I’m Too Scared To Show My Parents What I Write About My Brother

I lie about my brother because I’m desperate to control how other people will respond, despite impossible conversations being central my entire shtick. Consciously, I fail to see these “people-pleasing” bids as attempts to manipulate the outcome of a conversation. Growing more aware of our deception, but choosing to deceive regardless, would render a person cruel or clinically bat-shit (or both). I don’t think I’m cruel, but I definitely flirt with the margins of bat-shit. To reassure myself and my readers, this is largely normal behavior that most of us do both with and without conscious awareness. We fib, we construct an intricate series of white lies, and we shmooze and fake-smile so as to keep some unwritten peace between ourselves and the people we interact with.I once worked with a family who lost their beloved father quite suddenly. The family quilt, held tightly together through Pops’ sense of humor and patience, was now tattered, irreparable. The relationships between the others (the two sisters, brother, and Mom) hung only by frayed threads they hadn’t realized as so spindly, so fine. These brands of difficulty, whether mildly insane or truly tragic, soften the veneer of our “perfect life” and reveal our worst tendencies and traits just below. It’s unfortunate that it takes such bad circumstances to fully understand ourselves.Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The family had one adult child with severe Down’s Syndrome. They had been burdened for decades by the highly destructive behavior and cost of therapies and out-of-pocket providers and “sensory equipment”, and it was the late Pops’ primary task to guide the house in managing the unrelenting load. With Pops’ absence in mind, I couldn’t find it within me to share my own experience of my brother sort-of-kind-of tragically passing. I say “sort-of-kind-of” because my family had come to accept his death as imminent by virtue of his heroin addiction; we just couldn’t forecast the timeline of it. I believe it was two or so years ago when I had first written about Conner’s death on Substack, and remember phrasing it something like, “We absorbed his passing while he was still here, as if he had already faded.” It was a live-action role-play that is the idiom, “death by a thousand cuts”.When I first heard that the daughter with Down’s Syndrome was a twin, my knee-jerk reaction was to respond with, “I am too!” In lockstep with my emotions I was tibia-deep in the bear trap of awkward conversation. My options were straightforward: be honest and stoic and authentic in the same manner I encourage others to be when these situations arise… or lie. I chose the latter. I lied about Conner being dead by claiming he was still alive.Death and death do not cancel each other out in conversation, as I’d come to conclude. This became my justification. My little mind and its penchant for trickery would see this as an opportunity to deceive even myself into believing that talk of my brother was unimportant. I proceeded to speak as if Conner were only minutes away, enjoying his life as I did mine.Firstly, this tendency is profoundly selfish, albeit subliminal. My own fear of their reaction was what drove me to not only to lie--- but to justify lying. I sometimes reenact the fake scenario where I ruefully tell my parents I lied about Conner being alive and well, all to their disgust and their torment and their salted weeps. Why do we do this to ourselves? In the same wicked scheme that is paying money to experience sadness watching a movie, I apparently opt for experiencing agony by imagining my parents branding me a callow brute, unfit to sit at the grown-up table of real-life.Let’s return to my lying to the family--- an event that actually occurred outside of my imagination. Yes, of course I cared about how they were managing to get by in light of the tragedy they’d all been dealt. It was this understanding that resulted in the strange sense that I’d owed them a positive experience, a laugh, a kernel of reassurance that they’d learn to accept this as only a small interruption to the life they’d planned for. They didn’t demand this from me, nor did they imply they needed my consoling. It was undue pressure I’d placed on myself to provide something impossible to materialize: their Dad and all that came with him.I left many words unsaid because I was unwilling to tolerate their questions, their reaction, their condolences to Conner being gone. Psychologists are probably foaming at the mouth theorizing the many reasons this is only a manifestation of my own intolerance for my own condolences to Conner.So I tried to control the family instead.In my own defense, I’ve come to this analysis only in retrospect. This moment captured through my keyboard was an exchange lasting probably 20 seconds or less. In the thick of that space, between her comment and mine, the ping of a subtle impulse convinced me,“It’s not worth the trouble of explaining. You have a twin brother, and that’s the end of the story.”The words unsaid are those feelings I have about Conner. They’re unsaid around my parents because I am a hypocrite. This discernment has evolved into a question I’m now unable to wrest from the forefront of my mind.It’s a question of whether or not we could hold a belief with an iron grip despite consistently acting against it. Can we believe something but also take consistent action against its core feature? Can we value our health while regularly indulging in Thin Mints? On perhaps a deeper note: can we treasure the sanctity of marriage but allow our eyes to gaze astray? As I age, many of my beliefs and perspectives have unraveled with new information, information