Good Heroes in Bad Places

This is completely off target and out of sequence but it has to be done! Thanksgiving was shadowed by a cloud that has been building and looming for a possible fifteen years. My brother, the son of my mother, and the grandson of her mother (ok no need for genealogy lessons). My grandmother is Bi-Polar, has spent a few days in the mental institute, damaged many lives, and her refusal of medical intervention with this illness has had a great impact on all of the generations to follow her. My brother has very possibly inherited the gene. For most of his life his mental oops have been written off to his drug use. So Thanksgiving came and went with a super mental melt down from my brother that dealt the hardest blow. You see, the last breakdown ended in the entire family rallying to his rescue, finding medical help, covering for him at the office, easing financial burdens, putting aside judgment for the greater good. Bumps in the road were to be expected, but this was an abyss. Back to square one I was nominated to accompany him to our home town of Lake Havasu City to deal with a traffic violation. I was beyond stressed about the 8 hours in the car with someone I was so furious with. How was I going to avoid chewing off his head with my verbal diarrhea of how I gave him a thousand dollars to help his family, a thousand dollars that his family never saw. How he blew off his job with a wife, one year old, another baby on the way and three dogs, a job that I and my father put careers on the line for. After chewing my nails to nothingness and my boyfriend’s ear to near the same, the day arrived. It took thirty minutes or more before we spoke to each other, he began the conversation with how he watches the TV show intervention and cries with the hope that someone would just take control of his life and intervene. How he would have checked out of the world if not for his one year old. We spent the next three hours discussing the usual suspects of family history. We dove into my shattered childhood and his silver spoon. Yes you read that correct, his childhood was exactly dreamy in comparison to mine, yet his adulthood is a mess, it’s a strange mixed up world. I gave him some much needed hope to move forward. For that moment I was his hero. With the court thing out of the way, we had an hour to kill before our restaurant opened. We drove by the house I first lived in when I moved out of our parents home, the home we grew up in, and the Brady house (a rental we lived in when we first moved there, I call it the Brady house because it looks as if it belongs to the Brady Bunch). Heading downtown he suddenly pulled into a driveway and as he exited the truck, he said, “I need to check on Karrie’s dad, you can stay here if you want.” From the truck window I watched him pound on the door. A small window on the door opens, I can only hear my brother’s voice “where’s Scott, it’s his brother in law, where’s Scott, I’m his brother in law, let me in, who are you, why are you here, just let me in” as the door opens “you’re not selling tweak out of this house are you?” After a few minutes he comes out of the house, “Hey, I need your help, come here.” As I come up the walk I smell a familiar smell. A part of my restoration career has been spent in hazmat situations, including crack houses. The smell is heartbreaking. Every now and again I would be sent to a rental home that flooded. The landlord had not a clue what the home was being used for, but exercised their right to enter the property for repairs. It was my task to organize and execute these repairs. Crack houses have some elemental things or maybe they just all blend together for me; a pet that is allowed to defecate where it pleases, a middle aged furry man passed out on the couch, an un-watched toddler with desperate eyes eating out of garbage piles on the floor and has not had a diaper change in what could be forever, two or three paranoid people hiding the stuff, someone at the kitchen table with one hand shaking over his gun and the other attending to his chain smoking, a resident sane teenager that is more than willing to give you the tour because they just want a better life, and an elderly person without a say because they’d lost control of their children and are now at the mercy of their lifestyle. “Here take these to the truck. I have to get all these photos, her grandfathers ashes and a bunch of other stuff.” As I loaded the truck I realized Karrie, my sister in-law, was that teenager, with tweaker parents who just wanted a better life. I understood how she could love my brother through thick and thin, how she also was his hero by overcoming her past. She inspires him every day to overcome his illness, they just can’t see it. More importantly he was her hero, and sometimes just being needed is enough to inspire us to keep doing better. His intuition told him to stop and check in. His love for her gave him the insight of a potential disaster. If he had not stopped all that was good about Karrie’s childhood would be lost. The woman in the house was on a binge and hiding. She was left there by Karrie’s dad after his father (the homeowner) passed away a few weeks ago. She claimed to be waiting for the person who was to come get these things. She was far enough out of her mind to take my brothers word, and turn over all the sentimental belongings (all that was really left anyhow) along with the house keys. I watched my brother carry a heavy motorized wheelchair with two fused discs in his back, because that is what people do for the ones they love. I hope and pray (and all that know me I’m not much of the praying kind) that he follows through with all the help given to him so he can realize he knows how to do the right thing, he just does needs to figure out how to do it most of the time instead of some of the time. More often than not our faults overshadow our strengths. One mistake is equivalent to one thousand triumphs. We all need to remember to always be the hero for the people you love, because for every time they’ve wronged you they have at some point in time have been someone’s hero.