I Stopped Judging My Brother When He Came Home In A USPS Box.

It was a cold January morning. The grey skies outside matched the heavy gloominess I felt inside. From the corner of my eye, I caught the USPS truck slide right by the kitchen window. My heartbeat quickened and I raced out.

I accepted the 14" x 10" box from the mailman and signed for it. I gauged it’s weight, 10–15 lbs of substance that once was my brother. A whole life of moments and memories now whittled down to a bag of ashes in this little box.

My brother was 6 years older than me and it’s sad to say that I don’t even have a single childhood memory of us ever playing together. I don’t know if it was because he was a boy and I was a girl or the age difference, but our childhoods were like two ships passing each other at sea.

As we grew, distance further separated us. We grew up on 2 different continents to pursue higher studies. He was away in boarding school and then later at college. It was the pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-everything era. We kept in touch through real letters and very rare phone calls.

It would be a long 7 years before we would meet again. His annoying little sister was now a grown married woman. We met as strangers, each unaware of the painful and pivotal moments that had shaped the other during those missed years.

But we were siblings, we had lived together under the same roof for years, shared the same upbringing, lived with the same crazy relatives, kept mum about the same family secrets and had the same set of whacky genes.

Like two halves of a ven diagram, our lives would forever be merged with each other no matter how vast the distance or time.

We slowly reconnected where we left off but it was not all smooth sailing. We had our disagreements and frustrations with each other.

My brother suffered from low self-esteem, a byproduct of his childhood. Like invisible handcuffs, it held him back in everything. Those self-fulfilling prophecies are not an urban myth. They will fortunately or unfortunately come true.

He became what he was told. You will amount to nothing.

I wanted him to look at his reflection in the mirror, and see what I saw- infinite goodness and potential. I wanted him to rebel against those critical voices and show them how exceptional he was.

But he was blind to his salient powers. He believed the words and settled for a life half lived.

We clashed whenever I questioned him and egged him on to push himself more. There were many heated phone calls with both of us fuming at each other and rolling our eyes.

He wanted me to back off with all the lectures and mind my own business. I couldn’t blame him. If I was in his place, I might have felt the same way. I knew that he was an adult, free to make his own choices and live with the consequences.

Besides who was I to fault him when I had many deep flaws of my own?

But he was my brother, my hero growing up. Now he was in need of a hero to save him. It pained me to see his struggles when he deserved so much more.

We kept in touch but slowly emotionally distanced ourselves from each other. Our calls to each other became less frequent and brief. We avoided the giant elephants in the room in our conversations. The weather and my kids were our safe topics.

The last time I talked to my brother was a month before he died, asking him if he would come home for Christmas. “No, I’ll be busy at work,” he said.

Maybe next year, I thought. But there would be no next time ever again. He died a week before Christmas from food poisoning.

I know his death was preordained, I couldn’t have altered that fact. But I could have been a more supportive figure in the few years that he had instead of a judgemental one.

Turns out, this is the hardest thing to do, to love unconditionally without having any expectations, especially when they are your family member.

The overpowering sadness inside my brother made him feel invisible and worthless. I rarely saw him smile. He did not want to be fixed. He wanted me to just understand his human condition and not point the finger.

Sometimes, all we want is to be seen and accepted for who we innately are.

The ugly, shameful truth was that I only stopped judging my brother when he came home in that USPS box. As I signed for his cremated remains from the postman, all the anger, grudges and annoyances I had previously clung on to seemed meaningless. They crumbled into nothingness.

I wanted him back with all his brokenness. I wanted him at the dinner table chatting with us and not in that white box. But now it was too late. All I could do now was to ask for his forgiveness.

My brother was now 10 lbs of matter, one with the Gods and the universe. His earthly problems no more, he was finally at peace. His urn now sits in my mother’s closet, right beside her neatly folded clothes.

Today was his first birthday in heaven with the angels. We released blue balloons into the sky and watched them float away to his new abode. I have no doubt that he is looking at his reflection and finally smiling at its brilliance.

Keep shining brother! Your true colors are beautiful.