Full Brothers / Full Sister

The night Nana died, my brother, Bobby, called me from the car on his way home from work. I was sitting in our parents’ living room, alternating between silence and tears. Her death was not sudden—she’d been sick for almost a year and was nearing 90. But she had been a source of joy and light and faith and infinite love for our whole family.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bobby said. “We don’t have any grandparents left.”

Or maybe he said, “Looks like we’re out of grandparents.” 

Or was it “How does it feel to have no more grandparents?”

I can’t recall exactly. Memory is weird. 

Whatever he said, it hit me like a brick. Not the words themselves. Of course I knew we had no more grandparents. It was the fact that he said those words in the first place. Underneath his totally matter-of-fact, unbothered “Bobby” tone, I heard a vast acknowledgement of loss. Of people. Of time. And some weird cocktail of youth and innocence, all gone in this moment. It wasn’t just a chapter. We had closed a whole book.  

And because I’m morbid, I started thinking about our parents. If our grandparents were gone, that meant our parents were next, right? Like, no but yes? Hopefully not for a long time? But eventually? My mom and dad are probably reading this going, “Why the f*** are you killing us for your theater essay?” (Judy and Bob Haddad approved the topic of their mortality prior to publication.) 

Because I think about death pretty frequently. Never my own, always the people I love. 

How? When? Where? Will they be ready? Will I get to say goodbye? 

Death permeates Will Arbery’s beautiful and arresting new play Corsicana. 

There’s Justice, who is grieving her best friend and seeing mysterious dead figures in her dreams. But she finds them comforting? And also she might not be dreaming at all? 

There’s Lot, the reclusive artist and musician, still grappling with the loss of his mother twelve years ago. 

And there’s Ginny and Christopher, a sister-brother pair whose mother dies shortly before the play begins. They’ve lost their anchor and are struggling to move forward. 

“We don’t know what to do,” Christopher says. “Like we’re waiting for her to come in and just be like, let’s eat, let’s go to church, let’s... but we’re just little kids.”

“No, we’re adults,” Ginny replies. “I’m 34 years old and you’re 33 years old . . . So we have to be adults.”

Reading the play and then watching it, I wondered what that means for me. 

Does it mean making my bed every day? My bed is unmade right now.

Does it mean putting my pills into a weekly container so I don’t forget to take them? 

Does it mean cooking instead of takeout?

Does it mean not letting dishes pile up in the sink, especially since I have a dishwasher? I stopped to do dishes in the middle of writing this because I thought Ginny would be disappointed in me. 

Or does it mean losing a parent? 

How will I ever be able to load the dishwasher when I no longer have my parents to talk to on the phone while I do it? 

Who will want to hear from me every day? 

Christopher wants a girlfriend. Ginny wants a boyfriend to become a husband. But in the time we spend with them, we don’t see them on a path toward those relationships. For now, they have each other. And I guess I’ll have my brothers, too. 

Bobby and Joe are my half-brothers, technically, but if you refer to them that way, I’ll get very angry. They’re my brothers. My brothers. In Corsicana, Christopher tells Ginny, “You’re my full sister,” even though they, too, are half-siblings, and I felt that deeply. 

For just a few more months this summer, Joe, Bobby, and I will all be in our thirties. Which is to say, one of us is about to turn forty and it isn’t me. And to say, we are older than the images of us I have in my mind. 

Most of our in-person memories are from my childhood, and most of our adult memories have formed through the phone. I’m the artist chasing my dreams in New York. They are in Ohio with wives and kids and dogs and houses, levels of responsibility I can’t begin to comprehend. 

They call me regularly to check in about my work, my love life when I have one, my financial literacy, and my general well-being. Sometimes I take this for granted. Missed calls and voicemails I frequently forget to return. Watching a play like Corsicana, I’m reminded that my brothers have the potential to be in my life longer than anyone else, and I shouldn’t take them for granted quite so much. 

We have four parents between us. They’re getting older, their health less stable. Each one faces a variety of medical issues, at a time when the medical system as a whole is still struggling through a pandemic. I try to be understanding. Doctors and hospitals are doing the best they can in impossible circumstances. But when your parent is the patient, not with COVID, but a bunch of other things that make them vulnerable, it’s hard not to feel protective. Angry. Scared. 

Doctors show up to appointments unprepared. 

Specialists in the same hospital don’t work together, or even talk to each other, to find solutions for competing—and equally concerning—problems. 

And they run the same tests over and over, without any plan for improvement or results.

While these doctors grasp at straws to keep our parents healthy, I realize it wasn’t long ago that my dad, his siblings, and their spouses were fiercely advocating for Nana as she weathered stomach cancer. 

What a difference a few years makes. There are no more grandparents for our parents to take care of. Now it’s our turn to take care of them, and to take care of each other. As Ginny would say, we have to learn to be adults. 

Oh, and one more thing. 

Ginny has Down syndrome, and I have cerebral palsy. I didn’t intend to omit our disabilities, but the more I wrote, they just weren’t the focus.

And that’s one of the things I love most about Will Arbery’s wonderful play. Ginny is a lead character with Down syndrome, based on Will’s own sister, Julia, yet at no point is Down syndrome ever a source of conflict or strife or pain or tragedy. Ginny is a 34-year-old woman who loves pop music, Disney channel, singing, and helping people. She lives with her brother in Corsicana, Texas. Their mom just died, and they are trying to take care of each other. She is part of a family that is healing, and Down syndrome is just a part of who she is, not an engine of the story. This doesn’t sound like it should be revolutionary, but it is. It really, really is.

Ryan J. Haddad is an actor and playwright. His play Hi, Are You Single? recently completed a run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and his new play Dark Disabled Stories will debut in the 2022-23 season at The Public Theater, produced by The Bushwick Starr. His TV credits include “The Politician” and the upcoming FX miniseries “Retreat.”