I’ve (Finally) Stopped Wishing My Brother-in-Law Dead
By: Jan M Flynn
Tags: Betrayal, Relationships, Family, Forgiveness, Love

I’ve (Finally) Stopped Wishing My Brother-in-Law Dead

Photo by Alison Courtney on Unsplash

I’m only human

More to the point, I’m a female human of a certain age, long schooled in the importance of niceness. Niceness and emotional honesty only go hand-in-hand when life’s waters are calm and shallow. So when, ten years ago, it developed that my brother-in-law had been cheating on my sister for about a dozen years, I was cast among storm-tossed waves, far past the breakers of niceness and hopelessly over my head.

Let me be clear about the cheating: I’m not talking about an affair here and there. I’m talking full-tilt, sex-addict-level, hound-dog-lust fests with a web of anonymous women. Some of them were professionals, which explains why my sister drove around with the bumper of her minivan secured to the chassis with electrical tape despite her husband’s thriving business and her own teaching career.

Long-lasting deceit has tentacles

It’s not just about shagging other people on the side; it’s the accretion of layers of lies that prop up the ability to cheat without a trusting spouse catching on. Especially when that armature of deception is constructed so that the trusting spouse is led to believe that her sense of something wrong in her marriage is simply her neuroses kicking in, her need to make something out of nothing, her problem.

If she, for instance, wondered aloud why she had to drive a wreck of a car when business was so good, well, that was her being demanding, or not understanding the realities of running a small business, or he might point out that she was notoriously bad at math. Meanwhile, he kept an opaque grip on the family finances, all part of taking care of her and the kids. Gaslighting, you could call it, although that term seems to lack the gravitas for such deep duplicity.

Did I suspect my bro-in-law of fooling around (again, far too light a term)? No, I did not. Nobody did, except for one of his buddies who we learned was his accomplice. My BIL had always been reserved and somewhat socially awkward, but as the years went by I observed him becoming more distant, less easy to talk to, more likely to seethe at family dinners until he erupted in out-of-nowhere rants that tended along right-wing lines. Also, he drank more.

But a hound dog? No way; not this guy. He was steady as a rock. Not an easy person, but one with integrity; someone you could count on when the chips were down. My sister is seven years my senior, so he’d been part of our family since the two of them had started seriously dating when I was fourteen. He was foundational to my sense of what a good man was, especially since the father my sisters and I grew up with was so clearly not.

Learning of the cheating didn’t only shatter my sister’s world

The revelation of my brother-in-law’s tawdry behavior — discovered by his eldest son — went off like a bomb. It rocked the foundations of the extended family, sending shock waves among us, sweeping into its wake my sister’s whole social circle.

I was appalled and furious, but kept that to myself. My sister was too shattered to withstand it, just as she was in no shape to endure some of her friends’ ill-concealed judgments. She had to know what was going on, went their thinking, needing to believe nothing like this could happen to them. How could she not? If any man did that to me, I’d . . .

The last thing she needed was me piling on. She met the wreckage of her life with as much grace as she could. She arranged a family intervention and packed her stunned spouse off to a clinic that purported to treat sex addiction. But she made it clear that their nearly 40-year marriage was over. Living three states away at the time, I did what I could to support her, spending hours on the phone as she aired out her bewilderment and sadness, which slowly, ever so slowly, coalesced into fury.

Privately, I wondered what I was supposed to do with my load of rage. I was brought up in the Christian tradition, and I knew the approved path was forgiveness. I’d always agreed with it in principle and in practice. But I’d never faced this level of outrage to my sense of justice, at least not that touched me so closely and yet not directly.

It was complicated

I could not, as some of my sisters’ friends had apparently done, simply write him off as an asshole. This was the man who had never missed his sons’ games or meets, the man who was always willing to open his home to all of us who traveled from different points of the state to gather for holidays or family celebrations, the man who delighted in shepherding his family on adventurous, life-expanding travels. He was my sons’ uncle, part of the bedrock of their lives, and part of mine.

Maybe, I thought, sex addiction was a real thing, a force outside his control. Could he be blamed for an illness, including a mental, spiritual, or even moral illness? Being a compulsive cheater hardly made him unique or a monster: the philandering husband is a stock character in Western culture, a subject of wry humor.

And this was my sister’s tragedy, not mine. Were my BIL’s transgressions even mine to forgive? I tried to take my cues from her as she deflected his pleas to resuscitate the marriage yet treated him with dignity. She refused to dismiss him as a villain. He’d screwed up, big time, but there was more to him than his scummiest moments. Surely I could take a similar stance.

I read about forgiveness. I mused over quotes from spiritual teachers and people far wiser than I. Maya Angelou said, “You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, ‘I forgive. I’m finished with it.’” Mahatma Ghandi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.”

I wanted to be strong, and I really wanted to be finished with it.

But, a dozen years?

That was the wave that kept plunging me under. This wasn’t a stupid mistake, or someone going off the farm for one or two dalliances. Nor was it a long-term affair with another person, which while damaging and hurtful, would have at least seemed more understandable, more defensible.

This was twelve years — twelve years — of indiscriminate sex with, apparently, any woman who was willing or for rent. Those twelve years contained so much shared history: graduations, celebrations, family crises, his parent’s deaths, my mother’s death, weddings. All of those memories were now tinged with a darker tone, one that began to seep into my world view.

