My father called me one year ago today and told me that my bother had killed himself. I believed it without hesitation. My brother was 30 years old. We weren’t close but at the time of his death, but things looked like they might be getting better between us.
He was incredibly smart and had earned an undergraduate degree in physics engineering. He joined the volunteer fire department when he was 18 and at one time was the youngest fire officer in the State of Maine. He had dark blue eyes. He watched his mother slowly die over the course of three long years. He lost her when he was 21 and she was 53. It was breast cancer. His grief stayed with him. He was mentally ill and recently sober. He both sobered up and got diagnosed in jail. He was depressed and schizophrenic.
We found out after his death that Chris died of a pulmonary thromboembolism. He was sitting at his computer and it knocked him off his chair. Nothing anyone could have done would have saved him. This information has done little to change my absolute certainty that my brother took his life. I know that doesn't make sense.
You must understand that Chris did not commit suicide. You must also understand the subtle difference between suicide and killing yourself. He killed himself, little by little, drink by drink, every day for fifteen years. Nuance.
Every time we spoke in the five years leading up to his death, we got on each other’s nerves. I would ask him when he was going to get his shit together and he would get defensive. He wanted to control the conversation, the narrative. He might have wanted money, though he never directly asked for it. He wanted me to accept his version of how things were and not to ask him to clarify the details. But his version was not acceptable to me. It made no sense. It was a story he told himself. I would push back and tell him he was better than that, and he told me I knew nothing about his life and would find a reason to hang up the phone.
And he was right, and every year that passed I knew less and less about his life because I refused to participate in his delusion that everything was fine. That it wasn't just one act of self-destruction after another.
I didn't fight for him. I let him go and hoped he'd come back.
I didn't fight for him. I let him go and hoped he'd come back.
He didn't. He kept drinking and he became someone I didn't know and now he's dead.
That was the end of his life. The beginning was not like that. He was a fat and happy baby, wanted and loved and celebrated, born the summer before I started high school. I remember what it felt like to make him laugh and to see his tiny face relax in my arms as he drifted off to sleep. He loved to be held. His mother believed in attachment parenting before that was really a thing. They were very close. She understood him and helped him feel understood. She was his champion.
Then she was sick. Then she was gone.
His daughter will never remember him now. She’ll only know what she’s told. She’ll look at pictures and try to see some resemblance to herself. My own children see his picture and ask “Who is that guy again?” They don’t remember him, only his arrests and erratic behavior and how the news of these things reduced their mother to a weeping and neurotic wreck.
I look at my sweet, sandy-haired children and see my little brother in them. And fear starts to clutch at my heart. He was such a happy, beautiful kid.
I noticed something was off when he was in 6th or 7th grade. He hated school and was having trouble getting along with people. They switched schools. Eventually, they homeschooled. By 8th grade, things were worse. They moved to Maine because there was an alternative school there that was going to make things better.
That school would not fix the problem, but we didn't know that then.
I think many families chose that school because a more traditional educational environment wasn’t working for their kids and the normal high school experience wasn't a good fit. But when you find that you can’t relate even to the people who don’t fit in anywhere else, or more precisely that they can’t relate to you, it’s hard.
At first, the other kids found his combination of insecurity and bravado merely off-putting, but later he scared them. He was strong and intense. By sixteen he was drinking, doing drugs (all kinds), and fighting. Now I see those things for what they were - self-medication. At the time, I saw them as a series of shitty and reckless choices. Probably they were both.
I now have three children. I now understand how hard it is to keep someone safe who is determined to be reckless. But I wish we could've stopped it then. Made him sober up. Insist he get help, even if he refused to go, because this was not normal teenage behavior. This was the start of the darkness working its way into my brother's life. Once it started creeping in, it quickly took hold. The next year his mother got sick and the entire house became consumed by her cancer and trying to save her life.
I now have three children. I now understand how hard it is to keep someone safe who is determined to be reckless. But I wish we could've stopped it then. Made him sober up. Insist he get help, even if he refused to go, because this was not normal teenage behavior. This was the start of the darkness working its way into my brother's life. Once it started creeping in, it quickly took hold. The next year his mother got sick and the entire house became consumed by her cancer and trying to save her life.
Of course, there was nothing we could've done to stop that either, but we didn't know it then.
There were stretches where we allowed ourselves to believe the light would creep back in. We told ourselves stories about how it was all going to be ok. His senior project was brilliant, we said, the best the school has seen in years. He's so motivated now. Let's pretend it was all just a phase. Thank God he's outgrown all that.
There were stretches where we allowed ourselves to believe the light would creep back in. We told ourselves stories about how it was all going to be ok. His senior project was brilliant, we said, the best the school has seen in years. He's so motivated now. Let's pretend it was all just a phase. Thank God he's outgrown all that.
When he was nineteen, he got a DUI. In Maine, if you go ten years without another incident the DUI can be wiped from your record. Nine years and nine months later he got a second DUI. He was a father by then. This was also the year before he died when things started to really unravel. When no one could pretend anymore. When we could no longer tell ourselves stories about how things were and about who Chris was.
You see, we have this thing in my family where the personal mythology we weave about who we are - about who we are told that we are - becomes more important than the truth. We are told stories about ourselves and then we become the storytellers, and then the stories become our history and our identity.
I no longer trust these mythologies. I'm re-learning who I think we are.
This is not beautiful grief where you feel longing, love, and deep sadness. Where neighbors bring you casseroles filled with kindness and noodles and express their empathy and love. I’ve felt grief like that and there is something pure about that kind of pain. This is different. This is dirty, angry grief. This is an old wound that never healed and has been ripped back open. This is too complicated and too shameful to be talked about, even with good friends. You wouldn’t understand what this feels like. You don’t want to know what we’re really thinking.
We could tell ourselves stories now. We could create a narrative that makes all this easier, that casts us all in a more rosy light, but it would be bullshit. It would be a capitulation to the stories we allowed ourselves to believe. That ended for me on the day of his funeral.
Here’s what I know to be true. My brother suffered enormous pain in his short life, and caused enormous suffering in others. He needed help for many years and when he didn’t get it, he got drunk to make himself feel better. He had a sensitive and kind soul and a brilliant mind, all of which were diminished by his illness and his choices. No matter what happened to him, I know that there was still so much good in him. He remains deeply loved.
(c) Mommyland Blogs 2013-2018
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