Feeling sorry for someone is complicated
The sound of my brother breaking—what now?
Ever since I can remember, I felt sorry for my brother.
For years, I've been trying to understand this feeling. Before he went to prison, it was mostly pity—looking at his life from a distance, seeing him as less fortunate, someone who didn’t know any better than to make poor decisions. Other times, it was a gnawing empathy that made me feel his struggles as if they were my own.
He's the youngest in our family, and by the time he came along, my parents' financial situation had already started circling the drain. So, my parents moved around a lot and he was shuffled to different elementary and junior high schools.
At one point, when he was in high school, my folks shipped him off to upstate New York to attend a Christian boarding school for troubled teens. Looking back, I wonder how they were even able to afford it, but now, I realize they were desperate to help turn his life around.
My bro didn't ever form a core group of friends or know what it felt like to just stay put in one place and have some stability. Also, his Tourette's Syndrome became progressively worse from the time he was a toddler and grew into elementary school. He was bullied constantly.
So now that he's stuck in prison, my feeling bad for him has taken new heights. When he first went in, I didn’t even know how to process how sad I felt.
Today’s newsletter is about what happened during a phone call my brother made to my sister and me on New Year’s Day. I was struck by this moment because I felt the raw desperation and sheer panic of a human being who doesn't understand his own emotions or how to process his feelings.
But it also made me reevaluate what it means to feel sorry for him.
I was enjoying my favorite walk around Diamond Head in Honolulu with my sister when her phone rang. It was my bro. Up until that day, his phone calls had slowed down considerably. He probably only called once every few months, if even that, and he only called if he needed money for canteen or his tablet.
My sister picked up and the conversation took its usual turn. She tried to convince him to take a program or a class—it was the same song and dance.
But this time, she was trying to convey that we wouldn't give him his money unless he signed up for a program. (I wrote all about this in the last newsletter.)
I could tell she was faltering because my brother has a way of making my family feel bad. Guilty. As the youngest and only boy in our family, he knows his way around being manipulative. Maybe he knows we feel bad for him.
I could tell it was getting more difficult for my sister to say, “If you don’t join a program, we’re not going to send you money anymore. The end.” I admit, my family has major issues around telling my brother no.
I told my sister to put the phone on speaker. As we continued walking down the last stretch of our hike, I firmly told him that he needed to sign up for a program. It was time for him to start doing something in there.
A breaking point
I heard my brother's voice rising and he started talking faster, telling me how he was so tired of hearing the same ass lectures from me. I tried to convey that sitting around all day doing nothing but watching TV and texting my sister nonsensical messages was going to rot his brain and put him into a deeper depression.
Then, he screamed. It was so loud I couldn't even decipher what he was saying. I finally realized he was saying, "Listen to me!"
The sound was so visceral and pained… it didn’t even sound like him, much less a sound that should ever come out of a human being. His screaming gave me chills. I felt like I was being stabbed... a thousand paper cuts slicing up my heart.
I stopped walking. I locked eyes with my sister and I could tell she was just as stunned as I was.
I tried to calm him down and tell him I was listening. I was listening. I was listening. I'm listening.
I told him that I cared about him and that we wanted him to do better. At some point though, he hung up on me and never called back. That was the last conversation I had with my brother.
After the call, my sister and I were in a haze. We talked about it over the next few days because it was so disturbing and heartbreaking. It was the first time he had lost it and the first time we heard his anguish. In his screaming, I heard that he hates his life in prison, that he is stuck, that there's nothing he can do but pass the days as he does. I felt his frustration and his pain.
There's a part of me that believes I should just shut up with all the lecturing because it’s so triggering for him. I should just be there for him. So since that day, I've written him letters and sent him photos just to let him know I think about him and I haven’t disappeared on him. He doesn't write me back but I don’t expect him to.
He refuses to mingle with the general population—well, technically, I don't think there are as many opportunities to do so as a level 4, but he can go to the yard or work but he chooses not to.
Tiny breakthrough?
I look at that New Year's phone call as his desperation to be heard, and I will try my best to just listen. But I also see it as a tiny breakthrough. I have to choose to see what’s good. It was the first time he just let loose. Maybe he needed to scream like that after being caged up like an animal for so many years.
Here's the messy truth I'm still figuring out: there are different ways to feel sorry for someone. Sometimes, I'm just pitying him from a safe distance—"Ugh, I feel so bad, he’s had it rougher than me because he didn’t have the same kind of stability I had”—the kind of sorry where I shake my head, send some money, and go back to my day without getting too tangled up in my feelings of grief. And since he went in, I’ve had many moments like this because it keeps him and all of my complicated feelings at a distance.
But that scream? Fuck. That scream blew past all my boundaries and I realized I felt sorry with him.
The ups and downs of having a brother in prison
Frankly, I still don't know how to handle this. It’s his seventh year in prison. Most days I wake up and I don’t have time to think too deeply about it because I’m busy with my own life. Other days I'm angry he won't help himself. And then there are days when I'm drowning in guilt because maybe if I'd done something different years ago, he wouldn't be where he is now.
Maybe I'll always be on this emotional rollercoaster with my brother. The pity, the guilt, the frustration, the heartache. But after that phone call, I know I have to keep trying—failing, and trying again—to believe my brother is still in there somewhere. Not the idealized version I wish for, but the real him—angry, broken, and struggling, yet also kind, funny, social, and full of life.
Will my belief in him make any difference? Who knows. I don't even know if I can do it consistently. But I do know that just feeling sorry for him hasn't worked for either of us.
So I'm fumbling my way toward something else, something harder but maybe more honest. And maybe that's all any of us can do when we love someone who's lost.
Thoughts on what it means to feel sorry for someone? I’d love to hear them.