If this laconic, devoutly Catholic, nose-to-the-grindstone man could treat women like kleenex and my sister like a fool, what did that imply about men in general? Was his view of women the common template? All the billboards and magazine ads, the TV spots featuring lushly sexualized women, the ubiquitous, stupid media I’d grown inured to —suddenly they weren’t just crude and annoying. It was as though I’d finally discovered a cruel joke that one-half the world was playing on the other half while laughing at our failure to catch on.

As much as anything, I resented the undermining of my sense of safety and trust. Yet Nelson Mandela said, “As I walked out the door that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” I didn’t want to be stuck in a prison of my own making.

Our other sister took the high road

She and her husband, who is a practicing Buddhist, were willing if not eager to forgive the now-ex BIL. They invited him to their home to spend the night, to hear what all this was like for him. They saw this as doing their part to promote healing and to avoid taking sides.

The way I saw it, the one who’d created the chasm was my ex-BIL, and if there were sides now, I was firmly on my sister’s. But we were all on our own paths here. It wasn’t my place to judge. The other sister’s son was getting married. It was a big wedding, a destination ‘do, and the whole clan was invited. Including my former brother-in-law.

I hadn’t laid eyes on him since The Revelation. He showed up looking dapper, better dressed than he ever had when my sister would plead with him to wear something other than a short-sleeved shirt and Tevas to, say, my wedding. He greeted me cheerfully, the resonance of his voice summoning thousands of memories reaching back for forty years.

I didn’t mean to be so abrupt, but the situation was awkward and confusing. He seemed surprised at my reluctance to play catch-up. When he mentioned his concern for my sister, I turned away to take a long pull on my sauvignon blanc. He took the hint and retreated. And that was that; the guest list was large enough that I didn’t run into him for the rest of the festivities. When I got back home, I felt things had gone about as well as they could. I was moving forward on the forgiveness path.

But a week later my sister called me, sounding shaky

She was having trouble recovering from the wedding. It turned out that her ex had chosen that occasion to assure everyone that his life was going much better, really well, in fact — so well that he had a lovely new girlfriend!

He’d wanted to bring the new GF with him, but she wasn’t sure she should come. Reports were that he was mystified at the lack of enthusiasm in response to this announcement. My sister sounded the way you’d expect a person to sound who’d just had her recently healed leg re-broken.

When the phone call ended, my husband — a man who has never failed to be worthy of mine or anyone else’s trust — took one look at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I remember my words:

I am so grateful at this moment that my thoughts do not have the power to make things happen. I have seen someone die, and I know how final and irrevocable and terrible it is. And at this moment, I wish my former brother-in-law would DROP DEAD RIGHT NOW. God help me, but I mean that with all my heart.

“White or red?” asked my better half as he retrieved a wine goblet from the cupboard.

That level of rage tips from cleansing to toxic very quickly

Releasing my ire was cathartic, but fraught. It was like letting a wild animal out of a trap. It needed its freedom to retreat to native ground, but it was prone to attack me instead as I stood there with my hand still on the cage’s latch.

I found myself ruminating about ex-BIL, wallowing in fantasies of perfect justice, waking from dreams of Old Testament-style retribution. It was not a comfortable place to be. I read what Oprah Winfrey had to say: “True forgiveness is when you can say, ‘Thank you for that experience.’”

I had horrible, dark thoughts. I wished him ill, in many imaginative and ugly forms. It wasn’t satisfying; it offered no relief and merely kept the pain alive. But I couldn’t pretend I felt otherwise. I was so, so not ready to thank him for the experience.

Eventually, I settled on forgiving myself. I was surprised at the result. Acknowledging my feelings as limited, human, and understandable allowed something in me to shift. The anger and betrayal didn’t disappear, but I no longer marinated in it. It took up less and less space in my psyche.

And then, time happened

One of the gifts of getting older is simply sticking around long enough for some of life’s bitter dregs to settle out. Ten years on, the ex-BIL is a broken old man, riddled with ill health and the onset of dementia. He is also saddled with the GF who, it turns out, is at least as dysfunctional as he is. She makes his life miserable, but he’s too far gone to jettison her. I think of her as The Limpet.

There was a time when I would have seen his Limpet burden as payback. But not now; I take no joy in it, no schaudenfreude. He’s too diminished, too vulnerable, too sad. What good does his suffering do anyone?

Anyway, he’s not my problem. I need my energy for my sister, who is now in the throes of a rare, incurable, progressive neurological disease. There was a time when I would have liked to blame her condition on him. But I’ve lived too long not to acknowledge the fearful randomness of life. Shit happens.

My death wish has died of old age

Some conflicts are outlived rather than resolved. It doesn’t mean I’m all good with my former BIL. I feel no resurgence of love or affection for him. Bygones may be bygones, but I’d be perfectly happy if I never saw him again.

On the other hand, if I were to encounter him, I wouldn’t be consumed with a desire to settle any score. I’m done with all that, and it’s a quiet relief. My regard for humankind is no longer tainted by what once lodged in my heart. He’ll most likely outlive my sister, and that’s weird, but that’s life. May he live in peace, to whatever extent he can.

I don’t know if this meets Oprah’s test for true forgiveness. I haven’t thanked him in my heart for the experience. But I am finished with it. And I do feel stronger.