Brothers Part Two

What I lacked in time with Alby (he died when I was seven), I made up for with Felix. He was seventeen years older, but after Alby’s death, he became not only the golden child in Mum’s eyes, he became someone I revered in a different way. Unlike Alby, I knew Felix in my adulthood.

When I look back, he really was the flying monkey. He didn’t want to be cruel or mean, he just had a job to do, and he took everything seriously. You couldn’t find a more serious person. He was always hyper-focused and loved talking about his work. Today, he might be classified as on the spectrum. We love labelling people now. They must be this, or they must be that, instead of focusing on connection or acceptance. But labels can help us understand, and that’s often the point people miss.

Felix was emotionally inhibited. He felt things, but he didn’t know how to express them. He showed love in his own way: in how he meticulously wrapped and gave thoughtful gifts, how he solved complex technical problems at work with unmatched dedication, how he religiously looked after the fish tank and the birds, none which were his, but Mum made him responsible for, or how he kept fixing the old black-and-white TV until the vacuum tubes were no longer available.

His thirst for knowledge was admirable. But for all his brilliance, Felix was a square peg in the round hole of society. While Alby was out attending Vietnam War protest rallies, Felix was working and studying. He built a reputation for diligence, passion, and his love of solving intricate data system issues. If you Google his real name, you’ll still find him on Whirlpool Boards, former colleagues still speak of his brilliance.

And yet, emotionally, I knew about as much of Felix as I did Alby, despite all the years we had together as siblings.

Felix was logical, Mum often called him “the Spock of our family.” She imagined his world of computers much like the Star Trek series we watched every Sunday night. Those evenings meant a light supper after the obligatory roast chicken lunch. It was one of the rare times we all sat together in the loungeroom, watching the black-and-white screen with a pot of tea, sandwiches, cakes, and biscuits.

I did cherish that time with Felix. It felt like he was never there otherwise, always working or studying. As a kid, I longed for company, and he was my brother. That probably seems selfish now, but there was no malice in it. I just wanted to play a game or be close. Isn’t that what most kids want, a sense of belonging with the people they love?

It always felt like each one of us was fighting internally, with ourselves, with Mum, and for some “normal” construct of a life. We were always struggling emotionally, but in deadly silence.

For me growing up in the seventies, Felix was what we would’ve called a square. While other young men wore flared jeans, worked on their cars, drank themselves into oblivion on the weekends and blasted Led Zeppelin, Felix buttoned his shirts to the top, wore Fletcher Jones clothing and kept pens in a protector in his breast pocket. His hair was always neatly combed with a side part and cropped short, his face was adorned with dark thick rimmed glasses, and he walked like he had somewhere important to be, even when he didn’t. Women, girls or a regular dating scene or even just friends were foreign to Felix, none of us understood that lonliness that he endured for his own reasons.

He wasn’t cool. He didn’t try to be. He liked what he liked, mainframes, electronics, Star Trek, and that was that. To a kid like me, surrounded by a world obsessed with colour, noise, and counterculture, one I was dying to be involved with, Felix seemed like he belonged in black-and-white. But even then, I admired that certainty in him. He never tried to fit in. He just... was and I loved him.

Fast forward to today and I have packed up my memories of him that I scattered around the house to keep him close. I have become so angry at myself and him, that I can no longer bear the sight of the dotted bits that are in memorial. It has just been simply too much to bear. I don’t hate Felix; I just can’t look into those green eyes staring back at me from a photo and feel anything. The only photos that adorn my home, have my family or Dad in them. There is nothing of Felix or Mum. I guess it feels like betrayal, and I can no longer face that.

The truth is that my anger comes from what he did. What they both did. Felix took his life, just like Alby before him. Two brothers. Gone. By their own hands. Over twenty years have passed, and still, I carry their decisions like a weight of two tonne block of stone in my chest. I have tried not to let the grief sour into bitterness, but some days it does. It’s not just sorrow; it is a fury. They left. They left me. They left all of us and to make sense of their absence, to piece together the why with no real answers. I was young when Alby died, too young to understand anything but the ache. And then losing Felix as an adult, knowing him, feeling him being pulled away by his mental health, it broke something I haven’t been able to put back together. I wanted to help him, but he couldn't or wouldn't ask. That's all he had to do....

When he had his first complete breakdown, my sister and I shot over there from our respective states to converge and help. Mum's lack of understanding was as we were to come to know, that was normal for her. Felix had a short stay in a mental facility and it was an echo of the past with Alby, what Mum couldn't comprehend in 1971, she couldn't resolve in 2003 either. Everyday Felix was away, she was relentless in calling the facility to find out when he was coming home, she wasn't interested in his wellbeing, but in her own. Who would look after her?

I don’t think Felix ever felt safe enough to speak. Not about what mattered. In our house, silence was the currency of survival. You didn’t talk about feelings, you buried them. You didn’t cry, you coped. And if you did try to name your pain, you were either dismissed or made to feel like a burden. I think he learned early on that vulnerability wasn’t allowed, not really. Especially not with Mum. Her world had no room for uncertainty, no patience for weakness that couldn’t be solved or silenced. So Felix stayed quiet. He poured himself into logic and systems and order, because emotions were chaotic and dangerous. He showed love the only way he could, through what he did, not what he said. And when it became too much to bear, he still couldn’t tell anyone. Not even me. Even though I now understand that pain, I cant do anything with it.

Sometimes I surmise that it was his last stand against Mum. Where he positioned himself, outside her kitchen window, in plain view, wasn’t accidental. He knew her routines. He knew she would draw up the blinds, like she did every morning, half-distracted from just waking up, not expecting anything out of place. And there he was. I think he wanted her to see him. To be haunted by that image. It was a final message, and maybe the only time he ever really said how he felt to anyone. It was his turn for rebellion, one that took 57 years to show. I am not mad at that.

I used to think time would free me of my feelings. That maybe, one day, I’d wake up and feel something softer when I thought of Felix. But it never came. There’s no resolution. No forgiveness. Just a kind of weary distance I’ve built around him. He left, and I’m still here, trying to carry something he couldn’t. Maybe that’s why I packed him away. Not because I stopped loving him, but because I never found a way to start grieving him.