Five Brothers

by Courtney Welu

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My first brother died of a disease with no name, or at least a disease with no name seventy years ago. They have presumably named it by now. Only eight at the time of his passing, he was the first of us to break my mother’s heart as she tended to him through the night, his shuddering weak breaths forced out by lungs that panted and gasped long before a strange illness swept through our rural farm town and left three families mourning their sickly, delicate little boys.

He had been born prematurely, a month too early, his first weeks on this planet spent in an incubator learning how to breathe. His tiny body struggled with the effort. His lungs lacked strength and rigour, but my mother insisted he made up for it in energy and verve. He traipsed around the prairie just fine, brandishing a stick as a sword. He could not run for long, but he loved to sit on the porch and play with the barn cat, who tolerated his games, his pokes and prods.

At the end of my mother’s life, my first brother lay heavy on her mind. She would call out for him in her sleep; she saw his little form at the end of her bed, but this time she was the sick one. When I gently told her that I could not see anyone, she insisted that this was merely because I had never met my first brother. Our existences had not crossed paths; if I’d known him, I would have seen him, too.

My second brother died of loneliness. He was exactly one year younger than my first year brother, and the only one of us to remember him in vivid detail. The two of them were thick as thieves on the farm, play-acting spaghetti westerns and toy soldiers.

He’d always been such a sweet child, my mother said, helping her with chores without being asked, sensing when she needed time alone in the house, attuned to her emotions when most little boys would have been wholly ignorant. But after his older brother died, he clammed up. He became colder and more distant. He resented playing with his younger brothers, believing God had played a trick on him and forced him to accept mediocre replacements for his first and best playmate.

He loved me, my mother said, because I was the only girl – I was an entirely new thing. My birth gave him the chance to be sweet again. My mother claimed he changed my diapers, and when she could not get me to sleep, he would sing me snippets of songs he heard on the radio.

I remember him in flashes. Curly blond hair, light freckles. He would play aeroplane with me, lifting me up off of the ground, propped up on his legs. I don’t remember his voice and our camcorders did not record audio, so he left no record of himself behind, no way to recall what songs he might have crooned over my cradle.

My mother thought that perhaps his life had turned around after his first brush with tragedy at too young an age. She wanted to save up money to buy him a guitar. My father had the opposite feeling; his shouting matches with my second brother would wake the whole house after my father caught him sneaking out for the umpteenth time.

My mother never had the chance to give him the guitar; my second brother careened my father’s station wagon into a tree three days before his high school graduation. He likely died on impact. He likely did not suffer for more than a few seconds, not like his older brother, who wasted away over weeks. We do not know if he crashed the car on purpose.

I received a guitar from my mother on my eighteenth birthday. We had more money then, so it was not as much of a frivolity, an imposition on her finances. Still, I knew what it meant when her eyes welled up, and she wordlessly passed me my brother’s inheritance.

My third brother died exactly five months and twenty-three days after he received his draft notice in the mail, a day that turned the mood of our house ugly and dour. I was nine, old enough to recall the heaviness of the moment but not old enough to have a say in the events that transpired. My father, a proud veteran, believed that the importance of military duty must be upheld, no matter our personal feelings about the conflict in Vietnam. My mother did not feel as though she could argue.

And so, after a buzz cut, my third brother left for basic training and did not return. He knelt next to me at our front door and gave me a fierce hug goodbye. He promised me, and promised our mother, that he would come home safely.

He came home in a coffin. I don’t even remember my mother crying; her face remained stoic and passive throughout the funeral service. I knew instinctively when I watched her that she must have been preparing for the news since the day he left home. I couldn’t tell you if he died heroically, but I hope he did, for my mother’s sake.

My fourth brother died many years later in a Canadian suburb, far away from the Midwest prairie. His draft notice arrived two years after my third brother’s death. My father, who defined himself by his Navy service and love of his country, was the one to encourage him to leave said country before he could become another piece of fodder in the military machine. My father had lost too many sons, and he did not want to lose another.

My fourth brother hitchhiked and crossed the border, disappearing from our lives without dying. Our goodbye before he left was not so dramatic, because I knew we would see each other again one day, even if it would not be tomorrow. My mother was less certain, but she told him rather brusquely that she’d rather see him dead in Canada than dead in Vietnam.

She did not anticipate my fourth brother falling in love with a Canadian woman and raising a family there even once his return to America became viable. My mother came from the farm, where everyone stayed in the same community from birth to death. She’d never had a child choose to leave of his own accord, and although she certainly preferred an absence where she had the option to place a phone call, the rejection stung. No one knew better than my fourth brother everything that my mother had gone through, and yet he still departed.

For most of my life, I saw my fourth brother once a year at Christmas. He was tall, thin, mild-mannered, and worked as an accountant. He had one daughter, my only niece, who was very nearly a stranger to me. I sent her trinkets and candies for her birthday, and my fourth brother would write a thank you card back and make her sign it in blocky childlike letters. I appreciated the effort, but I would have appreciated knowing her more.

My fourth brother’s wife called my mother with the news that her son had died suddenly of a heart attack at age 52. She’d come home from work and found him splayed out on the bathroom floor, dead before she could even call an ambulance.

By this time, my father had been dead for ten years; he’d only lost three sons, and now my mother lost her fourth all alone. I came home expecting her to be wailing, but she simply sat in her armchair, glasses off and eyes sunken in, numb and soundless. I sat with her for many hours, and she did not utter a single word.

My fifth brother, unlike the brothers that came before him, died after a long, full, happy life. He was kind and generous with friends and strangers alike. He told me that I was more than his sister, but his best friend. He made a wonderful uncle to my children, playing games with them in the mud; they followed him like he was their ringleader. He had good friends, and a storied love life and always had time for his mother. He travelled to many countries but did not stay for long, coming back home every time.

Cancer came upon him suddenly, a general feeling of exhaustion and muscle weakness taking him to the doctor who diagnosed him with lymphoma. I don’t think he would have gone through chemotherapy if my mother, at a wizened 95, had not been alive, sharp as a tack, and would have felt his loss as keenly as she’d felt the losses of her first four boys.

The chemotherapy may have extended his life by a few months, but when he could no longer care for himself, I stepped in. My fifth brother never had a family of his own; he admitted once to me in privacy that he had erred on the side of caution after watching what happened to the boys in our family, not wanting to place the burden of his death on anyone else’s shoulders. But my shoulders were strong and capable.

I stayed with him for eight long weeks, watching his body slowly break down. I made sure he took his pain pills on time; I bathed him, trimmed his beard, and made him dinners from our mother’s recipe box. I brought our mother to visit when she felt able, but she did not want to watch her last son dwindle away. When he finally let go in the night, I did not know how to tell her, but she knew from the tears in my voice when I finally plucked up the nerve to pick up the phone. We stayed silent on the line for a long while.

When my mother finally left this world, only a few days shy of her 100th birthday, I breathed easily for perhaps the first time in my life. My mother would not lose all of her children.