An Alibi for Despair

Time is moving forward. I'm considering it.

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Today, time seems to be making itself known to me. I’m suddenly very aware it is now March and soon my birthday, and April will bring the first anniversary of my brother’s passing. It seems too quick, all of it. My mind can’t seem to catch up.

Apart from a few relatively short stints through the years, I’ve basically lived away from home since graduating high school. Those years were spent trying to discover the different versions of myself and narrowing the paths of possibilities, building a career, and moving quite literally coast-to-coast and back (occasionally, and only briefly, to another country). Through that time, an emotional distance formed between me and my past — I needed to forge a new identity away from the wounds of growing up gay in Texas. It looked like growth and in some ways it was. But it was also avoidance, an unconscious decision to let certain memories sit undisturbed.

Of my two older brothers, one had poor health since birth but after being stable for decades — although not completely without issue — a decline began. This brought him and his wife back to our hometown of Dallas from Austin, where he had been living happily since his 20s. After a professional setback and the onset of the pandemic, I also found myself moving back to Dallas from six years in Los Angeles and before that New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It had probably been more than twenty years since all three brothers and our parents had lived only about thirty minutes from anyone else in the family circle. This made the increasingly more frequent hospital stays and visits no less scary, but comforting that at least we could all scramble quickly.

But eventually, after more than two years back there, I grew restless and felt I needed to move on. I moved back to New York City and guilt weighed heavily; I hoped my middle brother didn’t consider this an abandonment during what we then knew to be his final phase but there was no way of knowing how long that phase would last. He had been through so much and been close to death before, and he always fought back. He had proved worst case scenarios wrong time and again. I thought, I hoped, he would have wanted me to be where I felt more comfortable. I have to believe that to be true. Even so, it is a cruel joke that we seem to always think there will be more time than there turns out to be.

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His death wasn’t necessarily a surprise but the speed of the final decline was. Late one night after returning from D.C. for a quick work trip and getting the update that it was time to come home, I booked a flight from New York to Dallas for the next day and repacked my suitcase. No one can predict a last breath with firm accuracy, but the hospice nurse recognized the signs of a body starting to shut down telling us it would be days, maybe a week. The day I flew home turned out to be his last. When the car pulled up to our childhood home, I had missed him by 90 minutes.

At my arrival, the stretched rubber band of my emotional distance snapped me back firmly in place. Every carefully maintained mile between me and my past collapsed in a single moment. I felt a longing, a yearning for what once was I haven’t known before.

These past months, I’ve been thinking more about the cost of love. There’s an Albert Camus quote,

“It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.”

Oh, Camus. So pithy, so applicable. I would add to Camus’ premise that we will all despair despite ourselves, love is rewarding (and worthwhile, profound, etc.) and yet is also simultaneously a great cause of despair, not just an alibi for it. If and when someone leaves your life by choice, situation, duty, or death, it is then that despair fills the gap in direct proportion to the love felt or shared. Any of the forms of love can be substituted for romantic love in this quote with the same result.

Among the many words for “love” used by the Ancient Greeks is storge: familial love. That is what activated the snap of my rubber band. My brother was seven years older than I am and so we were at different phases of growing up as children, and then as adults we led very different lives. There were years when he felt impossibly older, he entered his teens when I was only six. He graduated high school before I started junior high. And yet, as I looked at photos from our youth, there are simply little boys with matching blond hair and sunburned noses.

As I turned through the old photo albums putting together the memorial slide show, the fresh ache of remembrance of a shared childhood filled me. The orange tones of an old photograph and ‘80s pajamas on a messy bed, limbs entwined as small brothers slept deeply, a box of my Pampers at the edge of the frame. A special occasion dress up and posing in front of the fireplace, our eldest brother towering over us, three kids — me as the runt with the goofy grin — when life still felt impossibly long.

One of these photos activated the despair and storge equally. I didn’t remember it being taken or ever seeing it before, but it instantly transported me decades and several states away. A quick snapshot from a family summer vacation caused my breath to catch in my chest and tightened my throat. The joy and innocence of two boys sitting on the stairs at the edge of a deck, holding the flowers they picked with the afternoon sun backlighting their towheads angelic. Before self-consciousness and without complication. Seeing this photo was one of the many moments over that trip home that broke me, but in the best possible way. It felt like a physical cracking open of the hard emotional shell developed in response to a difficult and at times cruel world. Hidden underneath that shell was the feeling of being a little boy with a big brother who happened to be blind and loved to laugh.

As the first anniversary gets closer, I think the storge has begun to outweigh the despair. And, as Camus put it, if we are to despair anyway, or to take it further, if the cost of love is despair, is it ever worth it? In my humble opinion, yes. Every damn time. Even without knowing what love is going to ask of us.

And so, at the beginning of March, time keeps moving. Love, and the ache, remain.

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