20 Years Ago, My Brother Committed Suicide
My brother's death led me to this moment and to my memoir.
Friday, August 16 will mark the 20th anniversary of my brother’s death, a full third of my life. I will visit his grave for the first time on that day, where he is buried with his long-suffering wife, and his two middle children. He was 51 years old.
You see, my brother had major depressive disorder, a disease he fought for 13 years, including bouts of attempted suicide, long-term hospitalizations, electroshock therapy, outreach work with NAMI, until one day, he figured out how to end his suffering.
He jumped from the Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon.
On the night of August 15, he scaled the Fremont Bridge and did what 13 years of the best psychiatric treatment for depressive disorder could not do. He ended his pain. In famous Lynn Hornbrook fashion, he took control.
Today, August 13, was my nephew Seth’s birthday (also my paternal grandfather’s birthday). We have a picture somewhere of the four generations of Hornbrook men - my grandfather, father, brother, and his son. As the youngest son, I was not included in that photo. That means that my brother committed suicide two days after his only son’s birthday.
I am the last Hornbrook male. My family dies with me.
Eight years after his father, Seth, too, committed suicide. He was 31. Less than a year later, Seth’s sister, Elly, unable to deal with the enormous loss of her brother, committed suicide. She was 29.
A year and a half later, my brother’s wife, Jody, succumbed to cancer. Having experienced her losses, I can imagine how it was grief that gutted her immune system as much as anything. They are all survived by the oldest and youngest of my brother’s children.
The four of them are buried with one stone bearing their names, my brother’s at the top: Rev. Lynn W. Hornbrook. He was an ordained minister, a pastor in the Assemblies of God church, doing his Lord’s work, founding churches for the deaf in the Pacific Northwest, in Seattle, Spokane, Portland. He was hearing, but he studied and learned to sign, often heralded as a much more articulate communicator than his deaf parishioners. His is a remarkable story, from hippie to evangelical preacher, from laughing jokester to depressed suicide.
I tell his story, because to tell his story is to tell my own.
You see, despite our 10 years difference in age, more so than most with a family resemblance - minus the religion, minus the mental health challenges - I am remarkably like my brother.
It was - it is, even now - impossible to escape his influence. He was 10 years older than me, but the shadow that extends from my body is his.
My extended family called me by his name. As a child, relatives I had never met before tousled my hair and called me “Lynn.” Sometimes people would catch themselves, remarking at the similarity. Through my entire life, this has never stopped. I often had to speak up and say, “It’s Lee. I’m Lee.” More recently, on one of my cross country journeys, I stopped to see my mother’s cousin, then in his 80s. I was in my late 50s and my brother had been dead almost 20 years. Jerry called me “Lynn.” He didn’t even catch himself, and I let it slide. Even my own mother couldn’t tell us apart on the phone.
I once stole my sister’s car and crashed it. I was 15 years old, and it was the first time I had ever driven a car - a joyride gone bad. I ended up on a corner lot, flattening two trees. The inhabitants of the house came out to see if I was all right. They were young, in their mid 20s. After figuring out I was unlicensed and the car wasn’t mine, standing in the rain like a trapped wet rat a week before Christmas, they said, “Hey, aren’t you Lynn Hornbrook’s brother?” I nodded. “We went to school with him. You look so much like him.” They took me home to call my parents instead of calling the police.
On my first day of high school, as I played H-O-R-S-E on the asphalt before the first bell, the basketball coach came up to me and said, “Hey Lynn, are you going out for the basketball team again this year?” I said, “No, I’m not Lynn. That was 10 years ago. I’m Lee, and I like baseball.” Coach walked off shaking his head, a decade older in a flash. (My brother passed on his senior year of basketball, deciding instead to keep his ponytail and his hippy ways! - hey, man! *peace sign* )
At my brother’s funeral, I threw my grandnephew in the pool like my brother did to me when I was little.Kyle and Logan were about 9 and 6 years old at the time (I think). Kyle had the same look as my brother and me, the lineage clearly running through him. Startled, Kyle grabbed my arm by the wrist and thrust my hand into the air, waving it. “Mom mom look! He has grandpa’s hands.” Kyle had never seen me and his grandfather (my brother) alive together. I had just met Kyle that day for the first time.