which lurches toward me from the unlikeliest of places.I’m terrified of my parents’ reactions to any conversation related to my brother. Mom has managed to maintain composure when his name is brought up, a step in her progress that took about three years following his death to achieve. Prior to this milestone reached, she was a puddle at the mere mention of something only tangentially related to Conner in any way. As the English language and human cognition would have it, any single person, place, or thing can find a connection to something else if we torture reality enough. While I’m certain she didn’t try to look for Conner in unrelated places, I imagine her pain was so all-consuming that he trickled into every crack of her conscience--- whether she liked it or not.My Dad, on the other hand, has always been more reserved in his emotional expressions. There have been three moments in my entire life that I’ve seen him cry. Once was when we were heading into a horrendous Illinois winter with multiple feet of snow, and my brother sold our snowblower for what was equivalent to a teaspoon of heroin. Conner’s addiction had already absolved him of any useful housework or yardwork, leaving the labor to my Dad and I. While I can’t remember exactly how my Dad managed to afford a snowblower, I know my parents’ manufacturing-plant, blue-collar jobs made it a 6-month venture to put money aside to plan for its purchase. Dad’s tears came that night. Conner’s did not.Perhaps the most horrible few hours of witnessing my Dad crying came when he called to tell me that Conner had died. The police in Florida tried to contact my Mom first but couldn’t get a hold of her. Dad was next on the list.Dad called me with a crack in his voice I immediately knew was imbued with tragedy. Nothing prepares you for events like death, no matter how many times you’ve neurotically rehearsed your emotional response. When your brother is a heroin addict, you nail your lines; then it only becomes a matter of time before you’re charged with performing them. That matter of time, though, wallops the wind out of your every fiber as if you’d had no idea all these years he was anything other than a healthy, happy kid. Rehearsal is moot in the labyrinth that is grief.Dad is a veracious reader and writer. I’ve inherited his love for the English language and its ability to invoke both wonder and rage within a single sentence. It’s crazy, really, to think words have that much power. I suppose it’s why the words unsaid are equally damning.The words unsaid are those feelings I have about Conner. They’re unsaid around my parents because I am a hypocrite. I’m a hypocrite because my entire career and reputation is based on my willingness to talk to anyone about anything, my ability to respect diverse points of view with a warmth and a sense of humor, and demonstrating competence through my openness to conversation. But I can’t have a single conversation about my brother so long as the listeners are my parents.I’m a hypocrite because the hours I pour into motivating others to resolve conflict, I’m unable to do with my parents. The silent conflict remains, and avoidance begets avoidance. The Conner-sourced tension has since distilled down to that of a simmer, gradually cooled down from the rolling boil it was for years after we’d gotten The Call. But the cauldron still functions as the invisible stew between us. I’m a hypocrite because I don’t want to move it. The cauldron that is guilt, the cauldron that is fear dictates my next course of action. My thoughts about Conner, my disturbing dreams about Conner; they evaporate into the mist which hangs carefully over the stew. Mom, Dad and I… We’ve all trained one another to become avoidant, at least as it relates to his memories.To answer my own question, maybe we can believe strongly in an idea or a notion while also betraying it. Maybe life is that complex, and that’s the beauty in it. Maybe we see these traits in other people and admire how they demonstrate them better than we’re capable of. Perhaps the very belief we hold, but are inept at embodying, is one better left to people more equipped than we are to pay this belief forward. That, or we can learn to engender it on our own. Either way, our dependence on others remains a constant.When I see professional track athletes and their work ethic, I’m only minimally inspired to put in more effort in my own exercise routine. Does it mean I do not value hard work, fitness, and perseverance in the name of achieving a goal? Obviously not. My values-gradient is just different from Sha’Carri Richardson.Conner loved our family despite behaving as if we were disposable. If we were to assign numerical value to how often our habits reflect our truest beliefs… what number would suffice? Who gets to decide what that quotient looks like? With the world moving so quickly toward medicalizing and numerically assigning quotients to every experience, is this something we can get away with just leaving be? Can we understand that the most meaningful aspects of life cannot be plugged into a formula or ChatGPT? Or, that if they are, they almost immediately bleed substance? Maybe the world’s problems seem so herculean that we’re desperate for a more concrete answer, one like a simple formula or a checklist or a flowchart. There is no flowchart to properly quantify the pain and suffering of Conner’s last few years of living.There’s also no formula for determining how far along I am in my recovery from anorexia. Or how much my parents have healed following the tragic death of a child.Or when I’ll be less of a hypocrite and share my truest writing with Mom and Dad.Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit honestlyunorthodox.substack.com