He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Memories of My Third Big Brother

The road is long, with many a winding turn

That leads us to who knows where, who knows when
But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother… The Hollies

The evening before my third big brother Toto passed away, they said he declined dinner and went off to bed early. He never woke up again.  

Kuya Toto was 64. He never married, and for nearly half his life, he lived in the house I built for my mother back in our farming village, and I was supporting him. He couldn’t hold down a job, he didn’t socialize, and he existed in a world real only to him.  

On good days, he did gardening around the property. The flowers and the vegetables he grew were the joy of the neighborhood, and everyone was welcome to pick whatever they fancied.

On bad days, he could be seen walking around the village, conversing with himself or with some of his invisible friends. In the grip of a full psychotic episode, he would walk away from the house and disappear for days, and nobody could find him. Eventually he would come home, dirty and hungry but wouldn’t say where he had been. Thankfully, he didn’t do such disappearing acts often.

Sometimes he would lock himself up in his bedroom, but stood guard near a small peephole he carved out of the wall, where he could observe the activities outside. He was convinced that someone or something was coming to get him. The only person he trusted was our mother, and later, our big sister.  

The one time he actually agreed - or more precisely, was physically forced - to go to the doctor, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. 

My brother refused to go to the doctor ever again and no one was able to make him. He never acknowledged his condition. He knew the stigma attached to mental illness. (Villagers talked about people like him behind their backs while exchanging conjectures as to which evil spirits (engkantos) could have possessed them. Word was that my brother may have inherited the same spirit that took possession of a neighbour, long dead, who used to haunt the banana groves brandishing his wooden sword and loudly challenging imaginary enemies to a duel.)  

My family and I knew otherwise. I’ve researched paranoid schizophrenia extensively and found that it was caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, and can be medicated, even if not cured. It can be hereditary, or be triggered by stress and other environmental factors.  

After my mother died, I requested my big sister and her husband to move into the house so they could keep him company. My sister, who’s now 74, made sure that he had everything he needed, and reported things back to me. Whenever I prayed about my brother, I always asked that he would at least stay physically healthy or go early and without pain, because I worried about him eventually having to live alone. God had now answered my prayers and I'm grateful, but it didn't make the loss any easier.  

Before schizophrenia claimed the best of him, Kuya Toto was smart, ambitious, and good looking. My other older siblings used to tease me that I was his junior female version, (ahem) but then again, only to point out my bad posture and quick temper, things that I had in common with the guy.

Kuya Toto was also a good teacher and a compassionate man. A self-taught first-rate electrician in his younger days, he helped many of his friends get jobs in Manila and trained them to be electricians, like himself. Those whom he trained became trade electricians, good enough to work even in the Middle East.  

One day about thirty years ago, my fourth big brother Fernando had a jeepney accident which landed him in the hospital for weeks. This event seemed to have triggered something in Kuya Toto’s brain and he was never the same again.  

Today I grieve for his wasted life and for his unrealized potentials. If not for schizophrenia, he could have achieved whatever he wanted.

But today I also rejoice at the memory of the times he spent with me when I was growing up. I was the youngest child in the family, and he was eight years older. I remember being three years old, playing by the side of the creek where he and Fernando were swimming. One of them dived and accidentally toppled me into the deep pool along with them. I nearly drowned. Kuya Toto grabbed me and put me back up onto the ledge and said, “I’m going to teach you how to swim.” He then showed me how to float, ‘like a dead person’; how to dive; and how to paddle with my arms and kick my legs properly.

He taught me that the water was my friend.  

Kuya Toto tried his best to turn me into a little warrior.  When I was four, he built me an arrow gun from pieces of bamboo and taught me how to shoot accurately. I was very accurate. The first time I let my arrow fly, I hit his leg. He trained me to drop mangoes off a high tree with my sling shot. He said ‘aim for the stem, not the fruit.’ I was happy to hit the fruit. When he was older and became interested in the martial arts, he instructed me on the rudiments of judo and karate. He showed me how to pull a balisong - a local fan knife - out of my pocket and have it unlocked and ready in 3.5 seconds.  ‘Watch me: One. Two. Three!’ He even constructed for me a sort of weapon he called a chaku, made of two wooden sticks attached to each other with a metal chain, and demonstrated how to swing the end stick as fast as they did in the movies, without strangling himself. He would draw a target mark on a green coconut and dare me to hit it with the tip of my chaku.  

He taught me focus and concentration.

He made me fearless. 

After he went off to study in the city, he only visited with us on holidays. He would bring treats like peanut butter and cookies whenever he came home, and would tell me and Kuya Fernando endless stories about city stuff, like the wired contraption where one dialed some numbers and be able to talk to someone far away. Other times he would serve us triangle-shaped scrambled eggs and other things like that.

He taught me that there was another world worth exploring outside the village.  

We didn’t hang out very much after we grew older. He got a construction job in Manila, and I did my own things. I went to college, dropped out after two years and got married. Many years later, I separated from my husband and came home to mother with my three little daughters. After failing to find a good job locally, I decided to work as a nanny in Singapore. It was around the same time that his schizophrenia reared itself, and he ended up coming home and living with our mother as well.

On medication during the early years of his disease, he could do some contractual electrician work around our area, while he helped my mother look after the girls. This time around, although he was still a good teacher, he also had become a stern disciplinarian. I heard that when the girls were little, he oversaw their daily activities like a drill sergeant. 

He taught my daughters self-discipline.

When I thought about my years of absence from my children’s lives, I’ve concluded that they turned out alright, partly because Kuya Toto was around to look out for them, in his own paranoid kind of way.  

I've decided not to go home for Kuya Toto’s funeral because I’m in the middle of launching a big project. I know he would understand. Besides, I’ve let my children take over. My two older daughters who live in the Philippines have gone home to the village to organize his burial services. They got him some really nice flowers and hosted a big festive memorial, one that included the fourth and ninth day celebrations. It’s a village tradition. My youngest daughter who lives in Washington, USA, paid for most of the expenses. These girls loved their Uncle Toto. He was around during most of their childhood.

Although none of us became electricians, a big part of my third big brother's legacy resides in the things he taught my daughters and me.