The Other

The nurse was giving me instructions at the nursing home yesterday about my mother's care.
"Are you an only child?" she asked.
I nodded my head and said, "yes," without hesitation.
Although I technically am not, for the first time that admission solidified what has been building for me all of my life.
My three siblings were 11-17 years older than me. I have no memories of the two oldest ones when they were at our parent's home and only a few memories of my brother - the one closest in age - before his return from Vietnam.
My siblings' childhood experiences were different than mine, and mine from theirs. They grew up in the decade of post war exhubilation. I was born in the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination and grew up in the decade of sex, drugs and rock -n- roll.
Their parents were young and full of life, mine were older and probably wiser.
Their family was one that attended church together on Sundays, my family was one of each of us involved in our own thing on Sunday.
Their father was one that attended their sporting events, my father was a workaholic/alcoholic that suffered a heart attack before I entered junior high.
Their father attended their graduations and weddings, mine didn't live to see me do those things.
As real siblings, we never really shared anything. They viewed my childhood from the perspective of parents themselves and maybe because of that, from the perspective of outsiders looking in.
My affirmation yesterday reaffirmed for me that the dysfunction that keeps our family from working is not what has been or is said, but the messages that are sent by what is not.
I have no idea why my siblings aren't here for my mother's last years/months/days.
I don't know why they've not offered any kind of assistance (emotional or otherwise) to either me or her in this difficult (and sometimes seemingly impossible) process of her aging and advancing chronic illness.
When I blurted out my affirmation, it began to free me from that loneliness that accompanies me on each visit to my mother's apartment at the retirement center. On each late-night walk down every hallway in every hospital. In every parade I made through the nursing home, past the lonely souls in wheelchairs who watched me march by as if I were there to crown the lucky parade queen who had a visitor.
And I know that their leaving our mother to those 1-person visits and me to those solitary parades was supposed to send me a message that I was just too stupid to figure out and now too weary to try.
We didn't share the same childhoods and experiences, but we share the same DNA.
That DNA should have been enough to guide us through the one experience that united us as siblings who share more than that.
Sadly, for all of us, this journey has only cemented the fact that it is the only thing we ever will share as siblings.
With my public acknowledgement of that, maybe now I can make my path a little smoother.