BROTHER CHECK IN: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY

A Facebook friend posted about a brother check, or check-in.

Apparently he’s got lots of brothers, or he was using the inclusive ‘brother’ to remind everyone to check in with their loved ones during the corona virus pandemic.

If you have a brother, a sister, or anyone you care about, what do you want to tell them? Is it more than, “You okay? Good. Talk later.”

As time slips by in slow motion, the distance grows between people. It’s not alway a bad thing. Especially if you’re following their request.

One approach to checking in with someone is not losing track of them. Big families, or small, there’s always the family historian who tracks every birthday, anniversary, every celebration, every disappointment.

Family historians could be writers, or archivists, or teachers. They are usually a little of each, and they have it down.

Some are chatty and like to share. Others are frightened by what they learn and put it away. Most are a little of each.

Important Family History

No matter how strong, or weak, the connections, family history matters. A brother check is part of it.

Start with medical history. Someone always knows more than the others. Learn how ancestors, like Grandpa and Grandma, lived and died. Then commit to living and dying better.

That’s the baseline of a brother check in. Has the past caught up?

One Brother Check In

After my mother in law passed, my wife asked me to call her brother. She didn’t want to call. It wouldn’t have gone well since he hadn’t checked in with his ma for over a decade.

I didn’t want to call, either, but someone needed to make the effort. And the tone had to be correct to keep the call on track. Would I say his mother died, or call her by her name since he wasn’t interested in the mother-son deal?

It was awkward, to say the least, but we got it done. I could have been talking to a stranger on the bus, waiting in line for coffee, or been talking to myself. That was the level of interest I heard.

His best question was, “When did she die?”

If memory serves, I called him a week or two later, and told him.

“She died a week ago and you’re calling me now?” he said.

This is how the conversation could go wrong, but didn’t. I stuck to the story.

“Yes, she died a week ago,” and left it at that. What I didn’t say?

The guy was in his sixties and gave up on his mom, but she still missed him, still blamed herself. That’s what parents are hardwired to do, blame themselves. If you’re a parent, you know this. If you’re not a parent it goes right over your head.

I didn’t call to do a life review, or evaluation, or help project where he’d be in five years. None of it. I called to tell another man that his mother had died, and he was unfazed. Very manly.

The Cold Reality Of Life

As time passes in slow motion, we’re in the midst of an American check in.

“How are we doing? We doing okay? Good, I’ll check later,” isn’t going to work.

During an election year everything gets hyped, the good, the bad, the ugly. But the truth still matters.

The history of covid deaths matter. Black lives snuffed out by police officers who fall back on, “Just doing our job,” matters. Unemployment matters, and so do the roadblocks for help struck in congress.

Voting turnout will make a difference. An honest count will make a difference. And showing a world in disbelief how to correct a leadership idea gone wrong at the top makes a difference.

In finishing up here, I’ll take a moment with the Fox man who said it was no surprise that a seventeen year old with a gun did what no one else was willing to do.

“How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Carlson asked on his night time television program on Fox News.

From where I am, it’s disheartening to see soft men play hard. It’s contagious when one softie inspires another softie with inflammatory remarks.

Men who practice their camera face in a mirror to appear more authentic in their outrage, and they’re always outraged by everything, serve as a warning.

Holding up a seventeen year old boy with a gun as an example for keeping order shows one thing above any other: he knows nothing about seventeen year olds with guns.

I served in the Army with seventeen year olds with guns. Parents could sign the enlistment papers for their underaged kids in 1974. I was nineteen and had feelings for the rifle issued to me. It was a soldiers tool, and I was one of them.

It felt like I’d crossed some border after I qualified on the range by placing three rounds inside the diameter of a quarter. The target was a generic head and shoulders printed on paper, a human appearing target.

We soldiers asked each other if we’d be ready to take a life based on the training we’d received. I was headed for medic school, others for infantry school before the other bad-assed schools that teach death and when to deal it.

The kid shooter had an AR-15, and probably felt the same power we did when we opened it up. The difference is context.

If he’s got a brother check coming, what would you guess they’ll be talking about?

If the police officer who fired seven bullets into another man’s back in front of his children gets a brother check in, what’s their topic?