Saturday 22 November 2014

My brother

There's so much I could say about my brother (and I probably will).  Today I noticed on Twitter - yes, since I persuaded him to start writing a blog
duringthemeanwhilst.blogspot.co.uk 
he's gone way over the top public - anywaaay, I saw that he'd written that this is the first Saturday he has spent in hospital since the day he was born.  And I remember it well.  I saw him when he was about two hours old, all screwed up and wrinkled, with a shock of black hair which defied the laws of gravity for some time.  I fell totally and irrevocably in love.  Forever.

Oh,  I resented him too.  I'd been an only child for fourteen years.  The centre of my little universe.  Suddenly I was cast aside, only really noticed when 'the baby' needed taking for a walk or, embarrassingly, to the clinic (embarrassing because everyone there thought he was mine).  He's been embarrassing me ever since.  And I him - isn't that what little brothers are for?

We talk (text actually) every day, sometimes (as now when I am 4500 miles away) for hours, me in an early morning, warm cosy haze in bed, far too early to get up, and he in his hospital bed, late morning, waiting for drugs or doctors or treatment, sometimes fearful, always always brave and smiling.  I am in the wrong place.  I want to be there at his bedside.  But maybe it's okay - when we are together we laugh.  Pretty much all the time.  So maybe we'd laugh out his cannulas.  Maybe it would hurt him.  So for now we must rely on texts and blogs.  

But I'll be there in a few weeks.  I can hardly wait.  Then they'll have to drag me away.

2 comments:

  1. what can I say about my beautiful sister other than that I love her to bits: always have and always will; and that we are just like one whole person. our parents may have had thir shortcomings (well, not may - they did) but they made us the better people we are :-)

    I sometimes wonder if our respective spouses truly get our relationship, with lots of shaking of heads over the things we say to each other and the way we behave together I have my doubts!

    Oh, and that I couldn't have been happier had she actually been my mother!

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