Another normal life, according to me

     My brother is one of the best persons I’ve ever met. He was so full of life, so strong at heart. He was a playful kid enclosed in a man’s body, and by this story I want to celebrate his memory.

I remember that as kids we used to play for hours and hours, laugh together, fight all the time but make up at the very next minute and keep playing. We were very creative when it came to playing. We made toys out of nothing, we did several car washes for the Hot Wheels, we used to run around in our bikes pretending to have motorcycles, hang stuff on the ceiling fan so when we turned it on they would fly all over the room. We used to wrestle and play karate in his bed, using hangers as massive weapons and play pirates in the tub, make video game contests; you name it. We were full of energy, but my brother had twice, he’d be running around so fast that he would start hitting himself with the edge of the walls, maybe that’s why mom decided to put him on a soccer team when he was ten.

At school he was one the brightest students, straight A’s, math genius, cool personality but strong temper, he could play it cool until someone would try to bug him too much. One time a kid from school started to play a pinching game and he was the target, my brother lost it, he got so mad that he broke that kid’s nose with a punch, but since he was the good student he never got suspended.

We used to fight a lot at home, but that was because we were almost the same age, he was one year and four months older than me. Whenever we couldn’t get to an agreement, we both wanted to win even if that meant war. But mom always taught us that we were brother and sister, that because we only had each other we had to take care of one another. We always kept that in mind.

We were together all the time, if one of us wouldn’t got invited to a birthday we would beg mom or whoever was in charge for both to go. We were super close.

He was a healthy kid, few times he got sick, he never broke a bone, never got to the hospital, the only thing I remember is that he got chicken pox and passed them to me. We were covered head to toes by those things. I also remember he started to have strong headaches but when mom took him to the doctor, the doctor said he had sinus, but nothing else.

There is one day that I’ll never forget, I was at mom’s room, he entered and asked her for the toothpaste, she pointed out to be on top of the sink, but he couldn’t find it, although it was right there in his face, mom got worried and took him to the doctor again and this time was way different. He got checked and for everybody’s surprise, the doctor discovered that my brother was blind; he only had tunnel vision on his right eye. Wow did we never notice?  No wonder he couldn’t find the toothpaste that day. The doctor referred him to other doctors so they could find the cause of his blindness. They found out that he had a brain tumor and they had to treat it as soon as possible.

I couldn’t understand much because I was eight, for me, that meant that we couldn’t play the same games anymore, which really sucked at that time.

So the first thing was to treat the tumor, he got into surgery two times in less than two weeks, but the doctors couldn’t get it out so they he had to start taking treatments as soon as the classes ended. He went with my parents to Texas for the whole summer and that was the first time we were apart.

After he came back from the treatments everything change at our house. Things started to have it’s own place, which was a struggle for a messy kid like I was. My parents had to move everything that could be sharp or hazardous out of the way. But the worst part of all: we had to change the way we played, no more bikes, no more roller blades inside the hose, no more karate in the bed. It sucked! At least he had a cool stick that the doctors gave him for walking, it was red, really hard, and sometimes we’d hit each other playing with it until we got hurt, and start another fight. It was kind of different, I would say, a whole lot different.

He finished elementary school but my parents had to take him to a public school because private schools didn’t have a special education program at that time, which meant we both had to change schools.

I remember he started getting bullied for no reason; everybody would play with the damn stick and all that. But he never made a big deal about it. He started to learn braille and tried to teach me, but I only recognized a few letters by sight, my fingers were totally blind.

That was a new season for him, for all of us. Our parents had to work during the day so during the summer we had to stay home so that was another story, I started learning how to cook, (simple stuff like pita bread pizza or hot dogs, etc) and I was the only one who was allowed to do it. But at times I didn’t wanted to and he would do it himself and spill everything on the counter and the floor. Shit! That made me mad, because I was the one who had to clean the mess, so when mom would come home she wouldn’t argue about it. Since I was kind of bossy many times I felt like he had to clean too, so we argued a lot of times about it but he ended up doing it.

Because he had tunnel vision he had a “Nomad” an arcade game, which was the only game he could see with the sight he had left. I hated when he was all day playing that thing because it was a single player game. I would get bored. And I remember him complaining all the time “Oh men, I can’t pass this level”, I helped him pass the levels sometimes, but he was really good at it.

Another thing about my brother, he was super coward, I was also, but he always thought I was the bravest. If we heard a noise outside or if we were alone in the patio at night, he would start running like crazy until we got inside, we always raced and see who would get first to the house, and every time he’d see a needle or got a blood test he’d closed his eyes very hard and never look. Not me, I always looked and waited until the needle was pushed inside my skin. But I was surprised that he was very bold for starting a new treatment or accomplishing something he’d never thought he could. At this point he had to do annual check ups for the tumor and by the time he turned 16 we were told that the cancer cells were no longer active and that there were no more annual visits. These were the best news we had received in a long time. 

