Paul

Note: I gave this post a lot of thought. I struggled with whether to write it since it is a very personal issue for me.  They say narrative therapy is good and who am I to bash postmoderism. I wrote it a few weeks ago and have beed struggling with whether or not to post it. Here's part of it.

Paul is my younger brother - younger by four years. We were pretty close growing up. He was, as Mom called him, "the real boy" - athletic, handsome, popular and not a care in the world. I used to call him the complete package  :)

We got along great too. But, like all brothers, we did have our occasional differences. I recall one difference that left me with a black eye and him with a bloody mouth and fat lip. I remember it because it was my first year at MUN and I had to walk into class late. But that’s all part of what brothers do I guess. Many of my friends also had younger brothers who hung around with Paul. A great bunch of guys who I still see on occasion.

And the laughs me and Paul used to have. Both of us were quick with our tongues – sometimes a little too quick for Mom’s liking. I was a little faster with the one-liners, but we’d always have each other in fits of laughter. His description of the movie “Out of Africa” as a three-and-a-half-hour boil up, is classic.

I just realized that I keep using the past tense. Paul is still here, but he’s not the same Paul I grew up with. The one I spend 16 years sharing a room with. (No mean feat, let me tell you.) A lot of times we would crack a joke and we would laugh ourselves to sleep.

No, things changed about nineteen years ago when Paul tried to kill himself. It’s like it happened yesterday and hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about it. I didn’t see it coming, nobody did. And I feel guilty about that.

But that pales in comparison to the guilt I felt and still feel, in how I handled what happened to Paul afterwards. The suicide attempt left him permanently disabled – he has irreparable brain damage and is in long-term care. The guilt I carry began soon after the accident. "Accident". That’s what I always called it. Not that I was ashamed or embarrassed of Paul or what he did, it just that it was easier to say accident.

Paul was found hanging in a tree in Victoria Park. I don’t know who found him, some kids I think, but I know it made the news. We were told that he had been clinically dead for several minutes and his chances of survival were poor. The doctors told us that if he did survive, he would be in a vegetative state connected to machines for the rest of his life. Mom and Dad made the decision that no parents should have to make for their child - they decided - on the advice of doctors and after some agonizing soul-searching – to disconnect Paul from the machines. As difficult as it was, I agreed with what they decided to do.

We waited for the inevitable but Paul continued to survive. Not only that, he started to show signs of improvement. The doctors were astonished. We were over joyed, but cautiously optimistic. Everyone was. Soon he was talking, albeit slowly and stared moving his fingers and toes. Next he moved his legs and arms. Soon he was sitting up in bed. He was nowhere near what we was, but he was. (I used to say that to myself a lot.) And he appeared to be getting better each day.

(I’ll have to stop for now. This is harder than I realized and it’s going to take a lot more time than I thought.)