I don’t often answer the phone at 8am on a Saturday morning, but it was my brother showing on the caller ID so I figured I’d pick up… However, when I answered, the voice was female – his daughter calling on his phone to let me know he had a cardiac arrest shortly before and was now in an ambulance on the way to hospital. I remembered a few months back when I had last heard this type of voice tone – it didn’t end well. We quickly gathered ourselves and drove down to the Joondalup hospital to see him and the family.

Despite all the best efforts of his wife and the medics, he never regained consciousness. The initial minutes he spent without oxygen destroyed his brain and while the machines kept him breathing for a few days longer he never ‘came back’. At just 57 his life ended… That’s terribly sad and he leaves behind a wife and family who loved him deeply.

So it’s been a rough few months for the Hamilton families. With Steve’s death there is an added weight of grief now to deal with. It is now a ‘muddled grief’ – because the pain of Sam still has us reeling and somehow we now factor in Steve. I don’t really know how you do that – but I guess we are about to find out. 

———-

I realised recently that leaving Nth Ireland at 10 years old and coming to Australia with just the 4 of us, I didn’t have the same experiences of ‘family’ as other people did. We had a fairly large extended family in Nth Ireland, and I imagine had we lived there I may have connected with them and they may have been my ‘go to’ for friendship. But over here it was us – just us – the 4 of us and we weren’t a highly connected or emotionally engaged family.

As I reflect on my teen years I remember unconsciously ‘adopting’ friends and older mentors as surrogate family. In our home we rarely engaged in matters of the heart and if we ever did the conversations were usually awkward and clumsy, so we tended to back out quickly into safer territory. As a result the people who helped me address life’s big questions and challenging personal situations came from elsewhere, mostly from within the church community. This was the path I chose from teen years onwards and while the biblical description of church as ‘family’ became very real for me, the experience at home – and with Steve – was more perfunctory. 

I have very few memories of the time Steve and I shared as brothers in Nth Ireland – strange – but maybe indicative of how we interacted generally. We did things together – we even shared a double bed for the first 10 years of my life (it was an Irish thing I think…) but we just didn’t experience the kind of intimate connections I have observed in other people’s families. When I think of some of the subjects Sam and I used to discuss I occasionally laugh out loud. I could never talk about that stuff with my dad! As I wonder why this was so difficult in my early years. I’m sure part of it was culture – it just wasn’t the done thing in that era – especially in what I would describe as ‘fundamentalist Baptist’ culture. But a significant part of it was also the relational and emotional coolness that seemed to be so much a part of our family life. We shared a home, but not our hearts.

In our teens Steve and I hung out quite a bit, played basketball together and went on surfing trips and hung out in youth groups, churches and the like. Steve loved the surfing and skating and even shaped a couple of his own boards.

In that time I found myself constantly trying to ‘escape’ the home while he was constantly seeking to experience a warmer more engaged familial connection. He wanted, needed and was capable of deeper relationship, but I was finding that type of friendship in other places so I fobbed him off. As the years went on I disappointed him a lot with my lack of energy for our relationship – and his ongoing need to connect only seemed to push me further away. It was strained and confused for most of our adult life and while I slowly learnt what it meant to be a family as I hung with Danelle’s crew, it also served to remind me what a fuzzle my own experience had been. (Yeah I just made up a word there – ‘fuzzle’.)

So Steve and I weren’t very close – even if we were supposed to be. Neither were we estranged. We were just two men with very different life trajectories who happened to be brothers. I imagine this is the case for many sibllings.

What I do recall clearly is that as boys growing up, Steve was the kind, sensitive and generous one. I vividly remember a day when we both had been given bags of lollies. Even though I already had my own bag, Steve asked if I wanted some of his – a very kind and genuine gesture – and I accepted, but with absolutely no intention to reciprocate. In those early years Steve was the kind of person you would hope your kids would turn out to be. Me, not so much…

As well as as being kind and gentle Steve was also very slightly built and emotionally sensitive. He became a target for bullies at school who knew they could get a rise out of him with virtually no consequences. This bullying wounded him and it continued throughout his life in various places. We didn’t know it at the time, but Steve had a condition called Kleinfeldters Syndrome, (meaning he had an extra ‘x’ chromosome) and as a result had fewer male characteristics and did not develop during puberty as other boys did.  

