Painted Pictures

One of my sisters told me she could not be in my life because of the letters I wrote her. She said I painted her in a poor light. She admitted she did not even finish reading them. In her words, they were like a sandwich: I would praise her and apologize, then say something that showed her in a negative way, then return to apologizing and trying to lift her up again. That middle layer was enough for her to step away.

I have sat with that description for a long time. The question that keeps returning is simple and hard: Did I paint her poorly, or did her own actions paint the picture? If what I wrote was true, was the problem the writing—or the reality it described? Or was it that we even had to paint pictures at all, because sending real photographs or being in them together had ended so long ago?

I have asked myself the same question about every difficult sentence. Anything in those letters that could be read as negative about her—was it true? I believe it was and she hasn’t asked to talk about them otherwise. I was not inventing faults or exaggerating for effect. I was naming what had happened between us and in the wider family, the choices that created distance, the ways people were hurt. In the same letters I also named my own failures. I apologized. I took responsibility where it belonged to me. I tried to leave room for growth on both sides. Anything named was meant to acknowledge that I had forgiven it and to ask how we might move forward from the harm and be brother and sister again.

The contrast is sharp when I look at the picture she painted of me. To her parents, to family, to friends, she shared a version of her brother that I do not recognize as honest. That picture traveled farther and landed harder than any letter I ever sent. I have had to live with the effects of it. The difference is not that one of us spoke and the other stayed silent. The difference is whether what was said matched what was actually true. Because I was no longer allowed in her life, neither of us could take real pictures of the other. Everything had to be painted from a distance.

Like the rest of my family, she does not know about this blog. That is intentional and, I think, wise. If those letters felt like too much light on her choices, these posts would likely feel the same. But that is not what I have done here. I have told what happened. I have tried to understand my brain injury and how it shapes these situations. I have included my own mistakes and the places where I failed, because accountability is the only way I know to grow. I have not written to punish or to settle scores. I have written to understand, to grieve honestly, and to refuse the easier path of rewriting the past into something more comfortable. That path has helped many of you that have shared in similar difficulties that need navigating after your brain injuries as well. I hope each of you will write your story too, just as I hope someday, she’ll write hers. Or at least share it again.

She has always had a strong conscience. I told her that when she was eight years old, and I know it is still true. I saw it deeply in her eyes two and a half years ago on a night she made it clear she knew she was wrong, yet still could not allow herself to share her life with us openly again. That same conscience does not sit easily with how she treated us and the rest of the family for so long, or with what those choices cost her. Which is why running from it, avoiding it, and staying away is easier than being back together for her. When she is honest with herself about the emptiness of certain decisions, or about harm that was forced on her in situations she might have avoided, the weight is real. At the same time, not everything painful in her life is the result of her choices. Bad things happen to good people. That truth belongs to her story as much as any other.

What she has never seemed to ask is the quieter question underneath all of this. Why were pictures even painted to begin with? Why would this brother keep loving her, caring for her, and praying for her every day since then? Why would someone who has been so clearly rejected, and who has been painted truly poorly by her to others, still love her despite that? Why keep writing her the first and last parts of those sandwiches—the praise, the apology, the insistence that she is loved by him and by God? Why keep writing anything at all? Why would this brother keep trying for people who do not want him?

She will probably never ask those questions. She may never know the answers. But she mattered. Being mistreated by her never changed that. Losing the ability to be together in person, to send real pictures when we were apart, or to stay close was hard on her too, I believe in ways she doesn’t even fully allow herself to sit with yet. The love I had did not require her to finish the letters, or to stay, or to see the relationship the way I did. It simply remained. That is the part of the story that still stands, even after the goodbye that never needed words.

I may never again have the close relationship we once shared so effortlessly. But it was effortless for her back then because the picture was not something I painted of her alone. It was something we painted of us together. That is part of the equation she forgets: the picture of her life used to include us. Years ago I even temporarily made her my phone’s home screen. Now I imagine her camera roll stretches back years without a single image of me, with me, and almost none of my wife or kids. The past cannot be changed. We simply have not been in the picture of her life in recent years.

Perhaps someday she will reread one of those letters and ask the better question—not why I painted a picture of her in the middle of the sandwich, but what picture I painted at the beginning and the end, the parts that held it all together. What the bigger picture of my regard for her has always been. And maybe then she will ask the only question that still matters: how do we get back into the picture together?

Pictures do not have to be painted when the real photograph already exists. That has been the underlying line in every letter I sent her—the quiet hope that one day we could have something real again. Her frustration with the painted images may actually be the same wish: that we could simply be real with each other. In a real photograph, when something looks wrong we adjust the light, change the angle, or try again. Instead when something looks wrong in a painting, we blame the artist. Being real lets the actual problems be seen and worked through, so both people can move toward the picture they both want—really together.