Trigger warning: This introduction mentions death and alcoholism. It is also very long. It is also very sad. If you chose to skip it and go straight to the affirmations, I completely understand.

I did not publish anything for the month of July. I apologize. I had just returned to my hometown and was spending time with family, and honestly I was a bit tired and just didn’t feel like doing anything for a little while. So although I wrote these affirmations and even wrote an introduction to them several weeks ago, I never sat down to record them. Then, a couple of weeks after I arrived back in the United States, life took a very sad turn.

My youngest brother, the baby of the family, died. 

The cause of death, to put it shortly, was alcoholism.

My brother was a loving, hilarious, silly, amazing young man. He was a HUGE animal lover. He was an actor, a drummer, a singer. He knew so much about airplanes, and so many other topics.

He also had the misfortune to inherit the genes for alcoholism from both sides of our family, and he died from the condition.

I never knew how serious his problem was. I knew some of it, but not all. My baby brother and I are, well were, 16 years apart in age, so by the time he was really up and about and walking and talking, I was already in college. We stayed in contact, I came home to visit, and he visited me a couple of times in the places where I lived, but we really didn’t spend very much time with each other when he was very young. But we adored each other and talked about each other all the time.

Starting when he was in middle school, he kept getting into trouble with school, but he also kept getting out of trouble. He could charm his way out of trouble so easily. He was very much a charmer. Always has been. Had been.

(It’s really difficult to speak about him in the past tense.)

Sometimes that trouble would involve alcohol. As he got older, that problem with alcohol got worse. He had been hospitalized because of problems due to his drinking. In the past few weeks, some problems he’d had in the past started to come back, and he became afraid of the condition that he’d had before returning.

But instead of seeking help for it, instead of seeking healing, his anxiety caused him to drink even more. Which of course made the illness come back even more quickly, and then brought other problems. 

He was hospitalized. He got sicker. He went unconscious. And a week later, his wife chose to take him off the life-sustaining procedures the doctors had him on, as there was no chance of him recovering at all. This choice was fully with the rest of the family’s support – we were all there at the hospital at the time she made the decision.

I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for her to make that decision. She loved my brother, she loves my brother, so very much.

I am so grateful I did not have to make that decision. And I am so sad that she had to.

My brother died as the sun rose that Sunday morning, with his family around him.

I wish so many things for my baby brother. 

I wish he had realized how serious his condition was. 

I wish that his wife and family had been able to save him. 

I wish that someone knew the right words to say to him to make him choose healing. 

I wish so very many things.

Unfortunately those things did not happen. He did not realize, or maybe he couldn’t acknowledge, how serious his condition was. His doctors, his wife, his family couldn’t make him see how serious his condition was. And none of us had the words to say to get him to seek the healing that he needed.

I wrote these affirmations many weeks ago talking about my own healing, but now I’m thinking about them in terms of my brother, and I wish these words could have reached him, and that he could have gotten the healing he needed.

But they can’t.

And so I hope these words reach me, and reach you, so that we can all find the healing that we need.