End

It was a weekend, a Saturday, I think. I was still in bed, deep in some REM cycle, when my phone startled me awake. These were the days of a simple Nokia feature phone, the kind that usually sat on the floor beside the bed, buzzing away until someone noticed.

Groggy, I leaned over and picked it up. It was my aunt, her voice rattled. She told me my brother-in-law had hanged himself the night before. She was sorry, she said, that it had come to this. She and my uncle had gone down to my hometown to help my sister separate from her estranged husband, and their intentions going in had been good when they sat down with his family the previous night. But it seems the conversation spiraled into a family altercation. His father beat him for embarrassing them in front of the world. He locked himself in a room, drank himself into a stupor, and ended his own life.

I sat there trying to feel something. Nothing came. I already knew my sister had been going through a hard time, a single parent with no support from her husband, who’d walked away from the small enterprise my parents had helped set up for him, only reappearing now and then to harass her or demand money. She’d had enough of it. Relatives, thinking ahead and trying to give her life back to her, had called a meeting to formally end the marriage. It had ended bitterly.

My sister called soon after, while I was still sitting there. She was sobbing, carrying, I’m sure, a sadness tangled up with other feelings I can’t name for her. I must have asked the right questions about how she was doing. I don’t remember doing it. What I do remember is that the call was short.

My roommate, asleep in the next bed, stirred and asked if everything was okay. I told him what had happened. He didn’t quite know how to react. I told him it was fine. Life would go on.

I’d known my brother-in-law for a long time. Theirs was a love marriage, and in all my naivety, I’d helped my sister through it, ferrying letters and gifts back and forth, the small rebellious acts of slipping past my mother’s hawkish watch. It eventually led to grudging acceptance and a wedding, despite everyone’s quiet discontent that this wasn’t the right match.

Should I have felt responsible then? I don’t know. Do I feel responsible now? In some ways, yes. Not because I could have prevented what happened, but because I could have done so much more for my sister, could have been a pillar for her to lean on. Instead, through the years I spent studying and building my career, I was largely absent from her life, save for the occasional letter. I could have been more present. I can be more present now.

If her life were a book, this chapter would be part two, and this was the event that closed it.