I can never say goodbye

My brother doing something around a car. His favourite thing.

The Cure’s most recent album, Songs of a Lost World, takes a great deal of inspiration from the grief felt by Robert Smith on the death of his brother. As the song ‘I can never say goodbye’ puts it;

Something wicked this way comes
From out the cruel and treacherous night
Something wicked this way comes
To steal away my brother’s life
Something wicked this way comes
I can never say goodbye
I can never say goodbye

I have been listening to these songs whilst driving over the last twelve months, little expecting to have them become so personal.

We were away for the week visiting family. I woke on the Thursday morning and, checking my phone, discovered I had missed half a dozen calls overnight. The first was No Caller ID at about 1am, followed by repeated calls from a visible, but unknown, number over the next 20 minutes or so. I imagined a drunk rolling out of the pub and misdialling me thinking I was a taxi. But there were no voicemails.

I hate that thing where you miss a call and ring back, only to find they’d dialled you by mistake in the first place, but an hour or so later my curiosity got the better of me and I dialled the unknown number. I listened to the answerphone message for a Police Constable operating in the area where my brother lived. There could only be a very limited number of reasons why a PC would ring me in the middle of the night. My brother had been quite unwell for the previous couple of months, with two stays in hospital. He hadn’t contacted me for about a week, but that was normal when he knew I was on holiday. I rang my brother’s phone to check and it went straight to voicemail. Most unlike him, I thought. The Police Constable, I presumed, was on night shift and so I left a message with the Constabulary Control Room. A Police Sergeant rang me back and told me what I suspected. They had forced entry to my brother’s house and found him dead in bed.

I was glad to be with my close family in that moment, although we knew we had to speak carefully as we were within earshot of our 5 year old Grandson. His presence meant we had to speak calmly and plainly. That was probably the best way to share the news, anyway.

The news was both a shock and also not a surprise. I had expected his health to continue to deteriorate, with the corresponding decline in quality of life, but not this quickly. I had been given a degree of responsibility for my brother’s affairs by both our parents in their Wills, which added an unasked for layer of complexity to our relationship. Having lost both our parents in the last three years, I am familiar with the administrative task that lies ahead.

Our relationship seemed based primarily on my brother’s unhappiness. The vast majority of his texts to me were complaints. Old peoples’ driving and parking. The chemists not having the right prescription sorted for him. His ex-neighbours, whom suspected of being drug dealers. His landlord. Thankfully, there were also moments of comedy gold. It was he, after all, who had given my Mum the nickname of “Nop Nop”, due to her inability to project her voice when calling us to come after playing outside.

Yet, despite the ending of a complex relationship which placed significant demands upon me that I did not ask to carry, I find myself grieving. My first sense was this being the final disconnect with my birth family. I relied on my brother for memories of our childhood that I had long forgotten. Where did we go on holiday in 1972? Who was the lad that lived three doors down?

Two brothers in the doorway of the caravan some time around the early 70s. Probably this was his happiest time.

Despite our relationship feeling to me to be quite one sided, the abrupt halt to frequent texts - however negative and full of grumbling - hit home as well. When planning the funeral, I had the idea of wanting to ask an old Pastor of a Chapel my Mum attended for a while. He preached with an American accent, but spoke as a true native of Lincolnshire the rest of the time. I was about to text my brother to tell him. He would have found that funny.

My brother’s death certificate gives a virtually identical cause of death as is written on my Father’s from three years ago. Heart failure. This morning I did a wet, cold, and slightly miserable parkrun. I guess this is the future - trying to fend off biological probability.