Many years later, I had the opportunity to have lunch with my brother’s first girlfriend. I had not seen M- in more than 30 years. M- was a teenager when she dated my brother, and I was 6 or 7 years old. She was like an older sister to me, and our families remained close for years. At one point during the conversation, M- stared at my arms and had this almost mesmerized, horrified look in her eyes. I stopped talking and looked at her. “What?” She said in almost a whisper, “You have our brother’s arms.” Unsettling.
Recently, I’d been thinking about my brother’s best friend, R-. I wondered why R- wasn’t my brother’s best man at his wedding. At 11 years old, I was my brother’s best man. In the wedding photo, it’s my brother in his blue/green plaid Pendleton - always the hippie - and Jody his bride in a white wedding dress, and me kneeling in my 3-piece peach disco suit holding the three golden retrievers - my brother’s dog, my sister’s dog, and my brother’s best friend’s dog.
My brother’s best friend’s wife contacted me recently, having seen an article I wrote about my brother. I didn’t really know them, but knew of them. It was a wonderful conversation. But I wanted to know about R-, my brother’s best friend, whom I had heard about my entire life. He also has many of my brother’s letters. My brother wrote legendary long letters in his long hand left-handed script. I am also left-handed.
I asked if I’d be able to talk to R-, and R’s wife hesitated. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You look so much like him. Your way of speaking, your mannerisms. I think R- would be devastated.”
Twenty years after my brother’s death, I’m still waving my arms to the world, saying “Hey, it’s me, Lee. I am not my brother.”
Someday, I might start believing it myself.
Today, I live in the Pacific Northwest, a revelation if you know me. As a southern California child (a Valley dude), I loved the heat and sunny days and detested the rain.
My brother and sister moved to Olympia to go to Evergreen State College, the flocking place of hippies and peaceniks. They stayed in the PNW while I moved east to Albuquerque NM, Lawrence Kansas, back to San Diego and then in a whirlwind of moves during the pandemic, New Haven CT, Santa Cruz, Atlanta, and now Seattle.
I learned to love the rain with the beautiful Midwestern thunderstorms, destructive forces that barreled through in the late afternoons, washing away the heat and cicada carcasses and june bugs to leave behind insufferable humidity and expansive blue skies.
I learned to love the rain after 13 years in San Diego during a great drought, when the yard in the back of the rented house cracked like broken cement and the sprinkler pipes decayed in the heat and dust. What I would have given for a few drops of rain.
It doesn’t rain as much, not as much as I remember, in Seattle, far and away the prettiest place I have ever lived. Every day, with Herman the dachshund leading his small pack, my partner and I walk through the park to the shores of Lake Washington. Around one corner and through the trees, with geese and ducks on the water or pecking at the dry grasses, with unpruned apple trees and blackberry brambles marking the paths, with osprey teaching their young to fish, and soaring bald eagles fighting off legions of crows, there, 100 miles south, looking as if reclining on the far shores, looming with unrivaled majesty, Mount Rainier. The very definition of sublime.
I take this walk daily to see if "the mountain is out,” a somewhat joking refrain uttered by locals and new residents alike. We declare it when we see it. We look down at our feet when it’s not. But when the mountain is out, there is reverential silence. There is nothing to say. There is no language for that beauty.
I can only wonder, in the shadow of Mount Rainier, what I will hear when I see my brother’s grave.
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I write about:
writing, literature, and the writing life
writing process
memoir craft
mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
sailing
alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
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Until next time, I’ll …
Just keep writing!
Wising you peace in your travels, Lee.
Lee, all of this was hard enough to read--I can't imagine what it was like to live through all of it. I hope the visit to your brother's gravesite is a good one. I'll be thinking of you tomorrow.