My Brother - A Good Bye.

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This is not going to be a happy post. It's also not going to be a post in which I'm going to point a finger at anyone.
That post will come. This won't be it.
Not now.

My brother passed away.

source

Less than two weeks ago, he was sent to the Erasmus hospital in Rotterdam because their oncologists are better equipped to scope out cancer. Their machines are better too.
He battled cancer last year. More about this later in another post but anyway, he was treated and it was gone.

However, he kept having issues and no one knew why.

His doctor at the hospital in our home town sent him to Rotterdam because, there, they could surely figure it out.
My sister drove him there, and later she told me that the trip from his door to her car had him out of breath to such an extend that she was afraid he'd collapse right there and then or end up dying in her car during the one hour car ride to Rotterdam.

Once there, the doctor told him that there would be no scans or tests for cancer because they needed to figure out where this shortness of breath came from.
They had to keep removing fluids from his lungs, and they wanted to keep him there overnight to see if he had lung emphysema.
This was ruled out so he was sent back to his local hospital.
This was a week and a half ago.

On the Monday that followed, he and my sister attended the appointment to hear about their plan of approach. What came next, no one could have expected. And it was definitely not what anyone wanted to hear.
They told him they were going to apply for Hospice care.
They didn't know what was wrong and they didn't know what to do. There wasn't anything they could do.

I don't know too much about it but from what I do know, is that in the Netherlands, Hospice is truly the end. My sister told me that sometimes, even there, people get better and leave. But I don't think it's very common.
They don't like to keep people in there for long, and they certainly don't want to try to improve their lives, other than giving them morphine to ease the pain, and end things...

In the days that followed, I tried to call him once with no answer, and once he picked up just as his colleagues from work walked in.
I called him back on Saturday the 28th. We talked for about 15 minutes.
Me expressing the fact that I didn't know what to say.
Him saying there was nothing to say. It was the end of his story and that was that.
But he still had hope. He wasn't done with life. He was still fighting.
So on that note, I promised to call him again soon...
I cried silently after I hung up the phone.
Cried because I wasn't able to be there with him.
Because I wasn't there for my sister who was his only family left in Holland.
I cried for all the missed chances to keep in touch.
I cried for the one time we did speak, a year ago, and when I already knew deep inside, that it would be one of the last times we spoke.

Call you soon never came.
My sister called me the next day that he had passed away just an hour or so before that.
At 8.04 pm according to the doctor.
She's been to visit him earlier that day, and because he had had a bad night and they'd given him morphine, he was already quite incoherent and was in and out of consciousness.
Once mentioning to my sister that he thought he was hallucinating.
Sounds about right.

I was calm on the phone to my sister. Mainly because I didn't comprehend and because I was in shock.
How could I have talked to him the day before and told him I'd talk to him soon, and now he was gone?
I cried later that day, and although I felt relieved for him that he was spared a long period of suffering, I also felt all kinds of other emotions.
My big brother. Gone. It's still all very bizarre and surreal.

Yes, I have another half-brother. But this is the one I grew up with.
The one that was there when I was born, and who saw me grow up.
The brother who I shared my life with until he moved out of my parents' home many years ago.

Both my parents passed away years ago, and I've always felt like the death of my mother was the worst. It came unexpectedly, while my fathers' death was a relief in many ways.
But nothing could have prepared me for losing a sibling.
Sure, he was much older than I was, but still too young.
One year exactly before his retirement.
He already had plans to keep working the same job but freelance, once retired.
He lived for his job.
Sometimes I think his colleagues knew him better than we did.
They probably did.

But nevertheless, nothing could have prepared me for this.
Being an orphan is one thing, especially when your parents die when they're already a bit older.
But losing a brother is something of a different kind...A different kind of loss.

My sister is now trying to hold it together and arrange all that needs to be arranged.
The funeral arrangements which he took care of ahead of time, having learned a valuable lesson from the death of my father, who hadn't...
But still. It all comes down to her now. And we will both be alone mourning our brother on the day of his funeral.
She in person, and I online.
Not the same thing.
She's visiting in March, together with my eldest and her boyfriend so I want to arrange a shaman for a Mayan ceremony for him. Something to do together as a good-bye.

Good-bye is so final all of a sudden.

Anyway. I wrote a piece for a funeral speech from me. It will be read by a stranger but that's OK.
It's written in Dutch, so I'll translate it loosely.

My Big Brother

Not always as close or close together,
but still reminiscing about the old times was always nice.
We've been through a lot together, sometimes to laugh and sometimes to cry.
And sometimes to cry with laughter.

As our big brother, you were always there for us.
Throwing snowballs together till our fingers were cold and our lips were blue,
on the ice whenever possible, or walking the dog.
Memories that we look back on with much fondness.

We shared a piece of a century, and the next.
We shared a piece of history.
You take another piece with you.
A history with questions that will never be answered.

Rudy, our big brother, there was still so much to do,
so much to say
so much to ask.
So much…
But there was no time because you had to go.
For you, there is no more pain and suffering.