March 22, 2006

Lost and found: My brother, my faith

By Gail Koop

“My power works best in your weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9, New Living Translation)

“Hi Irv, it’s Gail. I just wanted to ask if it was OK for me to come and see you.” As I spoke to my brother’s answering machine, my palms were sweating, the receiver shook in my hand, and my heart fluttered like a caged bird. “I know you’re sick and …”

He picked up, belligerent and spewing accusations cultivated by a lifetime of emotional illness. “Let me save you the trip, Gail. No! I do not want to see you. I do not want you to come here. Why would I want to see a sister who has ruined my life, cost me my job, and erased my children’s respect? Why would I want to see someone who has plunged a knife through my chest?”

His words hurtled at me like arrows. “I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” I found the courage to say.

“OK, you told me!” Click.

It was the first I had spoken to my brother in seven years, since his third major heart attack. That conversation sent me to bed for two days. When I found out through my niece that Irv had esophageal cancer, I had hoped the prognosis would temper his anger. But I had to remind myself that it wasn’t just anger. It was a spirit darkened by demons that he couldn’t battle alone.

My brother had suffered from anxiety and depression since he was 14. My parents tried to get him help, but he would never cooperate. On the advice of his high school guidance counselor, they enlisted Irving in the Army when he was 17.

The structure did Irving good. He earned his GED, learned his trade as an airplane mechanic, and met and married his wife. After the Army, he joined the National Guard and even taught survival tactics. But he was never equipped for the war that raged within him.

After our phone call, childhood memories began to filter in. I saw myself teaching Irv to dance the Bristol Stomp in his attic bedroom, my socks catching on the plywood floor. I smelled grass on the wind as he rode me on the handlebars of his bicycle. I watched him stretch out under the dashboard of my ’65 Ford and install the eight-track cassette player, heard the Young Rascals sing, “It’s a Beautiful Morning.” I ached for my brother, for the hope those days held.

“Please God,” I prayed, “make Irv let me see him. Make him know that all I ever did was love him.”

A few weeks later, after Irving was hospitalized, my sister Betty called. She’s a nurse.

“Gail, I spoke with Irv’s doctors. He doesn’t have much time left. I know he doesn’t want to see any of us, but I’ve prayed about it and I’m going. Even if he won’t see me, at least I can be there for his family. I’m not saying that you should go. I just wanted you know what I’m doing.”

I wanted to respect Irv’s wishes; I didn’t want to force myself on him, especially in his weakened condition. But I trusted my sister. I called my younger sister, April, and we both decided to join Betty.

By the time we got to the hospital, Irv had been quarantined. The cancer had spread to his lungs. He had developed an infection. He required oxygen, and visitors had to wear surgical masks.

At first he refused to see us when Betty told him April and I were there. Then Betty said something settled over Irv’s face. His clenched jaw relaxed, his squinted eyes opened. As she came out of his room pulling the mask over her head, tears spilled down her cheeks. “He said he’d see you.”

As we entered Irv’s room, everything I’d ever feared crept up my legs, grabbed my heart and squeezed.

My brother’s once-burly 6-foot frame now hunched shrunken at the edge of the bed. Irv’s nose and mouth were encased in a plastic mask; pajama pants ballooned around his lap. A hospital gown, draped on boney shoulders, covered the electrodes pasted to his chest. Other wires led to his ears. All were hooked to a monitor that displayed his vital signs in blips of primary colors. My stomach pitched.

Irv began the familiar, dreaded attack. Oxygen-fed accusations squeaked beneath his mask.

I felt suffocated with loss beneath mine. “Irv,” I said, “I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

He grew quiet, then looked at me as if truly seeing me for the first time, wide-eyed like a child. Magnified behind the lenses of his glasses, I witnessed the turmoil drowning in the clear, blue-green Mediterranean of his eyes. In a moment that will always be in the present tense, he said, “I love you, too, Gail. I’ve always loved you. Sometimes I just didn’t know how to act. So I’d lash out. I’m sorry if I ever hurt you. I never meant to.”

He held out his hand to me. I took it in both of mine, then reached around his bony shoulders and hugged my brother for the first time in seven years. Each of my sisters did the same.

Over the next three days, we rebuilt the nests in each other’s hearts. Then Irv was placed on a respirator. Three weeks later, he died.

At first, I felt teased, cheated. Why was he given back, only to be taken away?

Miraculously, the answer came from my brother. An article by Charles Stanley, “The Blessings of Brokenness,” was found in Irving’s study. Let me paraphrase the passages that were highlighted:

God will break and keep on breaking us until all resentment, hostility, anger and self importance have been broken out of our lives. … Often as people struggle with terminal disease, the outer body literally seems to waste away, yet if they are willing to turn to God and to submit completely to Him and trust Him with their lives, the inner beauty and spiritual strength begin to develop that far overshadow and far outweigh anything happening in the physical realm.

The Earth seemed to shift inside me. Rage became gratitude. Doubt became belief. And God, who had seemed as far away as eternity, became as close as a prayer.

Gail Koop attends Hampton Bays (N.Y.) Assembly of God. (Eric J. Rey, pastor).