A recent conversation with my brother set free a long-moored memory of a conversation with another of my brothers. I may have written of this before, and may be repeating some thoughts, previously shared, but then — some things may be worth repeating.
My mother had five children: four boys and a girl, with the girl born in the center. I was the first-born of the five. We were born in March of one year, September of the following year, and December of the year following that one. After a hiatus of approximately nine years, two more were born. Two of my brothers have died, and my surviving “baby brother,” the youngest of the five, is eleven years my junior. I say “my mother” had the children, but of course, my father was involved. I do not credit him much for he was an abusive and often absent father, a subject I may have also shared in this space, but which is relevant to my memories, and the sharing I have done in my adult years.
Many years ago, I called up the brother who was born in the year after my birth. I was adjusting to the results of the wrecking ball that I had taken to my first marriage, and in what was, perhaps, some attempt at character reformation, I had a conversation with Jerri about expressions of love. “We didn’t grow up hugging and saying that we loved each other,” I told him in a phone conversation. Jerri cautiously agreed with me, but was less enthusiastic about my next idea. “When I’m taking to you on the phone, and I think ‘I love you,’ I’m going to tell you.” Jerri died about nine years after that conversation, but not before he grew accustomed to returning my expressions of love. When he felt that a phone conversation was winding down, he would brusquely blurt, “Go ahead and say it. I know you’re going to say it,” and I would tell him, “I love you, Jerri,” and he would fire off “Iloveyoutoo” and bang down the phone. That comedy routine continued until his death.
Jerri passed on to my nieces and nephews our new-found commitment to the overt showing of affection, and of course, I inculcated it in his nieces and nephews. I did not have many phone conversations with our two younger brothers, and don’t remember if I called them with “the plan,” but my sister was an immediate convert. “I love you” comes with ease from her and to her, and she has an abundance of children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and foundlings upon which to lavish our joyful declarations.
Not everyone gets the declaration from me, of course. It is not common coin, carelessly spent; it is an earnest statement of deeply felt emotion, an assertion that I have found the recipient to be important to me, and I want that importance to be known. I take no shortcuts with the phrase, either: “I love you,” is what I say. Never, “love you,” or “kiss-kiss,” nor any of the other fumbling and embarrassed ways we have devised to communicate loving someone. I’m all in, full-blown, nominative singular pronoun followed by the noun and concluding with the second person singular pronoun: “I love you.”
In the conversation with my “baby brother” that started this trip down memory lane, I ended with my familiar close. My brother has had some recent medical challenges and I have been giving him an extra ration of love. I could almost see him smiling as he closed our moment: “I love you too, man.”