I was the world for him, he was always watching for me, or asking for me. We were still spending time together, we where always laughing and making jokes about everything, but as we kept growing older somehow I felt I was changing and he wasn’t. I no longer wanted to play Monopoly or checker’s, yes, we had every board game in a blind friendly version) or Battleship, no more Spanish cards.  A lot of things started bothering me about him. Since he really liked music, whenever he heard a song, he would whistle it very loud and he would make music with his fingers and make a drum sound out of everything, made me so annoyed.

I also wanted to go out with my friends but he also wanted to go and I didn’t want him to. This kept happening a lot, so that became the second time we started to be apart. He would complaint about it because that meant staying home bored. But it didn’t pass long when he became friends with my friends, he was very good at convincing people, I still don’t get what he did to people that they would fall in love with him very quick. So we started hanging out together again.

I remember going out to the movies with him, it was funny to see people’s faces, as if they had seen a Martian or something. The funny part was that I had to explain to him the visuals of the whole movie, I hated to do that when it was a movie as complicated as Avatar, or The Dark Knight, I missed the whole movie because I was explaining it to him. If it was a comedy, he would laugh so high and sometimes at parts where the movie is not making any jokes that people would start laughing because of him. We would also get free stuff, for no reason so, that I didn’t mind at all.  

I always tried to experienced new stuff with him, although sometimes I got crazy because he was a bit willful and I was always a control freak. Some times I wanted him to do or stop doing something and he wouldn’t care. I would scream at him in the car or at the house and he would simply ignore me. That was a way to really piss me off. He was the only one that knew how to do it. Another thing was that he was hungry all the time; which was a problem when we didn’t have enough money to go out and he would tell everybody, so people would buy him stuff. It was some times a pain in the butt but we still got along.

Talking about new experiences we went on vacations to one of Puerto Rico’s little islands and dad had rented a 2-doors/4-passenger jeep. We were passing near an abandoned airport and they came up with the craziest idea: “Let’s let John-J drive” since that’s been my brother’s dream a long time ago, he was 19 by now. I couldn’t believe my parents, what were they thinking? I thought we were going to get killed. But they all agreed, except me, they made me stay inside the car. They made me stay in the backseat, so the first thing I did was put my zip belt without even thinking about it. And the first thing he did was to step his foot all the way in the go pedal, I almost die and piss my pants, the only pedals he was used to were the racing arcade ones. The car went super fast but I had to scream to not push hard the breaks cause we were going to get killed. But he got it, and because God’s grace is so big nothing bad happened, on the contrary, it was a whole new crazy experience, and a great one; for 5 long minutes, he became the happiest person in the world, and he accomplished a dream that was taken from him.

Another time the whole family planed a trip to the rain forest and we decided to take him, we knew this could be a really bad idea; there were cliffs, trees everywhere and a very narrow and muddy walking road. After an hour full of different intents to walk him trough we finally came with a good idea, guide him by putting with his hands on my shoulders with my father grabbing him on the back, and of coarse my mother praying all the way for him not to fall; not forgetting that my brother was 6 ft. tall and very wide. It took us about three hours to get to the falls but it was worth every step of the way.

My brother had finished school and after those vacations we went back to college for 3 more years and got a Ba. on Criminal Justice. Everything was perfect by then.

Short after, my parents planned an anniversary trip and that was the first time we stood home alone. We hung out with our friends every night, we were having a blast, but he started not feeling well. He seemed a little strange than always but nothing too bad. We had a wedding to attend on the weekend so when we got there, some of our friends noticed that he didn’t look quite well. He was acting slower than always; he didn’t want to eat anything, which was very weird. An old friend told me to take him to the hospital so we went there. It was mid day by the time we got there; the hospital was kind of full, and because my brother had so many disorders it took longer than what we thought it would.

They made several tests to him and midnight came, when finally the doctors called me out and showed me and X ray, it was my brother’s brain and there was a black dot in it, he told me that my brother’s brain was bleeding; that he had to be treated immediately.

At that moment the entire world paralyzed for me, everything was going so well, we had even forgotten about the brain tumor 7 years ago.

I had to call my parents who were waiting for some news; I couldn’t find a way to tell them this was happening again. After I called them the hospital set an ambulance that took us to the hospital where they had operated my brother when he was a kid, the same doctor was there and had John-J’s record. Being in that ambulance was the boldest thing I’ve ever done. It felt like now was my moment to repay all his caring for me. We were brother and sister; we had to take care of one another like mom used to say.

