Keep Going Sister

My brother John died last month. The day after his funeral which I did not return to Canada for, I went on a camping vacation to probably the most incredible place I have ever visited away from the glorious gorgeousness of my own province. I went camping on a small volcanic island off of the Izu Peninsula called Niijima. The campsite was free and I was surrounded by a back drop of geographical beauty, joyful surfers surfing, and a group of creatively inspiring hula hoopers hooping. It was in the midst of this overwhelming outer good fortune that I was processing my own greatest inner turmoil both in personal circumstances and in state of mind.

Life is complicated. Death is complicated. Sibling relationships are complicated. Love is complicated. Creating our own physical and emotional health is complicated. Putting up 'boundaries' is complicated. Having a schizophrenic brother is complicated. To be honest, sometimes I am just really `gosh darned` tired of how freaking complicated it all is. But we can`t give up right? or so I am told by good friends.

Who is a person's brother to them? For every person it is a different relationship, as unique as the individuals involved and the circumstances of life they find themselves born into. Some of us don't even have a brother, so perhaps they dream of an idyllic relationship with the brother they wished to have had, sort of like a single person dreams of an idyllic relationship with a partner they wish for.  In my case I had a real brother, a complicated one. I arrived in this world two years and three months after him. It was just John and Kristin until seven years later when we both won the lottery with the arrival of our surprise baby sister Katie.

My older brother's hand was probably the first I ever held on a regular basis, but only when we were terribly small toddlers, as ours was not to be an affectionate or pleasant relationship. I adored him, but the feeling was never mutual. I like to think that during the short time when I was still a baby that my brother John didn't mind me, because from my earliest recollection, my brother did not like me at all, ever. My brother was a reserved and intelligent person, and although wonderfully friendly to others, it was no secret that I was his nemesis. I was an overtly expressive little girl who received a lot of attention from strangers over my beautiful coloured eyes and my avid interest in connecting with the people who crossed my path. But as far as my intellect, I was never in the running for any sort of academic awards and my brother`s aptitude in math was always a great mystery to me.

my eyes forty years later, surrounded by the beautiful eyes of younger women on niijima

In our teens my brother was wonderful with our grandparents and all older people, whereas I loved children and thought elderly people were grey haired kill joys. John and I were night and day. Probably the only thing we shared was our love for and giftedness in music, something that our baby sister Katie would also inherit from both of our ill matched and soon to be divorced parents. But John even hated the way that I sang and used to scold me for it. Now that he is dead, I think I can safely say that I really don`t think there was one thing that my brother John ever liked about me, except that I moved to Japan.

In 2010 when I moved to Japan and my brother John said goodbye to me, he gave me a large and genuine hug. It surprised me. We had long ago negotiated an unspoken truce between us, but when I left for Japan I could actually sense his sincere well wishes for me as I embarked on my great adventure to a country that my family has always had a love for and fascination with. Twenty seven years ago John had embarked on a similar adventure. He went off to Europe and North Africa and worked in England in order to explore and make his own way in the world. It was during his two year international adventure that his schizophrenia appeared, the mental illness that he would suffer from for twenty five years. Schizophrenia, the medical condition that would isolate him from his friends and his dreams and his aptitudes and his potential for success.

family send off to tokyo october 2010, the day i got the HUG

If I had thought that John`s and my relationship had been challenging when we were kids, our relationship as he navigated every day with a devastating mental illness, was even more difficult. But we kept going. We were a brother and sister with completely opposite lives. I had the weight and wealth of responsibilities of raising four children at a very young age, my fourth child was born to me when I was only 24. John had the responsibility of trying to stay alive, and managing his episodes of psychosis, followed by a strict regime of medication and dealing with their many side effects. I watched his journey, he watched mine. We were brother and sister, two years and three months apart.