As well as having an impact on his physical appearance the condition directly impacted his academic capacity. Steve struggled at school, and left before year 11-12 to pick up a job as a store man for a medical company. Steve loved life and he travelled around the world, bought an old HJ Holden which became his daily driver for a while and also a green mini – which we found one morning on blocks on the front lawn as someone had stolen his wheels.

It was only when he and his first wife attempted to have children that his condition was discovered. Generally speaking men with Kleinfeldters have little to no sperm so he was unable to have children of his own. Shortly after this discovery his wife left and he was single again, but this time with the knowledge of his condition.

I can only imagine how devastating that time was for him. We caught up a little, but I was generally too ambitious and busy to find time for him and people he thought were his own close friends didn’t connect with him as he hoped either. His church didn’t give him the support he was seeking so he made the choice to step away from faith and his church community to find another way to frame his life.

Steve wanted and expected genuine connection with people and he sought to give this himself, but few were able to be what he needed. Each time he expressed his disappointment  with me I would step further away, only ever exacerbating the problem. As a soft-hearted, gentle person he took a bruising in that time and as a result he hardened up. 

Steve developed coping mechanisms for the relational disappointment he experienced. Over time he became more angular and quick to bite. Whereas previously he had absorbed whatever hostility had come his way, now he was snapping back. It didn’t sit well on him and I wondered what the young Steve would have been like as an adult if he hadn’t copped the knocks. I imagine he would have been a very well formed man – probably someone I would have enjoyed being around.

Steve went back to study as a mature aged student and achieved a degree in Men’s health, a decent effort for a bloke with his academic limitations. However he was unable to find a job in the field so eventually went back to store work and this was his mainstay ever since. His love for wine saw him complete sommelier courses and he worked a second job offering wine tastings in liquor stores. Steve loved his wine and food.

He was committed to looking after his wife and his inherited family and he was doing the best he could. He was a good bloke.

Life didn’t deal Steve a great hand and he had his fair share of struggle. The last few years have been more peaceful between us as we have both settled into the knowledge that we will be connected by family, but its unlikely we will hang out as close friends.

As I reflect back on our 57 years of relationship I do regret that I wasn’t better able to connect with him as he needed. As an alpha male type I tended to seek out and hang with the other A types and that description never fitted Steve. Sadly the immaturity of those early years set a pattern from which we never recovered, despite Steve’s efforts to the contrary.

When Steve died he was probably about as content as I have seen him over the whole course of his life. He was with a woman he loved deeply and who loved him, he inherited a family who he gladly embraced as his own and he had settled into a job that he enjoyed. 

When I look at Danelle’s family I see a depth of connection that is quite foreign to me. It took me a long time to engage well with them because I just hadn’t ever seen family in that way. I feel like I have learnt how to be a decent human being largely from the love and consistent teaching of my wife. Over the years my own abrasive edges and sharp tongue have mellowed as she has taught me better ways to relate. I really wasn’t very good at ‘being human’ for a long time.

The last time I saw Steve was for lunch at a local cafe. He wanted to catch up with Danelle and I after Sam’s death, to check in and see how we were going. We chatted for an hour or so, but nothing about Sam. I wondered if he was just going to pass over this monstrous elephant or if maybe we should raise it. Then red faced and a bit awkward, he asked how we were doing since Sam’s death. I realised he probably wanted to ask this all the time we were there, but it just wasn’t a part of the way we normally engaged. Our ‘rules of engagement’ didn’t generally include heart conversations, but I was so glad he pushed thru. What followed was a genuine and caring conversation as we shared our pain and he quietly listened. It was a good final memory. 

As with Sam, it’s hard to imagine that he will never be around again – that my only sibling in the world has died and that any possibility of a more significant relationship has ended. There’s a genuine sadness there that I feel now as an older, ‘second half of life’ man that wasn’t there in my younger self absorbed days. 

Steve’s was a genuinely good guy, who struggled bravely through life and who brought a lot of love to his own family and he will be missed by all of us. 

(Photo credit to Ben Chipper – an old mate of Steve’s)