Friending My Brother by Michelle Goering

I have a testy relationship with Facebook. I ignore it for weeks, then come back for the dopamine hits when friends read what I’ve written, and I connect with others’ experiences. But I like to complain that it’s not real life, that Facebook makes me feel distant from others as often as it draws me closer. Sometimes scrolling through others’ posts makes my life feel small; sometimes the distance from others is too great to bridge.

But the other day—on the four-year anniversary of my only brother’s death—Facebook was churning out possible friends for me, as it does, and there he was. Perhaps you’d like to be friends with Darin Schrag? suggested the algorithm. You have a couple of shared contacts. I’d rejoined Facebook since Darin died, after a long hiatus from the platform when I’d seen enough ads and had wasted enough time, which I tell myself is why Darin was never one of my Facebook friends. Truthfully, I’m not sure I ever considered adding him when I joined the first time; he was in a different, non-friend, compartment in my mind. But now I felt negligent that I hadn’t.

It was hard to talk to Darin, hard to see him. We’d lived in different states throughout our adult lives. The most salient point is that he was killing himself slowly with alcohol. He called when he was drunk to talk ruefully but with humor about his losses—his wife, his young adult daughter who was done talking to him, his job, his health. I had little to offer; I was swimming as hard as I could in my own messy life, and letting Darin in was exhausting. And we’d both left home; talking to him was a reminder of that distance and those losses as well.

So I’d pushed him out of my mind most of the time, especially in those later years. But here he was, or at least some trace of the time I’d missed, however spotty and truncated by the nature of Facebook. How long, I wondered, would a dead person’s Facebook account float in the ether? My brother’s online self was available to anyone: his words, his images, his connections to others in the tidy catalog of several dozen friends pictured with his account. Facebook had no idea he was dead, and neither would anyone else, looking at his site. He could just be taking a break.

I clicked on his account. The About tab listed his employment status—Self-Employed, though actually he’d been fired and wasn’t working—and his educational institution: the School of Hard Knocks. I smiled, shaking my head. I looked at his list of friends, most of whom I didn’t know. There were a couple of our cousins on the list, but most of the contacts were from his life in Texas, not from Kansas where we’d grown up. He didn’t post much—pictures of his pit bull Rosie, encouragement for his San Antonio Spurs, and comments about the weather and music: 
-I don’t always listen to AC/DC, but when I do, so do the neighbors.
-Every day that I live and get older, I hate summer just a little more.
-RIP Walter Becker, of Steely Dan.  Another great from my childhood, gone far too soon.

Rosie died a year or two before Darin did. He’d shot her after she was hit by a car and her back was broken. He couldn’t afford a vet and was drinking and couldn’t drive her there anyway. On the phone he’d told me it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and that he’d considered shooting himself then, too, but “I couldn’t do that to Mom.”

There were a few pictures of Darin, mostly selfies, some with a flag in the background, some with facial hair, some clean-shaven, usually alone. And then I saw a post that made me stop scrolling. About a year before he died, Darin posted a picture of himself and his lifelong friend Jeff when they were little boys. In it, Darin, riding his tricycle, faces the camera head-on. Jeff is standing behind him on the rusty metal trike’s platform, his hands over Darin’s shoulders. Darin’s note with the picture says, “This is the true meaning of best friends for life.  Jeff even trusted me at 3 (or 4, not sure when this pic was taken).”

I look closer. Darin’s looking at the camera, all business, his body coiled to move. His white-blonde hair is pushed out of his eyes. The photo is fuzzy, but I can fill in the gaps. I remember the blue of his eyes, the space between his teeth. I remember how quick he was, even before he’d grown out of his childhood softness. I remember how his hands felt in mine, how his body vibrated with energy needing a place to go. I’d been happy to have a little brother when we’d adopted him, though from the beginning there were signs that he would break our hearts, and that we’d be unable to love him enough.

And suddenly I am devastated by his death—no, not his death, but all the distance over all the years.  It’s a small thing, but if I had another chance, I’d friend him on Facebook. Not to say anything big, not to fix him, not because I could lengthen his life by even one day, or make him want to change something, or coax him to visualize another life. 

No. I’d respond to his comments with a heart or a thumbs up, and send him things I know he’d think were intriguing or funny, about Stephen King or Lee Childs, about bacon, about the tiny hometown we’d both left long before. I’d commiserate with him over Mom’s deafness and how impossible it was to talk to her on the phone and acknowledge how harsh my father had been with him. I’d report on my twins—Darin’s nephews—as they grew up. I’d count him as part of my group, and perhaps be counted by him. 

I’d do it for me, so I could feel connected to him, less like a casual acquaintance, someone from his past, someone he never mentioned in his Facebook feed. I’d do it so I could feel like a sister and maybe a friend.

If Darin had been my Facebook friend, I might have even given Rosie a thumbs up, though I’m not a dog person and I don’t quite trust pit bulls. The last activity on Darin’s account was four days before his death; he’d changed his profile picture to an early one of Rosie. She gazes at me, her blocky heart-shaped face turned up. I’m a good dog, she pleads. I am. You would’ve loved me, if we had ever met.

Michelle Goering is happiest when she’s writing—or singing and playing guitar. She’s an introverted chatterbox with a background in publishing, married and the mother of twin college-age sons. A San Diego transplant from a Kansas farm, she’s published in Her View from Home, Sasee Magazine, and Christian Science Monitor.