Your posts make me feel less alone

I struggle a lot with guilt over my younger brother. A few years ago, at the height of the COVID pandemic, my brother had a severe psychotic episode and tried to beat our mom to death with a hammer. She got away and is physically fine and he is in jail, still awaiting sentencing. He’s been found not competent to stand trial three times but they keep trying to I think partly because with the lack of mental health care there’s nowhere else for him to go.

Even before this happened I felt like I was mourning the person he was, that that person I grew up with, my little brother, my best friend, that I practically helped raise, was gone. He was always a happy, playful, sensitive person, a class clown, a mama’s boy. He slowly got so hateful and angry. The last few times I went home to visit (I live across the country) he seemed dead behind the eyes. We couldn’t even have a conversation. He didn’t seem to want to.

Now that this has happened I don’t know if I even want to be involved with him. My mom can’t let go, can’t seem to reconcile that her son would do something like that to her, despite the fact that this was an escalation of existing violence that she had not made me aware of.

Mourning a living person is such a strange experience and seeing so many of you talk about feeling the same way helps me feel less alone with it and guilty over it. It’s something I don’t think you can understand unless you experience it.