Chapter 5 - The young man carbuncular
From Part 1 - "The Burial of the Dead" of my memoir, "My Own Private Waste Land"
Chapter 5 is about my nephew Seth, my brother’s only son. I had wanted to be an uncle he could turn to, and he did. But life’s stresses proved too much. He never really had a chance.
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5 – The young man carbuncular
Who’s there?
Why do you tremble in this dark forest?
What shade compels you to this place
To muse upon your father’s death before you?
Here there is only rock and no water.
Who is walking beside you?
The apple has withered, it falls not far.
The twisted boughs, no longer golden,
Beckon with bony fingers.
The chapel is empty.
In a bright modern church, at my brother’s “celebration of life” as these events are now often called, my brother’s only son, fiddling with a pack of cigarettes, the Cellophane crinkling, stood at the podium to give his obligatory statement. As counterpoint to the adulation, Seth defiantly proclaimed:
Me and my father didn’t get along.
I had never known anyone to not get along with my brother. He was universally revered.
Seth would have been a William had not my brother’s religion dictated every detail of his life, including the naming of his children. Thus, the patrilineal sequence from Lynn Arthur (grandfather) to William Glynn (father) to Lynn William (1st son) was broken. Lynn named his son Seth, after Adam and Eve’s third son, often looked at as a replacement after Cain’s killing of Abel. My nephew was Seth William.[1]
I didn’t know Seth well, but at least he made an effort. His sister Anna and he knew their father before he was ill. I visited them when they were young. But they were effectively cut off from the family after my brother’s illness. For years, we only talked about it in hushed tones.
As a toddler, Seth visited our house and slept in the same room that his father and I had shared as children. Seth didn’t sleep soundly. Seth thrashed. He threw himself from side to side, raised up and slammed his head against the wall repeatedly, crying out with night terrors. It was a scene straight from The Exorcist. In the morning, he showed up at the breakfast table with his soft smile, betraying no recollection of the previous night’s violence.
Seth and his sister Elly made the effort to visit the family when my father died. Their grandfather had been a favorite. They made the drive down the coast to represent the Pacific Northwest family, reciprocation for our having traveled to Portland for their father’s service. We didn’t have a service for my Dad. We sat around and told family stories, reminisced about their grandpa, asked Seth and Elly about their sisters and mom. My brother rarely came up in conversation, though I could feel him in the room and when people looked at me.
The house of illness changed Seth. How could it not, with parents afflicted with Epstein-Barr and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Major Depressive Disorder compounded with a strict, religious, home school environment. The sweet boy had grown to hate his father and was suspicious of authority figures all his life, teachers, bosses, elders, even uncles.
The young man I met in San Diego, now in his mid-20s, was irascible, argumentative. A few years after my brother had died, Seth cultivated the laidback Pacific Northwest post-Nirvana anti-intellectual granola vibe. But he was also fiercely anti-authoritarian.
He, the young man carbuncular, brooding and melancholy, and she, the Hyacinth girl, fresh-faced with a smile like rays of California sun, arrived for a beach camping trip. Alisa was just 18 or 19, bright, friendly, articulate. Seth was immediately on offense.
Man, you are just like my father.
The Southern California family didn’t argue much. We could only guess what life was like in the house of illness where Seth was raised. Seth and I had two ongoing arguments on the bookend days of his visit.
“You’re a teacher, right?”
“Yeah, I teach English at night. In the day, I work for a university science lab making websites.
“That’s cool. I hated English. The teachers always make you guess what they are thinking. Why are their meanings right and no one else’s interpretations are okay.”
It wasn’t a question.
“My teachers said this one book we all had to read was complete trash. I hated it. It was so bad I couldn’t get through it. Why do they make us read things like that?”
“Which book, Seth?”
“It was called The Great Gatsby.”
Almost 10 years removed from high school. I figured he must have misremembered, but he was fired up, willing to reduce everything to ash. T.J. Eckleburg’s sightless eyes blinked.
