Family Picture circa 1982

I was born in a little town in Ontario near Ottawa.  When it was my turn to arrive on this planet six other brothers and sisters had preceded me.  When I was growing up I thought of my family as one with very few “issues”.  My parents stayed together, all the kids went to college – to me that was normal.  I am thinking now that when we grow up do we all see our family as “normal”?  I expect so.  As we get older we discover the skeletons in each other’s closets, but hopefully as a family we can still remain together.  I thought that would be the way with my family until I die, and I fully expect to be the last one to go.  After all I was the last one here, so it’s only fair, right?  Recently though for some unknown reason my oldest brother decided to disown us all.  My parents have both passed, so he figured that he would receive no flak from them, and there would no longer be an occasion that he would have to run into us.  This was a bizarre shock to us all when we first heard it, because despite all of our “skeletons” we all feel that we are a close family.  There was no real formal announcement either.  One of my brothers discovered this from a casual phone conversation that happened over a year ago.  We all made our attempts to make peace with no results.  He wouldn’t even tell us the reason.  Over the year clues started to rise, one being the fact that my alienated brother is a staunch Republican to say the least.  We all knew about the fact that he is right wing but we discovered through his children that his views (in his mind) are so incompatible with all of ours that he felt it easier to not have any contact with us.  Hmmm…  It is so weird to me to realize that I have laid eyes on my brother for the last time and the reason seems to be solely political.  Now I would not classify myself as being far left, far right or far anything but to me that doesn’t matter in the least.  Family matters.  I now have to explain to my nine-year-old daughter the reasoning behind this schism when I have always told her that family is the most important thing in life.  With the economy crumbling around us and terrorists trying to bring our country down, the one thing I figured I could count on was my family.  Life can be challenging sometimes.