Day 2 – Forgetting.

After 2 full days, my brother was released from the confines of the hospital, restraints (combative with nurses), and covid exposure. He claims they wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom. They have a different version of the story. He forgets people can compare notes.

I’m terrified of even getting a cold, and now I wear 3 masks and gloves in my own house.

He is quarantined in my extra bedroom with a private bathroom and concierge service. For the first day, he kept wandering downstairs without his mask to ask me questions he could easily text. Once, he got ice before I could stop him and I wondered how to disinfect a freezer full of food. I remind myself he can’t remember the rules yet, such is his diminished capacity.

Today has been better. No threats required for his 2nd AA zoom. Tiny successes. But everything else he forgets.

“Stay upstairs.”

“Take your meds.”

“Leave your dishes outside the door.”

“Wear your mask as if you care what happens to me.”

It must be horrible to be treated this way. To be a grown man spoken to like an infant. Dependent on a sister you never particularly liked.

But he’ll forget. He once told me he wished Ted and Robin had gotten together on How I Met Your Mother. When I told him they did indeed end up together, he laughed, “That’s what you get for being drunk for 3 years.”

I love when people say, “he loves you so much and always brags about you.” Artifice. Posturing. The worst things anyone has ever said to me were from him when drunk; when the truth emerges.

“But that’s just the disease!” you all chorus.

No, that was long before The Disease. I know the truth.

I do not have the luxury of forgetting.