I spoke for my brother when he was too afraid to answer — now, he speaks in melodies, and I have learned to listen

The Guardian

07-07-2025

When my brother was small, he barely spoke, and certainly never around strangers. He could speak, there was no developmental delay, he just mostly chose not to. We were close in age, under two years apart, and – out in the world – I spoke for him. This is, perhaps, a common dynamic: chatty big sister, quiet little brother.
I was sometimes reprimanded by well-meaning strangers. 'Stop talking over your brother,' they'd chide. 'I asked him a question.' And I would quieten down, shamed. My brother would say nothing, but entreat me with frightened eyes to step in.
As a small child, I felt my brother spoke without language. I heard his voice in my head, and I believed I was his translator. To me, this felt natural. It's easy to scoff – the delusions of childhood – but as toddlers we read everything around us. Through immersion in family, we acquire language.
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Maybe, my brother's non verbal cues felt like language to me. So much of what is communicated between people involves attunement, a subtle reading of one another's emotional states, micro-expressions and non verbal cues. Perhaps I just hadn't learned to distinguish. Attuned, I read him as if he was speaking.
We'd always been close, but in adolescence our world was engulfed by grief. We lost my sister and father to suicide, six years apart, while we staggered towards adulthood. I became quieter, but my brother was almost mute. During this time, he was learning guitar, and his music rose to fill the space. The language of loss, the language of yearning. So plaintiff, so expressive. There are other ways to speak.
Unlike me, my brother doesn't remember much of our childhood.
Trauma has erased it, the way it sometimes seems to. He has no memory of our sister, who we lost when he was 10. In this, we are opposites. For years now I have been writing about what happened in my family – in memoir, in fiction, in essays. Each memory glistens like a pearl on a string. Sometimes, I mourn that he has lost the memory of how adored he was. Baby brother, slant-eyed-smiler, boy of few words. Always the easiest of humans to love. When he read my memoir, Staying, he said, 'You've given me back my childhood'. I'm not so deluded that I don't see that I'd only given him mine.
Nowadays, my brother is a man who leaves space for silence. If you want to hear him speak you must learn to be quiet. I have taught myself how to bite my tongue. And, there is always the music. Joy, wonder, melancholy, sadness, drama, so much drama. Tension, release, surprise, awe. My brother's music moves through many moods. In song, his vocabulary is vast, his story unique. All instrumental, it speaks of many influences. The sounds of our childhood. Dylan, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Neil Young, CNSY, Joe Cocker, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Bruce Springsteen, Billie Holiday, early pre-disco Bee Gees, The Beatles, Bob Marley, early Paul Kelly, Paul Simon, Judy Garland, John Lennon, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Sade, and Sting. Listening, you can catch hints of all this, plus the intensity of an inner world rarely expressed verbally. It's alive, it's pulsing. All the history, all the feeling. In books, I gave him my childhood. In music, he gives me his.
Here I am, still talking for him! I hear those well-meaning adults from our childhood: 'I asked him a question.' Go! Go listen to his songs!
Jessie Cole is the author of four books, including the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning