I saw a name in my inbox this week I never thought I would see.  Nevertheless there it was, clear as could be in black letters.  My older brother had sent me an e-mail.  My surprise was not at the medium or method of communication; Rick had been computer literate long before anyone else in the family. I was shocked that he had communicated at all.  I had not heard anything from my older sibling in twenty years.

Twenty years is a long time.  Almost half of my life has gone by with nary a word from the brother who was the best man at my wedding.  He had walked out of my life in October 1988, his last communication to me an angry letter, page after page of spiteful words describing in detail the terrible person he believed me to be.

Previous to that letter I had desperately tried to reach out to him, reaching out as far and as well as the limits of my faith would allow.  I think it was the limits that angered him so.  He had chosen a life that was to me a complete denunciation of what had been our shared faith.  The tenets of scripture mattered not to him anymore, or so it seemed.  He was who he was and was going to live how he wanted.  Either I fully embraced and completely accepted the person he was, or he would have nothing to do with me.

What I could not get him to understand was that the life he had chosen had a known outcome.  Multiple passages in Scripture made it clear that people who lived in the fashion he was living were choosing a life without God.  For me, the temporal happiness he was pursuing came with an eternal price tag that was just too high.  It was my fear that if I accepted him completely, if I endorsed his lifestyle, I would be contributing in some way to an eternity without God.  If I loved him, how could I do that?

So he disappeared from my life.  For reasons I have never understood he remained in close contact with my twin brother.  Together they shared a closeness I never knew.  He was an uncle to my twin’s children, friend to my sister-in-law, a welcome guest in their home.
 
Through my twin I heard little bits about Rick, such things as where he lived and what he did for a living.  I frequently let my twin know that I would love to hear from Rick, that if he ever wanted to talk I was available, but I was repeatedly told Rick had no desire at all to talk to me.  Even after 20 years the anger had not faded.

And then the e-mail came.  It came because our mother had died.  Our dysfunctional and damaged by the world mother had died alone in her home, her drunk husband not even noticing until after rigor mortis had set in.  With her death came a clarity that she never inspired in life.  The loneliness that was her last minutes could have been avoided.  She had made choices in life that had driven her children away.  She could have had a family, she could have had comfort, but fear and addiction trapped her in a cell from which she could not escape, so she died alone.

The loneliness of her death inspired a chain of thoughts in my brother, a chain that wound its way to the conclusion that maybe family was worth something.  Maybe anger and withdrawal weren’t the best solution.  Maybe there was hope for relationship after all.
So Rick wrote.  No apology was offered, no explanation given for the twenty years of silence.  Just a request that I “throw him a bone” and a statement that he wanted his brothers back.

A part of me wanted to say that this brother had never left, but I saw no value in that.  I did tell him that the man he had hated so much twenty years ago wasn’t around anymore, that like it is with all men twenty years had brought a lot of change.  And I told him I would love to see him, that distance did not matter.  If he wanted me to come I would come.

He wrote back.