I didn’t know what was about to happen but I started thinking about all the moments we’d spent all this time together, but this was the most important of them all, being there with him and for him.

We got to the other hospital at 4am. My parents flew the next day because they couldn’t find any more tickets. Right when they got there the doctors made an appointment for surgery, the tumor was back. He got the procedure done but he had to take chemotherapy. He recovered so fast that the doctors couldn’t believe it. After that we knew everything was going to be well again.

But this time we noticed he wasn’t the same, the tumor and the chemo had damaged other brain areas and now he was more quiet, and serious, he didn’t made any more annoying music with his fingers, we couldn’t leave him by himself anymore, he was more dependent but at the same time he became more special to us. We had to enjoy the time he was with us because we didn’t know at the time how much he’d last. I was also more mature that when it first happened, I could understand better.

Time passed, about two years, and everything was well, normal for us, my brother was mostly quiet, although really annoying few times but he was sleeping too much. Now all of us had to work, and I had to study too so I didn’t had enough time to spend with him, he was most of the time at home and we had a friend taking care of my brother; I can say we were alright.

My birthday came and my brother got excited to go out so we went to celebrate it at a pizza place and our table was in the second story, the place had no elevator and the staircase were super narrow and irregular (in a concrete weird spiral form). It took us a lot to climb those stairs but we got there, we had an awesome time, after that we went walking all over Old San Juan, he was so happy that night because he finally got out of the house, it made me also happy.

Two weeks after that my brother wasn’t feeling well again, this time I thought about last time and tried not to be negative about it, my parents tried to wait for him to get better but that didn’t happen. I guess they were also trying to avoid another unnecessary odyssey. We were again at that horrible place we’ve tried all this time to avoid, making another appointment for surgery.

Same setting, same people, but different feelings; this time we wanted him to stop suffering, so we were kind of prepared for awful news, but for our surprise everything went well in the surgery. They sent him to intensive recovery room; soon we would have him home again. One of those days we received a call from the hospital, something went wrong. We got there and for our surprise my brother had fallen into a comma state due to an embolus that happened the last night. The hospital committed malpractice.

Sometimes you wish for things to happen but you don’t have the slightest idea of what it entails. I thought that wishing my brother to be happy and not suffer would be an easy thing to handle. But I dind’t know that one month could last so long waiting for something to happen, we didn’t know if he was ever waking up or if he was going to recover well as always. But he didn’t.

The day came; it was 11:30 in the morning. Going to my brother’s funeral wasn’t exactly what I’d expect for such few years of his life.  I tried to prepare but it was saying goodbye to a face that I was accustomed to see every day; he was the person who received me at home all happy because I was finally home, he was my copilot at every drive, he was my game partner, I wasn’t ready to enter.

So when I got there people suddenly started coming and gathering from everywhere. A lot of familiar faces, many of which I had seen in a long time, and some other people that even my family didn’t know about. The staff at the funeral had to open another section because the room was too small for so many people.

The service was a whole different thing, it looked like a life graduation, many of our common friends gave a speech of how they were changed because of my brother’s friendship and by that point something made sense for the first time. I was used to people saying that he was special but I only thought it was in a supportive way because of all of his struggles in life. But it was more than that. I finally started to see it.

For all that time spent with him very few he complained about the bad things that happened to him, those where, “Oh I can’t pass this level” or he would feel bad about splitting something like milk whenever he served himself cereal. They were little things, now I realize that. He never complained about how he couldn’t ride a bike anymore, or never being able to drive or why he had that illness and not some other person. He was very grateful with everything he had. He was very confident about life; he always tried to get the best of it. He never rejected anyone, even though they rejected him a lot, he always listened and I never heard him judging anyone. He always had a smile on his face and whenever we argued with him he never stayed angry. His heart was similar to a kid’s. He was the kind of person who trusted God in everything, and also me and his friends even if at times we disappointed him.  

I imagine now how hard it must have been for him, for a kid so independent, so bright, and so young. I know he didn’t understand well what was happening, much less for me; I had no idea what was going on, for most of the time I took it for granted, I got used to it, for me it was a different way of living that I had to learn to live. His whole life had change from an instant to another. He always tried to push himself as far as he could and tried to fight everything that set him back even when we got tired at times.

It was a great pleasure to have him as my brother, as a true friend, I thank God for putting him in my life. He made me stronger, he taught me to keep going even if times get worst than expected. He helped me see that life is so much more than living it for yourself, its about people, relations, is enjoying the smallest details of it; and I know that a lot of people learned that as well.