The call came in, my uncle told me my brother had passed.
I wasn't expecting it but neither was I surprised, I was just nothing. We were estranged since the death of our mother, some things broken can never be made whole again.
The circumstances of his passing were not clear, and what little detail we could get was that it had been at the farm where we grew up and that he had been found lifeless, lying face-down in the barn there.
He was living in Sweden at the time, but was back home on an extended visit, it wasn't uncommon for him to go on such visits for days and weeks on end now and then.
Sometimes these visits were just convenient excuses, he was still at war with his inner demons and many of his battles raged on without mercy for days or weeks as he tried in vain to put out the fires with more gasoline.
His father had been expecting him to take over the family estate, a farm of several hundred sheep and rolling meadows. I don't think that prospect was something he looked forward to, whether it was to disappoint his father by refusing to take over the farm or just selling it or to surrender and be shackled permanently to the place we grew up on without much in the form of nurture.
The father was an old man at this stage and in no state to care for animals or even himself as he now lived far away at a nursing home in some form of retirement.
There were rumors of starvation and neglect around the farm animals in the wake of his departure, but it was hushed up as his neighbors swept in to help feed them as close-knit communities do, likely in the expectation that it would only be a temporary measure until my brother could return to claim his inheritance and his rightful place as the head of the household.
It never came to be, his 50th birthday never was.
For the second time in only a few years, the dead were beckoning me to travel north to attend them and I could not refuse.
By accident, we were present at the hospital when my brothers body was interred. His father hadn't particularly intended us to be a part of that ceremony, my brother's daughter and niece were there however and we found out about it through them and decided to pay our final respects.
As the shroud was lifted, what struck me immediately was how his face was all swollen and blue with t tint of purple chasing the edges. I've read about it being something that can happen when a body lies face-down for extended periods of time, if the head is in a lower position than the rest of it.
Even so, not knowing what happened to him asked nagging questions even if the answers seemed obvious.
I would have liked to know more about his final hours, but his father wasn't inclined to talk about it and I wasn't inclined to ask. In any case, he was a father with a son that had just passed away, whatever questions I had as an estranged brother would be less important.
At the church, we carried the casket out of the church with his friends and my uncle, it was as heavy as a small ox. Whatever he had been doing these last five years he had been doing a lot of it.
2 months later the call came in again, again it was my uncle. This time it was my youngest brother who died from cancer with little or no warning. He had been living at a home for the severely autistic for the last 30 years, I had visited him there but only infrequently and not for some years since my mother passed.
This time I could not attend the dead, my son having just started school in the country we had just moved to. I could take comfort in that my partners attended on my behalf, while I watched over the Internet as his coffin travelled into the afterlife.
My mother, sister and youngest brother, all taken by cancer.
My younger brother taken by the unresolved trauma of indifference and neglect, having lived most of his life with severe burn scar tissue from the terrible accident he had when we were all living together at the farm.
Indifference is violence without commitment, Neglect is indifference through alternative means.
If there's anything that I want to tell you, then it is that you matter to me and that I care. Deeply.
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