have to force myself to do those things a lot of the time. I do the things I enjoy, go to the places that I love, and I am happy while I’m doing it, while I’m there. But when those things are over and I come back home, I retreat back into depression at times – fear, worry, anxiety, hopelessness, lack of faith and trust consume me.

I talk to God on a daily basis. Every day and every night I have conversations with Him. I guess you can call that praying. Sometimes it’s “real praying” – but most of the time, I am just talking to God. Sometimes I plead with Him, sometimes I am begging Him with tears streaming down my face. I do preface each encounter with thankfulness – thanking Him every time I talk to Him for SOMETHING: peace & quiet, which I treasure more and more as I get older; safety; the protection of my family, my house, my cats… It’s funny, but the thing I do thank Him for every night is ELECTRICITY – which, living in Southeast Louisiana in the unbelievably brutal summers (with the potential for hurricanes) is foremost at the top of my list.

I can do ANYTHING – if I just have electricity.

My trust in God and my faithfulness in Him are not 100% true, and He knows that. I am being tested by Him and tortured by the Devil. He is battling me with a fearness that I have never experienced before. I try to read my Bible. I try to not worry. I try to trust in Him, to “let go and let God” – but I am failing miserably.

I don’t know how to completely give it over to Him. Even though I know that’s what He wants me to do. I just can’t seem to learn, to understand how to accomplish that. It’s like it’s physiologically impossible for me. So a lot of the time, I feel like I am losing all hope, and I just want to give up and not care about anything anymore.

What a terrible way to live. Or – NOT live.

I’ve chosen today to post after almost a year of not even opening my blog because of the significance of this date, as referenced by the title. I’ve never put this story in writing before, and I just feel compelled to do so on this anniversary.

So – this will be a long one.

50 years ago today, something happened that affected my family and we were never the same again. Nobody died, nobody killed anyone, nobody went to prison, nobody was addicted to drugs. And yet, it was the worst thing that could have ever happpened to my precious little family.

My brother left home at the age of 18 – and it almost destroyed us.

He did not go off to college. He did not just move out to be on his own. My 18-year-old brother left home to go be with a 30-year-old woman.

In hindsight, at the age I am now (and I’ve understood this for a very long time) I realize what this was. Let’s be frank here: we all know what this was about. I don’t think I have to spell it out. But at the time, I was a 13-year-old kid. I didn’t understand what was going on. It happened so quickly in one evening, and all I knew was that my brother was gone.

My brother had just graduated from high school three months prior. He had been acting very secretive in his comings & goings, prompting my parents to finally confront him.

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but it all came out very quickly and stunned my parents. What I do remember is being in the bathroom when the conversation started between my parents and my brother. And then suddently, things got very heated, and I chose to stay in the bathroom behind the closed door and listen rather than immediately come out.

I remember hearing my brother say, “I love her.” I don’t recall my parents’ exact words, but I remember my mother becoming unglued and starting to yell. My father wasn’t flying off the handle like my mother was, and I don’t remember anything that he said. I seem to recall my mother referencing the fact that my brother was the age he was, that he had literally just graduated from high school, and something to the effect of “what exactly are you doing??”

She was the older sister of my brother’s two friends that he had been hanging out with. And my brother was claiming that he was in love with her.

At the time, it was thought that she was divorced, but we found out later that she was merely just separated. Again, let’s be real here: this was a grown woman, taking an 18-year-old BOY (and we all know what 18-year-old boys are interested in) and molding him into what SHE wanted him to be. I always think about my brother and this woman when I hear the song “Lying Eyes” by the Eagles – specifically the line “he makes her feel the way she used to feel.” I suppose she too was getting from him what she needed at that time in her life.

Regardless, the situation couldn’t have been worse for my Eastern European parents. In all honesty, they handled it the best way they could – which unfortunately wasn’t good. As for me, I was confused listening to what was going on. I didn’t understand what was happpening. All I knew was that, suddently, my brother was walking out of the house with just the clothes on his back.

As my mother was in the kitchen losing her mind over what was occuring, my father was in the living room taking my brother’s pictures off the mantelpiece. SERIOUSLY. It was like the movie of the week in our house. It was literally like somebody had DIED, as far as my parents were concerned.

And as for me? All I knew was that my brother was LEAVING. The living room windows in our apartment faced the street, and we were on the 5th floor. I remember running to the window & sticking my head out – watching, as my brother came out of the building below, walk down the street, turn at the corner, cross 88th Street, and disappear down Second Avenue.

And then he was just – GONE…

That night, my parents went to her apartment to confront this strange woman who had exacted her influence over their son. My mother asked her, “What are you DOING?? He’s EIGHTEEN.” I didn’t get the details of their encounter with her until years later, but my mother told me that Marge (that was her name) made some sort of nasty comment to her, and when my mother took a step towards her (to do what exactly, I don’t know) that my brother stepped between them and blocked my mother’s way.

My mother says that in her mind, my brother died that night.

My brother stayed with Marge at her apartment, which was probably about 10 blocks from ours. My parents were at a loss as to what to do next. Actually, my mother was frantic, trying to figure out how to stop what was happening. My father reacted completely opposite, turning inward, I guess hoping that my brother would come to his senses. My mother called or went to talk to SOMEONE – maybe the police, I’m not sure. Unfortunately for her, when whomever she talked to found out that my brother was 18, she was told, “In the eyes of the law, he’s an adult – there’s nothing we can do.”

