My brother Ben was born almost exactly two years after me and this was his very first sentence as a toddler. You see, Ben and I had a very close relationship. And we instantly connected as children via our mutual love of wrestling. Yes, we fought and tumbled in the most wonderful of ways as children. Our parents had an old station wagon, the kind with the third backseat which faces the bumper of the car. Our Mom often said when she glanced through the rearview mirror that she saw the flailing limbs of Ben and I and she knew we were fine. She called us her Bear Cubs; we loved our title and lived up to it. Years later, Ben hit puberty and he grew to be over six feet tall. We stopped wrestling then, because my days of winning were over due to Ben’s increasing physical size. But that didn’t stop our closeness, and we replaced teasing words and humor for the wrangling. We got each other through middle school and high school, our connection growing only closer as we grew closer to being full humans (adults). In my twenties, I had gone to college, secured a job and got my first studio apartment in Brooklyn, New York. I thought I had done everything right in my life; but I felt depressed and sad much of the time. Ben came to visit me in that studio apartment and fell in love with New York. “Becca, your life is great! I would do anything to have what you have right now.” Only I didn’t feel the same way about how things were going. I longed to move to another state, South Carolina or Arizona and begin a new adventure, but all of my family was in the Northeast and I was too afraid to leave them. “I don’t understand your fear of leaving us,” Ben told me. Ben wasn’t afraid, so he got a job as an entertainer on a cruise ship that traveled throughout the Caribbean. He had dropped out of college (much to our mother’s dismay) and was fearless in his quest for adventure and taking risks. I didn’t understand why I had followed an established career path and felt so despondent. My depression became more difficult to manage, so I started on some anti-depressant medication and went to therapy. Ben would call or visit from his cruise ship life and he was puzzled by my sadness. While he approved of me finding a therapist, he hated that I was on medication for depression. “Those pills you are taking are garbage. I wish you would stop, because that shit is no better than street drugs.” Hmmmmm. This was the first major disagreement we’d ever had. I knew I needed the medication and it was helping me. I also sensed a major depression within Ben. Of course he couldn’t see it and was living his best life on a cruise ship, dating young women and sailing between islands. I knew there was nothing I could do to change his mind about psych medication and I also knew that there was no one like Ben to pull me out of the despair I felt. He often yanked me out of my apartment to go dancing or have a beer when I wanted to be alone. I needed his belief in me. He saw me as a success, a bright light that he refused to allow to be shut out from the world. That is what a best friend does. And it helped. I eventually moved out of that studio apartment and started to live. We got older and hit our thirties. Ben had left the cruise ship industry and was working in Manhattan as a bartender. He began to study to become an airline pilot. I was so proud of him; he had lived his life out of sequence, he partied while being young and then settled down when he matured and this path was working for him. Until one day, it wasn’t. When Ben was 35 and I was 37, the depression that I had known was lurking within him came out to play. And it wasn’t the joyous playtime we had known as children. No, this was the particular brand of depression which took everything from Ben. Including his friendship with me. My depression always resembled that of an old woman in a housecoat, mulling over her poor life choices and standing by the window with regret during autumn, as leaves fell from trees. In contrast, Ben’s depression was one of fury. He became so angry with the world that he lashed out at everyone, could no longer keep a job, and then shut out our family completely. The young boy of antics and laughter had disappeared, and in his place stood a tall, raging monster who refused to engage in meaningful conversation. I was lost. I didn’t know how to get through to him, so I chose to use his same tactic to fight back. I sharpened by weapons, I matched my anger with his. The result was a full on war between the two of us. We existed on one lone field, my troops in tents facing his. Sometimes we riled our troops and they fought with such bloodshed that it was disgusting to behold. Other times, we silenced our troops and they stared angrily at each other across that field with nothing by silent rancor. This war lasted for almost a decade. The nasty and violent fighting was reserved for the beginning and middle of the war, while the bitter and frosty resentment reverberated towards the end. It was January of 2023 when I got the call that Ben had died. As any general would know, it was time to send my troops home and fold up the tents in which they had faithfully slept while waging my war against Ben. At least the war was over, I thought. There are some perks to the end of a war. Neighborhoods gather to plant crops, masons lay bricks for the foundations of homes, entire cities are rebuilt, sometimes with more luster than ever before, and unity reigns over division once more. Except I had none of this rebirth to lavish within because the war between Ben and I had no resolution. No winner. No white flag. Like most wars, it was futile and stupid and mean-spirited with no end result. I met a woman several years back, and she was in her nineties then. So, she was old. She told me that her parents were living near Times Square on the day that World War II ended. Known as V-E Day, this woman was a witness to the end of a very long and tumultuous war. “People walked in the streets and hugged each other! Perfect strangers! My father invited people over to share dinner with us and we didn’t even have enough food for ourselves! But nobody cared. The war was over!” The old woman exclaimed. Now that is what the end of a war should resemble, right? And then I remembered something else about this incredibly old woman. She was able to describe an event that had happened in childhood with exact precision (the end of a major war), and yet she couldn’t remember anything short term, like eating egg salad only two hours earlier. This is actually a common finding in people with dementia: their long term memory stores of childhood remain intact, yet their short term recall of events of the previous twenty four hours is irretrievable. That is how I figured out how to end the war, for both Ben and me. I looked back upon the years we spent fighting, and I told myself to stop. I replayed our hideous exchange of words and I forced my brain to stop. I am learning from this old woman and people with dementia that the recent history may not be as important as we think. It is the old, old memories that make life burst into bloom. I decided that the last decade at war with Ben is to be forgotten and that it is our task for me and Ben to relish in the extraordinary kinship that we had years ago. Our birthdays are coming up this week. They are four days apart and we used to celebrate together. This will be our first post-war birthday. I am looking forward to rough housing and mischief, laughter and limbs tumbling across the living room floor. I’m sure that Ben will tune up his guitar and we will sing together. These are the old, old memories where we are reminded that what was once divided, is now at last united. We will always be the Bear Cubs, as evidenced by Ben’s first full sentence, “Becca hit me.”
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