I see your horror, and raise you...

Everyday love

I wake every morning and there’s a text waiting from my brother. Nothing involved, just a funny gif, followed or preceded by “Love you.” It’s such a small thing, really, this daily exchange, and yet it fortifies me for everything that comes after.

We are ten years apart, my brother and I, which mattered for most of our lives. When his life was first starting to implode in high school, I was in kindergarten. When I was in high school, he was trying to manage adulthood and get clean and sober. He was better at the latter than the former, but his struggles with the former were more visible to me, easier to compare to my own striving. I was working steadily towards graduating, whereas he’d dropped out— of high school and then the military. I was driving back and forth to school, jobs, and eventually the ten hours to and from Indiana for college, while he was still riding the bus because on the rare occasions he had a vehicle he wrecked or broke it.

When he would lecture me about respecting him as my elder, I silently rolled my eyes so hard my eyeballs nearly rolled out of my head. But I did it silently, because his temper, despite his sobriety, was still fearsome. He wasn’t significantly bigger than me physically by the time I was in high school, but he loomed large in my mind, his rage when he got going, larger still.

After college, I moved out West for nearly a decade and we barely spoke directly for even longer. He didn’t attend my wedding or ever meet my ex-husband, though we were together for almost fourteen years. When he got married finally, my marriage was imploding. So, though I knew his wife, I didn’t attend their wedding, either.

We might have gone on like that forever, living at a physical and emotional distance from each other, only theoretically connected. I expected that to be the case. But then our dad died. I read a loving, but unsparing, eulogy at his memorial service. I had written it line by line in my head while driving the six hours back home, my kids snoring softly in the backseat, after the epic race to be there in his final moments.

After the service, sitting around our parents’ dining table trading stories about our dad, my brother spontaneously offered, “You and I had very different parents, I’m realizing. When I was small, Mama and Baba were young and vibrant and adventurous. I thought they hung the moon. But those weren’t the parents you had, and I’m sorry for that.”

I was stunned. Never, in all our lives together, had I felt like he actually saw me as anything other than a screen to project himself upon. Never had he seemed to understand I was a whole person, with strengths and challenges that were different, but just as legitimate, as his own.

My heart, long hardened against him, cracked open. Only a little. But it felt like a lot in that moment.

Over the decade since, we’ve been slowly, steadily, moving towards each other. We tried to spend an Easter together with our respective families about three years in. It got disrupted by family drama, making it less of a homecoming than either of us had hoped. But we tried. In our own imperfect, halting way, we tried.

When our other brother died another six years in, we texted back and forth, trading bits of news and commiserating about our lack of sadness at his passing. Maybe it’s weird to bond over being similarly unmoved at someone’s death, but it was a truth we shared. And sharing truths matters more, even, than the truths themselves.

When Trump got elected the second time, community, belonging, and love felt in short supply in my life. I knew I had to do something to feed them or I wasn’t going to survive. So, I started texting about a dozen people— my mom, my brother, my kids, and my best friends near and far— every day. Nothing big most of the time, just, “Good morning, I love you.”

I told everyone they didn’t have to respond. This was my practice, not theirs, necessarily. But my brother immediately made it a conversation, reaching out some days even before me. At first, him texting me instead of the other way around felt (just a little) like a friendly, sibling competition. Who’d manage to be first? Who’d have the funnier thing to offer? But quickly it became apparent, my brother gets up early, a fact about him I’d never known. Most days, I turn off my alarm and immediately open the thread to see the gif that has arrived before I’ve even gotten out of bed. I am bested.

It’s just little, daily texts. Not a big thing, right? But somehow, it has changed everything. My oldest ended up in the ICU just a few weeks after the inauguration. My brother texted me to check on us both every day. His estranged wife died this spring. He asked me to come to her memorial and have his back. Without hesitation, I said, “Of course.”

He texts our mom, who doesn’t respond because she can’t hear her phone, and then he texts me in the night. “Should I go check on her?” he asks. “I’m worried.”

“She’s probably fine, but if you’re worried then, yes. Let me know.”

A half hour later, there he is again. “She was fine. Sound asleep in front of the game in her chair.”

”Thanks for checking on her,” I respond. “You’re a good son and a good brother. I love you. Good night.”

A few weeks after his wife dies, he calls me in the middle of my work day and I’m immediately on alert, worried that something else horrible has happened, but no. He just wanted me to know that he’d arranged to receive her Social Security death benefits and then had to name someone to receive the combined benefit if he became unable to care for himself. Not wanting to choose our elderly mother, he chose me. Meaning, if or when the time comes, I’ll be responsible for caring for my elderly brother.

“If it comes to it,” he insists, “You don’t have to. I just had to give them a name, so I wanted you to know.”

”Of course, I will,” tumbles out of my mouth reflexively. We say goodbye and I hang up the phone, sitting there at my desk feeling whiplashed. And then the reality hits me. I really mean it. Of course, I will.

My relationship to my brother isn’t the only one that has deepened as a result of this daily practice over the last eight months, but it’s the change I never expected. I don’t know what I did expect, honestly, but it wasn’t much. Not reciprocity or an expanded future together. Not a deep sense of family or belonging. But here we are.

None of this changes the horrors that persist— the horrible policy, the targeting of the vulnerable, or the lawlessness or this administration. Nor does it change the necessity to take concrete steps to challenge those horrors— calling my Members of Congress, going to protests, or supporting mutual aid efforts. But it gives me a solid foundation of love to stand up on. It gives me fuel, and confidence that something different is concretely possible, not just a pipe dream.

I only have myself to go on, but I suspect this is what we have before us to do right now. We have to be out in the world, standing up in whatever way we can, but we also have to be building up the love in and around us in small, consistent, daily ways. If we believe another world other than the divisive one we’re being sold is possible, then we have to act as if it’s already here.

We don’t know what will come of what we do, but what if it’s more than we ever imagined? What if it changes everything?