Forgive me if this is dramatic, but I'm up at 4:30 AM thinking about all this, feeling terrible that I handled this poorly, and I've already talked about it to death with my wife, so here it goes.
My older brother and his wife made an offer on a house about a month ago and officially closed this Tuesday. They are moving about 30 minutes from their current location. They still had about 1-2 weeks in their current place but wanted to move into the new place, so they called direct family up on Thursday and asked for us to help them move yesterday.
My dad (64 years old), his wife (54), my mom (61) and I showed up at 8:30. Hardly anything was packed. Not a single kitchen cupboard was packed away, dirty dishes still in the sink, bathroom wasn't packed, clothes everywhere, sheets still on the beds, dressers still completely intact and full, nothing taken apart, closets completely full, I could go on. I would say probably 5% of their belongings were packed.
Everyone spent the entire day helping them until about 4:30. We took three loads over via U-Haul and F-150. By the end of it my mom could barely move. And the worst of it is that they are only about 60% done, if that. They still have the entire basement and garage and cleaning their old place, which is going to take a ton of work.
So afterwards, I called my twin brother--who dodged this mess by being in New Jersey for work--to vent. He said "enough is enough" with my older brother (long history with older brother constantly getting money from parents, being difficult at holidays, etc.) and decided to conference him in to call him on this bullshit. I told him it was "absolute horseshit" (exact words) to not have anything prepared, to expect everyone to do all this for them, to expect our aging parents to still do this heavy lifting shit for him--especially when they GIFTED him the money for the down payment on this new house. I told him the lack of preparation today was unacceptable with plenty of choice words.
His response had every excuse in the book and then went nuclear. "You know how hard it is to pack when you have a 13 month old?" "We just found out we closed this Tuesday." "We've been up every night until midnight." "This was the biggest emotional day of my life [finally buying a house] and you ruined it." "I've come from a bankruptcy and a divorce to buying a house and this is how you congratulate me." "I don't want you around tomorrow. You're not welcome." "I don't want you in my life, period. Don't call or text." "I don't want you around my daughter."
So I've basically caused WW3 in my family. You can probably assume from his response that we didn't have the best relationship to begin with, but we always put on a good front together and helped each other out when needed (see today).
Furthermore, my direct family all still lives within 20 miles of each other, so we are still going to have to see each other at holidays and get-togethers.
So how do I handle this? Apologize and try to move on (even though I strongly feel I'm right)? Let things settle and then call? Or was this just the nail in the coffin with my already not-so-great relationship with my brother, and we should just carry on our separate ways?