ROTHENBURGER: The special sadness of being your family’s lone survivor

There it was, my answer.

Just as Dr. Goldman’s column was an epiphany for me, he had learned from CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who had lost his father, brother and then his mother.

“She was the last person from the little family that I grew up in,” Cooper said in a podcast. “The last person who knew the same stories as me and had the same memories. Now I’m the only one. I feel like a lighthouse keeper on an empty island.”

Those are the same feelings I’ve been experiencing. I’m the last one of the family I grew up with in small-town B.C. Nobody is left alive who was there, living in the same house, during the years I became formed as a person. As I researched the subject, I found that many people go through similar emotions. As one person said, “There’s no one left on Earth who remembers me as a baby.”

Late in our parents’ life, I sat down with them and a tape recorder and talked for hours with them about their lives, before and after Bernie and I came on the scene, and I’m grateful I did.

After our father Ben died, then our mother Nora, Bernie became the go-to on our family’s story. “Remember that time when….?” I’d ask. “What happened exactly?” Most times, he’d be able to tell me.

When I was a kid, I looked up to my big brother, who was four years older. He was the handsome one, the smart one, the athlete, the guy with girlfriends and cool cars.

There were times we didn’t get along, times he would tease me and times when I deserved what I got but he always had my back. He was a listener, always willing to lend an ear. We shared a bedroom and he made me sleep on the top bunk. That’s about as mean as it got.

In recent years, we weren’t nearly as close as we once were but we stayed in touch. “Melrose,” Bernie would say, “What’s new?” My name isn’t Melrose but that’s what he called me for fun.

When Bernie was dying last summer, I thanked him for being him. “You’ve been a good brother,” I told him.

“I tried to be,” he said.

There’s one thing Brian Goldman mentioned in his column — and I’ve since read what others say about it — that I can’t relate to. He wrote about something called “disenfranchised grief,” which he says is grief that’s not acknowledged by society, which leads to feelings of isolation when a person is the sole survivor of their direct family. Many say they feel alone — and many are. They feel crushed, abandoned, like adult orphans.

I feel none of those things. I’m a lucky man who has a wonderful wife, great kids and good friends. I’ve had a rewarding career. My health is probably better than it deserves to be. My

bloodline won’t end with me and there are lots of Rothenburgers left to carry the name forward. As they say, I can’t complain.

It’s just that there’s an empty place in a corner of my heart that wasn’t there before.

“The relationship one has with brothers and sisters is one of the longest relationships a person will likely have with anyone,” wrote Goldman. “A sibling is a friend, rival, confidant and witness-bearer to one’s early family life.”

Psychotherapist Kristen Bomas says, “Each person who is the last feels something different.” Oddly, she also says, “there’s a gift in being the last.” I don’t even know what that means, but she adds that people feel the “alone state” to different degrees.

I hang on to mementos from the early times — the cookie jar from my mom’s kitchen, one of my dad’s old tie bars, a school pin my brother wore. And, of course, pictures — not the kind people store in the cloud nowadays, but actual photographs, mostly piled unsorted in cardboard boxes. Though I look at them seldom, there’s comfort in having them close. They’re a connection, maybe even proof we were there together.

There’s a certain feeling of responsibility as the only one left — the lone survivor — who can attest to our now-gone nuclear family of four, its good times and bad. I guess I’m the lighthouse keeper Anderson Cooper talked about.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

by Mel Rothenburger

ROTHENBURGER: The special sadness of being your family’s lone survivor

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