I distributed my dead brother Dave’s cremated remains this past weekend. Half of his ashes went to the cemetery, where I spread a thin layer over the family plot, like I did with Mom. The other half joined the rest of Mom and Dad’s ashes in my back garden.
I dug a hole in the garden, and then poured his remaining dust in the hole, and then spat in the hole once for every girlfriend he abused. Then I covered him up with dirt.
What I should have done was figure things out sooner. The wife he married after a two week courtship got to know him well enough to file a restraining order six months later … but he said she was crazy. He said the next one beat him, not the other way around. He said the one after that wanted to be spit on and slapped. With the next one he went to jail for spitting and slapping — even though, he complained, he ‘d never hit a woman with a closed fist, because that was abuse, and I realized he was just making up a new excuse every time.
All I could do after that was point out the consequences after he’d been jailed for domestic abuse, like when the nursing agency suddenly switched nurses, or when security threw him off the hospital property for yelling at a receptionist. He never got close enough to his last girlfriend to get to the violent stage before they split up, but I was going to warn her.
So he got two little memorial services from me. One at the graveyard, where I was a sister, and then one in my backyard, where I was a woman, and a human being. And even now, I wonder just a little if maybe his wife was crazy, the next girlfriend did beat him, the next one wanted it, and that the police were forced to arrest someone.
It doesn’t matter if I’m a bad sister or if I’m a bad woman instead, but I hope I know better in the next life.
5 responses to “Dave Dust”
Any given *one* of those is possible, but when you string it all together, at least some of that (esp. when you throw in the nurses, who are professionals and deal with this junk all the time) would be improbable to be sourced exclusively outside him.
(and statistically, it is really unlikely that any of them were sourced exclusively on the woman, from women-being-violent vs. men-being-violent stats, and from women-lying-about-men-being-violent vs. women-not-lying-about-men-being-violent stats.)
*But* also when each thing is a plausible one-off and different from the preceding excuse, it is possible/plausible and takes us longer to spot a pattern. and also you’re a sister and it is to some degree appropriate, if a sister lacks inside knowledge, to give a brother more of the benefit of the doubt than the outside world would?
(I am glad you were planning to warn the last girlfriend, though. Thank you for that!)
This is going to sound weird coming from an internet (almost) stranger, but I love you.
Your brother was clearly a complicated and (likely) abusive man, but people are messy and you loved him as a sister while eventually coming to terms with the reality that he was not good to women. We are all fucked up in ways big and small. The fact that you can come to terms with holding all of those complex things together and then write a perfect post that encompasses all of that complexity (in 6 short paragraphs!), which is hilarious at the same time is why I am professing my internet love.
Forget Jerry’s book, write your own book!
KC – Thank you. That makes me feel a little better. AH – The word “perfect” is especially sweet given the three times I added and deleted one extra heavy-handed sentence. Thank you for the love.
Very honest and beautifully expressed. I’m with AH – write it.
Big Dot – Thanks, Big Dot, that’s nice to hear, especially from you.