OPINION | It's Never Too Late to Tell A Family Member You Love Them, Until It Is

After my brother's unexpected death, I'm regretting the words I left unspoken. Despite our present polarization and political turmoil, we must create space for gratitude.

by Marcus Harrison Green

(This op-ed has been copublished with The Seattle Times.)

Thanksgiving is the day I speak to the dead.

It's a ritual that began last year, the first Thanksgiving Day without my brother D'Marcus. No, there is no seance with the supernatural, nor summoning of spirits, just a jangle of regrets.

There's my voice saying all the words I miserly held close while he was alive, asking him question after question even as I know each will go unanswered. It's an absurd practice but I go on anyway, pressing him as to why he never got on the straight and narrow sooner? Why did he hide his struggles from his family? Why did he feel the need to live in a cramped trailer with a generator as his sole source of warmth? A generator he would turn on one awful October night only to never wake up again, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

You would think in this morbid monologue that answers would be less than forthcoming. They arrive, however, in the form of rival questions.

Would you have taken the time to actually listen to what I had to say? Would you have only given me scraps of your time while everything else devoured the bulk of it? Would your concern for me have stopped at the point where your constant disappointment with me began?

These, too, go unanswered, mainly because I'm scared to confront them.

Biologically my cousin, my parents adopted D'Marcus when his mother could not overcome drug addiction. He was 4 and I was 13. Like most children who experience an abrupt life disruption, I handled his addition to our family terribly. I remember praying for another family to take him.

At that age, I still believed that love was something finite and there was only so much of it to go around. With this zero-sum mentality, what my parents gave to him was somehow subtracted from my allotment of love.

Gradually, you of course mature enough to recognize the faultiness of this thinking. You learn how abundant love is, witnessing its elasticity in encompassing the complexity, contradictions, and vulnerabilities inherent in the practice of being human. You learn this, and how to love, by being loved even with your growing ledger of broken hearts, rushes to judgment, reckless decisions, unvoiced apologies, and selfish deeds.

So, I never understand the need to polish away the jagged edges of someone's life in death. As if the tenderness of our memories is contingent upon mythologizing our loved ones.

My brother was not a perfect person. I remember pressing my right hand against a glass window to mirror his left hand when I visited him at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent during one of his jail stays, hoping this would be his last one. I remember shaking my head when he'd arrive at my parents' house during the holidays high and barely able to hold a conversation. None of that made me love him any less.

None of it negates the discipline he displayed in operating the cleaning business he started four months before his death. None of it detracts from him arriving at my parents' house on the Fourth of July with apple pie in hand to contribute to the family meal, bustling with a smile, and drug-free.

It was the last time I saw him alive. I had the inclination to see him before he passed, but never the time. At least that's what I kept telling myself until he was no longer here.

These weeks have brought us conflict in Gaza, and cantankerous city council elections locally. Both have brought division to friendships and families, sending them raging towards a polarity of absolutes.

Worse still, this transpires during the holidays when loneliness tends to peak, with 58% of our nation already there. Accelerating this loneliness is the fact that more than 25% of Americans are currently estranged from at least one family member.

How I envy those people. To be able to tell my brother again that I love him just once more, even when we disagreed, even when we disappointed each other, even when we had each other's disapproval.

I'm not sure who it is, but I know there is someone in your life — a family member, a wayward friend, a co-worker — who needs the reminder today that they are worthy of someone's concern, time, and ear, just even for a while. Even if, especially if, it's hard to do so.

I'll finish my conversation with my brother later today by telling him how grateful I am that he lived. How grateful I am that I got to love him.

Don't wait. Speak those words today, to the living.

📸 Featured Image: Photo via Benoit Daoust/Shutterstock.com