The Brother I Never Had

The Brother I Never Had

The house is quiet. I finger the toy car absentmindedly, my thoughts straying back to the time when it had first become wedged in the back of my closet. I see him in my mind’s eye—my brother. Seven, maybe eight years old, his brown hair flopping over his ears, his wide, gap-toothed smile. But he does not move. He is frozen like this in my mind, for this image comes only from a photograph.

I never met my brother.

A stranger would never know from my room that it had belonged to a child my parents had long before me. I don’t know if they would feel the memories that threaten to suffocate me; Every scratch on the wood floor, every place the paint peeled from the wall—it reeks of him.

His existence has affected my family in a way that I don’t entirely understand. I am separate from them. They lived through a loss I cannot begin to imagine. They rarely talk about it.

I mean, they talk about him.

Just not how he died. How it was after he died.

I sense their pain, but I can never be a part of it.

Sitting here in his old room, I often wonder if I am like him at all. If they wish I could be more like him, if they compared me to him with each year I added to my life, until I passed him. And if now they simply say to themselves, with each of my passing years, would he have been like that?

And they will never know.

I wonder if given the chance they would trade, him for me.

I wonder if I a replacement, an attempt to fill a gap that can never be filled. An attempt to disguise eternal pain.

I have a sister. Thirteen years older than me, eleven when he died. Nine years they spent together. Nine years and suddenly he was gone.

All I have are photographs.

But I couldn’t tell you which is better.

My sister and I don’t talk often, and when we do it is friendly, light, on subjects of no great importance. Maybe it’s the age difference. Maybe she is afraid of getting too close to me, afraid that fate would strike cruelly again and she wouldn’t be able to bear the pain a second time around. Or maybe I remind her too much of him. Maybe she resents me. Maybe I am a replacement, and a poor one.

My parents don’t talk about him much, except on his birthday, and of course, the day it happened. I am left out of their grief. How do you miss someone you never knew?

How do you love someone who never existed for you?

As I sit here, here in my room—his room, as the air sags with the weight of memories just out of my reach, I ponder this.

I don’t think I will ever truly know the answer. But at this moment I am beginning to realize that my brother is a part of me. He is so much more than a still image in my mind. I am my own person. My family knows this—if they didn’t before, they certainly know it now.

I am not him and so I will not try to be.

I grieve for the brother I never had.