24 and 26, a mother of four and a young man after five years of schizophrenia 

The misfortune and losses of my brother`s life are too extensive and depressing to fully list, but I was witness to how he kept going. The fact that he carried on despite of everything was ultimately how he won my admiration. It was the most difficult on my mother who would become repetitively distressed as she witnessed her son`s world becoming smaller and smaller. She was understandably tortured by the upset of him suffering from the medication side effects of his parkinsons like tremors, shaking so badly that it was hard for him to feed himself, in additional to the diseases of cancer and diabetes which were added to what John had to deal with. What upset her the most was that he spent almost all of his time alone. I don`t know when we all understood and accepted that John would never finish his degree in sociology, or have a proper career worthy of his intellect, or raise a family, or be fit and healthy and play music the way that he used to. It was one loss at a time. I guess we all just kept going.

Something that has been interesting to me since John`s death is realizing what happens when a family group carries a member who is sick for many years. When that family member dies without warning, the group is disorientated. That person who needed us, to whom we were so important to has suddenly vanished. Twenty five years of our family group`s journey has included taking care of, and including, and being concerned about a person who was mentally ill. By his death, although it was of natural causes, the physically weakest person in our family group who in some ways defined us, has abandoned us. What do we do now without our person to carry? Who are we without our John?

John has always made me re evaluate my thoughts about what we each `contribute`in this world. I cannot imagine raising my four children without a schizophrenic uncle, as he so greatly contributed to who they are so far as developing their compassion and kindness toward others. Using his intelligent mind to converse with each of them while caught inside of a shaking and suffering body, my brother John taught my children to respect all people, including those in unfortunate circumstances.

Now that my brother`s life journey is over and the story of his spirit has been told, it feels like I have a greater amount of responsibility to tell the stories that are mine and yet to unfold. John`s death at 46 sent me into a crisis about my own life, about where I should be, and about what I should be doing with the story of life that I have been given to tell.

I had to take everything apart and figure out if I should return to Canada to be with my family in the immediate coming years, or if I should stay in Japan. It has been a long long time since my big brother John has held my hand, but by him leaving this world last month, as I faced a future without him, my hand has never felt emptier.

So there I was on Niijima at a Hula Hooper retreat in one of the most beautiful settings in the world, trying to sort out what to do with my life again. Fortunately I was with my Jewish friend Liane Wakabayashi, an artist and a writer who created the Genesis Cards. The Genesis Cards are these wonderfully beautiful tools that can be used to facilitate creativity and life direction through the intuitive process. http://www.genesiscards.com/ With the Genesis Cards Liane patiently helped me use my intuition to map out my life direction.

My assumption that I should leave Japan was clarified as a ruse. I will stay in Japan. It seems that I have more stories to live out in this great country. I feel grateful and excited for all that comes next for me, even though I also feel deep sadness that I don`t have a brother back home anymore. Keep going sister. That is how I feel about my life when I think of my dearly departed brother John. In the beauty of the earth I hear John saying `Keep going sister.`

Scroll down to see related videos. One from Niijima, and one from Canada.

The music festival on Niijima with the surfers and the hoopers

My younger sister`s song `If I`m not Dead`with her band Pawnshop Diamond in Vancouver

top photo gratitude to Rob Moreno

The Things that Break Us

Oshika Peninsula Miyagi Tohoku

Today is the last day of March. Winter has confirmed its reprieve and the sakura cherry blossoms are  in their full and glorious bloom. It is the season of new beginnings, of school year starts, and for gathering in parks with friends and family for picnics and outdoor baseball games. March is also the anniversary month of Japan's Great East Earthquake. Two years ago the earth broke Japan while the world heard and watched it being shattered via live aerial footage. All of Japan has been affected economically by the break, with an estimated recovery cost of $309 billion, the most expensive natural disaster in the world, but the people of Tohoku are the ones who have had to live with in the circumstances of the country's brokenness every day since, including coping with the memories and terrible traumas of the events that transpired immediately after and continued during the initial weeks after the disaster.

This month I had the opportunity to visit the Oshika Peninsula, one of the areas that was hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami, a body of land estimated to be 17 feet farther to the East since the quake. The land on Oshika has also dropped by over a meter making previously beautiful sandy beaches a memory as they are now submerged under the tide. On the streets where there were once homes and businesses there are now only remnants of empty lots with cement pads that used to be foundations. The land is owned by local residents currently staying temporary housing units. The owners are not permitted to rebuild their homes because their land is now too low in relation to the sea.

