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My Brother Gave up Everything for His Art
We didn’t consider it could be mental illness
M y brother once shared this advice: if you want to be happy, take your most passionate dream and throw it in the garbage. He didn’t do that, though. He desperately wanted to become a famous artist and took a big step toward his goal when he and his wife visited us in Vancouver in 1981.
That was also the first time my brother saw his mother since 1968 when she and my father, with me in tow, defected to the West from Czechoslovakia, leaving him behind with his grandmother. My brother was from my mom’s first marriage. After her divorce, my mom and her son moved in with her mother. When she remarried, my brother continued to live with his grandmother.
In the months following the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Warsaw Pact invasion, 70,000 to 80,000 Czechs and Slovaks defected to the West. My brother was 16 years old at the time.
My mom told me leaving my brother behind was the hardest decision she ever made. But she thought it was better for him at that age to stay in Czechoslovakia. He had family there and had just been accepted to study civil engineering technology.
By 1981, my brother and his wife had two children. They weren’t allowed to bring them on the visit because that was how communist…
