I am an older brother who was clueless about fulfilling my role when my siblings and I were kids. Big brothers are expected to show the way for the younger ones, as if we received training.

I sure hadn’t.

Little Gerry Stein arrived on Earth four and five years ahead of Ed and Jack, respectively. The mature guidance I lacked left me like a blind man without the power of speech, leading deaf men who could see.

No one was pleased with this, and my brothers’ dilemma was further fueled by their birth one year apart, which heightened their sibling rivalry.

Since my dad worked multiple jobs, our mother took over the family’s traffic cop position. Life was sometimes like a demolition derby with lots of collisions.

Our mother’s mother, Esther Fabian, raised her four children during the Great Depression, the 1930s. The family lived in a troubled time. 

My sweet grandfather was out of work and alcoholic. His strong-willed wife was the couple’s powerhouse. 

She used her status to tell each child to be more like her other children. This was done one at a time, so all believed they were failing the life she gave them, unlike their siblings.

Call the home a cauldron filled with poverty, starvation, and pressure, stirred with some added bile and desperation.

Esther’s kind of supervision made the kids competitive and unhappy–jealous of the others and desirous of more time with an encouraging and sober adult,

Mom’s only model of mothering was her mom, so she took the tack Esther displayed. When all one understands is how to use a hammer, everything requires hammering.

Her strategy used each of us like a weapon to downgrade the others, not likely to make us friends.

It is not as if no love existed in my home. Laughter was plentiful, too, since my parents had a riotous sense of humor. Still, my mother was broken, and some of the shards of her anger rained on us.

My brothers and I had better times when we played softball in leagues organized by Chicago and suburban park districts. The Stein Boys stuck together and played well.

Our separate lives went their way, but the possibility of conflict among the Stein boys never disappeared until both our parents died in old age.

A basic decency and feeling for fairness survived, perhaps because we’d seen enough evidence of unkindness growing up, sometimes at home, in school, and on the streets with buddies. Our folks’ commitment to justice offered an abstract, imperfect direction.

Dad had his wife on a pedestal, and Mom was a talented rationalizer, caught between undiagnosed depression and anger.

The shadow of our grievances waited to be fixed. It had no expiration date. But in our parents’ passing, no one was left to set us against each other in a match to win approval.

Eddie, who was in charge of Mom’s estate, was conscientious in carrying out our parents’ equitable wishes. There was now room for us to maneuver and change our relationships.

Not long after, our behaviorally challenged Aunt Florence, a lifelong grifter, began to decline. Ed and Jack did their best to assist her despite her outsized suspiciousness. She was a “chaos merchant,” as Joseph Epstein described people who make trouble for others without distressing themselves.

Ed finally became the target of our aunt’s paranoid delusions, and Jack supported him when she took her anger out on Eddie. My brothers’ kindnesses to their aunt had not gone unpunished. 

I chose to steer clear of Florence’s circus and didn’t reach out to her. Nor did I expect any applause by keeping a distance from her, but when she died, she left me $600,000. Compared to this woman’s animus for my brothers, my distancing made me appear acceptable.

Since I had done nothing to win this surprising inheritance from a woman who pretended to be homeless, I decided to share it equally with my siblings and two cousins Florence had shunned.

Another $7,000 went to the Zeolite Scholarship Fund, a philanthropy my high school buddies and I created.

How did we, brothers of the same blood, set things right? Decades had passed, a waste of time to heal a wound we all carried–a laceration we had inflicted and received, like a boomerang.

Eddie, Jack, and Gerry remained brothers and aging orphans. Our parents had suffered bad times, but encouraged us to do better in life than they did, though they had no clear idea of how we should proceed.

The Stein boys needed guidance from our early days. One cannot know how to give it while looking for it oneself. By now, we had figured some things out and made the lives our parents had wished us to have.

I became the big brother I had never been. I needed to take this position in the absence of our folks and, at last, to tell my brothers someone was proud of them. I said it because it was the truth.

My brothers and I benefited from checking on and rooting for each other as we did on the playing field. We needed to embrace and express our affection. We needed to remember the lives, the people, the time, and the place we had shared: the memories no one else had.

The Stein boys–no longer children–were altered by time and experience, and cared less about fading differences.. Each of us became kinder, more thoughtful human beings with less or nothing to prove.

The flourishing of our affection had always been there in disguise. Ours was a late love, a poignant thing only discovered when family was gone and friends were nearing the finish line or past it. 

A few months ago, I told my brothers to make me a promise: to remember to love their sibling if I was not around to remind them.

The Hindu proverb says, “Help your brother’s boat across, and your own will reach the shore.”