trying

I was up until two in the morning, staring and worrying on the couch with the cat curled right up against me. His steady, even purring was the only thing that kept me from pacing, from breaking things.

I got word last night that my brother yells, at himself, alone in his apartment, at all hours. In a sense, this is not strange. After ten years on the street and a lifetime of struggling with schizoid personality disorder, one might yell. At oneself, or at another person one feels is present. Or perhaps even at god. Why not? Why not yell at god? I am often tempted to.

And so he yells, and it sounds scary. And it happens in the middle of the night or early in the morning. And the people in his building don't know what to do. And you know what? I don't know what to do either.

I lost my brother for a long time. He was my childhood friend; he was, in many ways, my childhood. And he absorbed, let's say, a special amount of the darkness of a wounded family system. And this propensity of his--to absorb damage and grief--led him, as it has so many millions of human souls in this broken country, to a life on the streets, in and out of dysfunctional institutional settings, to nearly die I have no idea how many times.

And then after 10 years we spoke again. And he told me parts of his story; the rest I could imagine. My brothers and sisters and I--still struggling in our own ways to pay the bills, to keep it together--wanted to help him. We felt that this was what a family was for. And we had love, as well, in our family, underneath everything. Love, but no money.

So for the last two years we've been trying. Trying to find my brother the things he needs, trying to keep him fed and housed and warm and safe. We've been trying imperfectly, and with an edge of desperation, too. Because, strangely, the system that nearly killed him still has so little to offer in the way of help.  You would almost think they were trying to kill him on purpose.

And they say he's paranoid.

The streets my brother slept on all those years are the streets of the city where Kurt Vonnegut was born and grew up. Vonnegut loved to quote his son Mark, who documented his own personal experience with a schizoid break in the book "Eden Express," and the quote of his son's that Vonnegut returns to is this: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

So, we're trying. Be patient.