"Poor James" by Mary Clements Fisher

 – Pity made a sour substitute for love.

Who my brother was eluded me too long.

Mary Clements Fisher relished her careers as an educator and businesswoman and celebrates her current mother/grandmother, sweetheart, student, and writer status in Northern California. Writing makes sense of her mad and muddled moments. She published in Quail Belle Magazine, Adanna Journal, Passager Journal, The Weekly Avocet, Personal Story Publishing Project, Prometheus Dreaming Journal, and The Closed Eye Open. Join her @maryfisherwrites and https://maryfisherwrites.squarespace.com

Author’s Talk

Mary Clements Fisher

When a friend dies, my grief often produces a string of woulda’-coulda’- shoulda’s. When my brother died this past year, endless stings of regrets tortured me. James and I never enjoyed a close relationship, and that haunted me.

The original version of “Poor James” brimmed with tears and left a twisted knot in my stomach. I almost deleted the entire document. However, with encouragement and questions from my Taste Life Twice writing group and in a dozen revisions, I uncovered twists of tenderness and a turn to joy. 

My infrequent emotional connections with my brother James were never perfect, but understandable. Seventeen years older than I, as a child, I considered him a mystery man, an uncle or a hired hand, but not a brother. During my youth into adulthood, he became the son my mother pitied—and perhaps her pity pitted us against one another. In his declining years, I reached out and tried to understand and appreciate him. His Alzheimer’s created yet another barrier. I was too late, even before he passed away. However, my edits and long-buried recollections about him erased the “poor James” image I’d originally painted and left me with an indelibly different portrait of my brother Jimmy. This memoir rewrote our story. 

It still revealed our differences, but in the rewrites, meaningful moments surfaced. He’d teased and tickled the toddler me, like brothers do. I mourned his failures and mine in our relationship but found redemption in our continued conversations. Recalling his memorial, I discovered the final twist: the pluses in his life equaled mine—the love and respect of his spouse and his children and the fondness his community of friends held in their hearts for him. Our sad story turned into his love story, which is how I will now remember him. — Mary Clements Fisher