Loss and what is fair

I'm tired and there are tears running down my face. I feel defeated. I don't understand my brother. Its like there's this murky fog between us and even with massive amounts of calming medication, he still is singularily focused on food, mayhem and pinching.

Oh the damn pinching. The reaching out to tear the computer out of my hands. THe grabbing of an ankle that I've already just had pins out of and that still hurts. He ate at 8:40 am and he's wandering around the kitchen wanting more food. He had a snack at 10:00 including another as needed dose of both of his calming drugs.

In a minute I'm going to put the tv on and try to sit next to him to see if he'll attack me or be still. I'll feed him another pudding or maybe an early lunch. Some water. Some music.

My mom is arranging for new placement for him. Two days, two weeks - I'm not sure. He will get on the bus here instead of the place my sister gets on the bus because he was evicted from there for throwing chairs.

Life isn't fair. We lose people we love - not only to death but to disability. Something is going on inside his brain. Schizophrenia? Autism? I don't know. I try to connect and i hit a wall. I feel like a failure of a sister. Even more so, I watch my dogs and my sister try to get close to me and I'm so frustrated with my brother that they stay away because I feel so awful.

This is not a "god I love that my brother teaches me" things post. This is a "dammit its really not fair that life gives us these challenges." Somewhere in this whole equation is my faith that there is a reason for everything but in these moments you wonder, truly, when he was being kept alive on a ventilator, did we do the right thing by keeping him on it?

Of course I know the answer but look at the prognosis for his life. There's very little funding for low functioning disabled adults. He'll be placed in homes that will continue to cope with his good days and bads with medication, time outs and naps and food. THey will be paid by the state and they will take a burden off this family who tried very hard but failed.

We can't put one member above all others - that's not what my faith, my family values are about. My mom, my sister, my cousins - all of us are affected by this challenge that has raised our stress level to red alert.

So in failure there is grace. Acceptance of one's limits. Of my limits. We had to ottry. We hoped to succeed. We did not. We will survive as a family just not the way we expected to.