…… I wrote this in july 1st, 2008

my brother

why am I stuck, I just can’t seem to get off it – and that’s worse that any actual or rather percieved injustice. I am so stuck – I just want to be FREE OF IT.  It has come to this – for all my bluster and bullshit – for all the wonderful words I spout about letting go. Here I am stuck, trapped in the suffering of a perceived injustice.

Steve – even the name now makes me pissed off. and I keep returning to ‘why’ and yet I also know this is no good. This question gets me nowhere – there is no rational answer – it is just ‘as it is’. So I am torturing myself – trapped between anger and knowing, between feeling angry and knowing that I am choosing to feel angry - stuck in the fucking middle.

This writing is a desperate effort to find a way out – perhaps some form of self psychotherapy – freeing my anger perhaps even my rage – and I don’t think it is that I have no money – that my sons have no money – nothing, absolutely nothing – in fact what we have is rising debt. Heather would laugh – hopefully she will read this – and laugh.

After all that – that caring for a beautiful dying woman – and it was done freely, no question – that perhaps makes the injustice of it all even more stark. I was not wanting anything from my actions. Yet I was not wanting this…

My fucking brother doesn’t even acknowledge what has happened. Doesn’t even see that he has half a million NZ dollars inheritance, in his hand (what he does with it, what he has done with it, is beside the point) - he has it – he took it before mum died, before it was due, while my sons and I continued to care for her. He has all that money – which to me and my sons is a massive amount, and I have absolutely nothing, nothing – and he makes no effort whatsoever to make things right. Thats what hurts, what burns – like ember inside. And I am kept stuck in this relationship. Fucking dependence – on him doing something – either giving us some money or setting us free.

And all that concerns him is that he can’t act cause he may lose some of the 500 thousand? What? Think about it….just think about it. Your blood, your family – the ones who choose to care for your mother when you turned away - and while I’m at it – what the hell was that at the funeral -  emotive words of gratitude chokingly expressed to me and my sons – how amazing we were to have made the choices we did, to do what we had- and then less that 3 months later – no words come forth. No apologies, no ‘I’ll try to make it right’. Nothing.

Too concerned with making money, keeping money - whatever, I do not know – your reality is too far from mine, I just want to be free, and you deny me that. Have the fucking house, keep it all, yes all the money for now, even though I would love just some to pay my debts – to give me some space – forget it – keep it all, just let me go. Bastard

Anger swells every time I think of it – and I think of it too often. I want to let it go, I want to walk away -I have travelled so far and yet I am right there, facing your fear - you are scared – you lack courage. Money rules you – and yet you will at the end be like mum, with nothing. You can not see, blinded by a belief that what surrounds you makes you happy, makes you comfortable. It does not.

Perhaps my pain, my suffering is more raw now, now that I am in need – I too am scared, scared of having absolutley nothing – scared of facing a bottom line reality… no job, no income at all, and debts, sure relatively minor debts, ones that wouldn’t have been there had things been different, and that’s just it, things are not different, and you make no effort to make them different – it is as if you have somehow simply accepted this injustice – absolved yourself of responsibility and absolved yourself of making it right. Perhaps you fool yourself into thinking that some time later, some time in the future all will be good, and then you will make reparation - I hope you are right, and it makes no difference to now. The silence remains.

Look at me, look at Tobias, he lives just down the road, for the last few months he has been broken – no money to pay his bills, no cell phone cause he couldn’t pay the bill – on the bones of his arse, alone in the house that he spent som much time tending to his nana. His father thousands of miles away, and you just down the road, three doors down with over half a million dollars of his grandmother’s money – and not once did you help him out. How do you feel?

Really, tell me how do you feel? I want to know. Tell me!!!!

And as always I return to ‘why’ – I know that there is no rational answer, and I also know there is an answer for me in here/out there somewhere. If I can understand this – if I can understand why I am in this position, feeling this suffering (which I totally acknowledge on the wider scale of things is absolutely nothing – but then again it is always only relative). And the suffering comes not from the perceived injustice (well not completely) but more from my inability to let it go.

Maybe that is the more relevant question – why can’t I let it go???

Why can’t I get closure?

Partly maybe because I still can’t put it behind me – I am still entrapped in this game of Trust. I encouraged the setting up of the Trust – to care for mum – and over the 7 years I ensured that that purpose remained in sight – even while my brother saw it as a means to…. meet his own ends. and he did that throughout – and I held the vision, and I cared for mum, and my sons stepped up. Mum trusted us, with her care, with her money, with her house, with everything she ever had, all she had, she put in our hands, she put herself in our trust. And what could you see? What did you want to do? What did you do? Turned away from her, and took her money. Shame.

And mum is no longer here, so now there is no purpose to this Trust.

Trust. One of my favourite words. Trust.

Is that where the answer lies?