 I went up to Oshika in order to 'volunteer' in hopes of being a little bit helpful, but mostly I was just reminded that I am a complete idiot comparative to those who are walking out their lives after being broken by the earth.

Caroline Pover, an active leader in local recovery efforts on Oshika and the mastermind of brilliant practical help projects such as school uniform sponsorships and the 'free store' gave us a tour of the peninsula. One of the other volunteers mentioned that her husband had visited Tohoku shortly after the quake. A resident living in the disaster area told her Japanese husband that he felt that Japan had been split in two on 3/11. He said that now there are two Japans; the Japan that experienced the disaster face to face and now understands the meaning of life, and the Japan outside of the disaster zone that does not yet understand the meaning of life. This comment made me wonder what it might be like to understand the meaning life, and how that wisdom looks to have come at the most terrible of prices.

It also made me think about the kinds of things that break the rest of us, those who aren't living in an area that has been hit by a natural disaster. It made me wonder if the things that break us are also the things that are bringing us closer to understanding the meaning of life, perhaps considerably more slowly than the residents of broken Japan. The events and circumstances that break us regular people, like the untimely death of a person or animal or business who is a center piece within our world, and the things from our pasts like being victimized by a person in a position in power over us when we were vulnerable, or the separation from a person we love due to circumstances, or being estranged from family members or friends, or an addiction that is drowning us, or the impractical messy things like unwelcome long lasting economic hardships that devour our best efforts to provide for ourselves or our families,  or illnesses and injuries that take us away from our loved ones and our dreams, and events of the heart like a lover's abandonment, or a partner's betrayal, or deeply loving while not at all being loved. Those kinds of experiences of not having the things that we really really need in life whether they be economic, physical, practical, or emotional can sometimes break us on the inside the way that the earth broke Japan from the inside out in Tohoku two years ago.

In the disaster hit areas of Japan where it is estimated that nineteen thousand people lost their lives and where ninety thousand people are currently residing in temporary shelters instead of in the buildings that until two years ago they called their homes, people have gone without many of the things that they really needed and yet because so they seem to know something that the rest of us don't.  What meaning of life can we also come to know by our comparative lesser brokenness and what can we learn from this part of Japan that already 'gets it'?

In addition to visiting Miyagi twice this month, I have also been hosting an old friend from home who is visiting Japan. He and I attended school together from the age of  twelve and we were always both a bit broken. His brokenness was manifested in the perfect combination of hilarious hyperactivity with intellectual brilliance that resulted in frequent detentions in Mt. Newton Middle School's supplementary desk next to the janitor in the bowels of the boiler room.  My brokenness was more along the lines of being a religious zealot, which was and is so much less cool. While this friend of mine was here visiting I wondered who each of us would be if we hadn't both been a bit broken from life.  Is it even possible to separate ourselves from our brokenness, and therefore is it possible to separate the people of Tohoku from everything they have endured together over these last two years?  Who is Japan without this busted up part of it that still struggles with the very basics of life, where idiots like me visit in an attempt to be of  some 'help' like we did last week throwing in a couple of extra hands for the local seaweed harvest, or a few weeks earlier by cheering up the residents with live music and an art workshop? And should we attempt to help anyways, even if they are so much the wiser than ourselves?

Artist Liane Wakabayashi and I at the workshop

 I think it is important to try to help, even if we are not of as much use as we would hope. Because I think it is important for the people who are living with the long term consequences of 3/11 to know that the other part of Japan, the part that does not yet understand the meaning of life, is still their Japan, and that they are not forgotten amongst the members of the rest of their beautiful country or by the rest of the world. Our visiting faces assure them that they are remembered as is  their struggle to recover some sort of normality. No we do not understand it, and we will never equal them in their wisdom, but they continue to be loved by us, and love as each of us knows, is always the very most important thing, even and especially between those of us who have always been a bit broken.