“Well, I don’t know, Seth. Gatsby is considered one of the greatest novels. I don’t think your teachers would rank it as complete trash, even if one or two of them perhaps disliked it.”
“Oh no, they all said it was just the worst book.”
“I doubt many teachers would say that.”
“You’re just like my dad!”
Despite attempts to change the subject and let things go, he persisted so much that tension and anger shrouded the entire visit.
After the camping trip, the young man carbuncular and the Hyacinth girl returned our camping gear infested with large earwigs that multiplied in the closet of our small one-bedroom apartment. Before he left, Seth tried to iron the wrinkles out of our arguing.
“I was thinking about it. You know, I got the title of the book wrong. It wasn’t The Great Gatsby that my teachers hated. It was Great Expectations. Just the worst book.”
“Seth, I don’t think your teachers would dismiss a Dickens classic.”
“You always have to be right! You’re just like my dad!”
We parted on tense terms. That’s the last time I saw him.
Like a drifting log, he was cast against the inevitable black tides.
He who was living is now dead.
Through Facebook, Seth’s mother kept the family in the loop about his struggles. In early 2009, Seth joined the army, an attempt to get his life on track. I can only wonder what his pacific preacher father would have thought of that. Seth spit at the first drill sergeant who told him what to do and collapsed with anxiety. He lasted a day. It took all of boot camp for him to receive a psychiatric discharge.
By 2010, the Hyacinth girl wilted, and they broke up.
Shortly thereafter, he decided to go back to school, to study English and become a writer. After all, as he told me, there are no rules in writing. Someone can’t tell him that what he writes is wrong. We had kept up an email correspondence of irregular frequency, and he asked me to help him with his admissions letters. He was accepted to start Fall 2010 at Saint Mary’s University, a Benedictine college, a surprising choice considering his own religious background.
Who is that walking beside you, Seth?
Distracted by my mother’s death and the distant thunder of divorce heading my way, I started a blog, Life Without TV, and sent the link to Seth. After a single semester of school, Seth was utterly dejected:
I dont read anymore. School has robbed me of the ability to read for pleasure. There are SO many reading assignments that I can't even read all of those, let alone something I might enjoy and find meaning in. So I stopped reading all together. I'll write the papers and do the homework, but no time for the readings.
By Fall 2011, struggling with the cancer that would end her life, his mother pleaded on Facebook for prayers for her son. For one torturous 24-hour period, he disappeared, leaving behind a suicide note. A few days later, he returned.
A year later, he did not return.
I heard about Seth’s death in an email.
As there was with my brother, there wasn’t a 13-year paper trail of psychiatric appointments and shock treatments, forced six-month institutionalizations and medicine changes, halfway houses, bankruptcies, and debts. There was only his unapproving father, staring back at him from the distance, as Seth said. I imagine the fire and brimstone of Jonathan Edwards raining down from a raised pulpit. And I know that’s not altogether true, just as I know that what I know about my own brother is what I have creatively fashioned here from fragments of memory: an icon, an idol of worship, pain, and redemption.
The thunder spoke. A flash of lightning, the taste of first-born blood, a moment’s surrender. Which an age of prudence can never retract.
Alone in the woods, rock and no water, Seth shot himself in the chest.
I don’t know why. Some truths die alone on the forest floor.
Born on his great grandfather’s (Lynn Arthur’s) birthday, August 13. Seth’s death ends the Arthurian quest. Who remains to search for the grail?
Childless, I alone remain.
Childless I remain. Alone.
[1] I was a third-born son. My parents had a junior, after Lynn and L---, William Glynn Hornbrook, Jr.—who survived a only a couple of days, so I lived as a 2nd son, baby of the family, 7 years younger than my sister Lisa. I got the initial “L” to follow in my siblings’ footsteps and my father’s middle name—Lee Glynn.
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