I found out from my mother in only recent years that a little while later, she ran into my brother on the street near where he was living with Marge. It was startling and unnerving, and when he suddently revealed to her that they were going to be leaving the city and moving to somewhere in Upstate New York, her only heartbroken response was, “You mean you’re not coming home for Christmas?”

My brother turned 19 that November, left New York City, and went to live in a town Upstate called Waverly where Marge had family.

He never came back to the city he was born and raised in.

What followed was almost 9 years of heartache, trauma, and difficult interaction between my parents. My mother was beside herself – wanting, desperately NEEDING to talk to someone – ANYONE – who would listen to her pain and grief. My father didn’t want to talk about it at all.  Me?  I basically became a recluse for awhile, pretty much until I started high school the following year.  My mother was extremely worried about me, but there wasn’t much she could do.  It would be almost 4 years before we would physically see my brother again after that Fall of ’74 – and he came back for a visit over Memorial Day weekend to announce that he and Marge had gottten married. Definitely NOT the outcome that was expected. I remember my mother taking off her weddng ring and gesturing in my brother’s face with it, saying, “See this? Mine MEANS something.”

My parents encouraged me to stay in touch with my brother in any way possible – which wasn’t easy. Marge had racked up debt on her ex-husband’s credit cards that he took no claim for, so she and my brother were constantly on the run, moving and changing phone numbers – eventually getting rid of their phone altogether. My mother had gotten an extremely vicious letter from Marge soon after she and my brother left the city – telling my mother things like, she would see my parents crawling in the gutter before anything happened to her, and that if anything ever happened to my brother, my parents would never find out. My mother cut off all ties at that point, but told me to try & keep in touch because “some day your father and I will be gone and you’ll only have each other.”

There were a couple of times when I attempted to go see my brother, but I didn’t want to go alone. I tried to set up bringing one of our cousins with me, but that was thwarted by Marge. She then got upset with me because I wouldn’t include her in my letters to my brother, and she threatened to withhold the mail from him. Meanwhile, she sent me two letters – the first one being downright nasty, saying things like “don’t underestimate me, little girl” and telling me to drop dead.  Within a week, she sent a second letter, apologizing for the first.  I suddenly realized that I was dealing with a person who was obviously messed up mentally.  She also claimed some things that my brother was allegedly saying about how he felt about the situation. If my brother felt that way, I wanted to hear it directly from him myself. My response was to send a certified letter to my brother, which had to be hand-delivered to him and him alone and that he had to sign for.

That letter was returned to me – unopened.

My brother did follow up with his own letter, telling me that Marge was his wife and that if I couldn’t include her in communication, then there would be none.  This, after he hadn’t even opened mine.  If he had, he would have seen that I had included copies of the two letters that Marge had sent me.  Honestly, at that point, I don’t know that it would have made any difference anyway.  That was followed by a year-and-a-half of zero communication between my brother and I. The catalyst for me to finally reach out again was the death of one of our cousins. I thought he had the right to know. That was in March of 1983.

In June of ’83, I finally got a letter from my brother, which I read to myself at the kitchen table with my parents nearby. Until I got to the point in his letter where he announced that he was going to be getting a divorce from Marge because he “couldn’t stand the leash around his neck any longer.”

My brother wasn’t that 18-year-old boy anymore…

When I read that part of his letter out loud, I remember my mother clasping her hands together and looking up towards the heavens. All her long-suffering prayers had finally been answered My father, who had held in so much for all those years, gently pounded his fist one time on the kitchen table and said, “Good – maybe he’ll come home now.”

My brother did finally come home that November of 1983. He came home to our father’s wake and funeral.

My brother never talked about his life with Marge.  He did tell us that she abused alcohol and drugs and how she would get high or drunk and go around town threatening people and how everyone in the town “knew her number”.  But he never went into detail about the personal side of their relationship.  He eventually slowly came back into the fold of our family and our community here and there.  I remember telling him once that I was there for him if he ever wanted to talk about any of it.  He never did.

He eventually re-married in 2004 and although my mother and I were shocked and somewhat surprised, I think we both were happy that he had found someone he could spend the rest of his life with and not grow old alone.  That relationship lasted maybe around ten years before things started going south.  I don’t think I’ll ever know exactly what went wrong there.

My brother Emery passed away in his sleep on January 18, 2024 at the age of 68.  He had COPD but also a heart condition that we weren’t aware of, that his death certificate listed as the cause.  The last five years of his life had been filled with stress, anger, and some poor decisions that affected him financially.  He had finally reached a point, though, where he was settled on his secluded Upstate property that he had purchased decades ago.  As his friends told me, “it was his little piece of paradise.” 

50 years ago today, a boy left his home in New York City for the last time.  But I guess he did find that the place he went to wound up being exactly where he was always meant to be.  50 years ago today, I was a confused 13-year-old who just wanted to know why her dearest brother was gone and wasn’t coming back.  So, to return to how I began this post, along with everything else I have been struggling with this year especially, I now add to it the fact that my one and only sibling is truly gone now.  50 years ago today, my little 13-year-old life was in turmoil.  50 years later, my brother has left me again, and my life once more feels like it is turbulent at best.  I find some comfort knowing that my brother doesn’t have to worry about any of the bullshit anymore, all the stuff that he was dealing with that was making him miserable.  I find comfort in knowing that he’s with our Lord – and reunited with the father who, although he never voiced it, was always longing to have his little boy back home.