Good morning! And Good Friday to you. I hope your week has gone well, and that you have an enjoyable Easter weekend planned for you and yours.
My brother was a preacher for the Assemblies of God church, and Easter was the high holy time of his life. He was always quite busy during that time, and I don’t really have any memories of him at Easter.
In fact, I only have about 12-15 strong memories of him, despite our being alive together at the same time for 41 years (let’s not count my first 4 years when I don’t remember anything, so 37 years of potential memories). That doesn’t seem like very many memories for brothers who shared a room as kids.
I started my memoir as an exploration of my brother. I followed the writing where it took me.
You see, I was compared to my brother my entire life. On the surface, we both had names that start with L (all of us siblings do). He was Lynn, named after our grandfather. I was Lee. He was 10 years older, and it’s not uncommon for parents to cycle through names to find the kid they’re looking for, so often I was called “Lyn- L-, Lis-, sheesh, Lee!”
The similarities between us were so close that relatives who I barely knew called me by his name. They’d say to my mom, “Gee, Barb, he sure looks like Lynnie.” When I look in the mirror or at old pictures, I don’t see my brother at all (except for one uncanny time recently, after this close introspection during writing, my sister sent me a picture, and I wondered when my brother was in Albuquerque where I lived for 5 years? Oh, it was a picture of me! Who doesn’t recognize a picture of himself?! That’s actually kind of scary.)
It’s one thing to have a strong family resemblance, but when verification comes from outside one’s family, then you know there’s something to it.
When I was 15, I took my sister’s car and crashed it (there’s a story there). I hit two trees on a corner lot. A brother and sister came out of the house to see if I was okay. They looked at me and said, “Aren’t you Lynn Hornbrook’s brother? We went to school with him.” That was 7 years after he had graduated high school.
On my first day of high school, as I was playing basketball before class with some friends, the P.E. coach came up to me and put his arm around my waist. He said, “So Lynn, are you going out for the basketball team again this year?” I said, “No, Lynn is my brother. He’s 10 years older than me. I’m Lee, and I like baseball.” The coach walked off shaking his head.
About 5 years after my brother died, I had the opportunity to visit with his high school girlfriend and her mother and sister and nieces. His girlfriend had been like an older sister to me, along with the rest of my older siblings (I was 7 years younger than all of them). I had not seen my brother’s ex-girlfriend for about 30 years. As we were chatting, she was staring oddly at me. I said, “What, what is it?” She stared like she had seen a ghost. She said, “You have your brother’s arms.” It was unnerving.
When I went to Portland, Oregon for my brother’s funeral, I met my grand-nephews, Kyle and Logan, for the first time. Kyle was about 9 and had the same Hornbrook look as me and my brother. We were playing in the hotel pool, and all of a sudden, he clawed at my hand and held it up. He yelled, “Mom, mom, he has grandpa’s hands!” Mind you, I had just met Kyle, and he had never seen me together with his grandfather when he was living.
When the similarities are that strong, and when my brother became suicidal and depressed, it caused some distress. I saw some counselors, “When’s my turn?” They reassured me, “It doesn’t work that way.” One goes on living, and one hopes.
My brother and I shared a room until I was 7, until he moved out to the garage. He hung tapestries on the wall, grew a scraggly beard, grew his hair long into a pony tail, hung a poster that said “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” drove a VW bug, hitchhiked around. Clichéd hippie. Of course, we thought he was the coolest.
He studied sign language and it became his life. He moved to the Pacific Northwest. The vibe there matched his hippyness and vegetarianism better than life in L.A. He had a dark red golden retriever dog with a red kerchief. When I was 11, he got married to Jody, and I was his best man. The wedding photo featured Jody in a white wedding dress, Lynn is his plaid Pendelton shirt and loafers (he was not a suit guy), and me in a 3-piece peach disco suit (this was Dec. 1974), kneeling and holding three red golden retrievers with red kerchiefs.
He interpreted for the deaf in church, and he joined the church, Assemblies of God. This was a major change as our family was not very religious at all. My dad was an atheist and my mom was a lapsed Catholic. But my brother didn’t do things half way. He went to seminary and became a minister and then got a counseling degree so he could counseling the members of his flock. Before his depression, he found churches for the deaf in Seattle, Spokane, and Portland. When he joined the church, he started separating himself from his non-believing family. He tried to convert me, but church was not for me. I was a young impressionable teenager, and I looked up to my brother. But even then, I resented that he tried to use my love to foist his ideas on me. He knew I looked up to him. We drifted apart for many years after that.
When he got sick in 1991/1992, I was just starting a Ph.D. program at the University of Kansas. Like many families, we didn’t talk as openly about his mental illness as perhaps we should have. I don’t really know many of the details of his suicide attempts or his struggles at all. Because of his illness, I never had the opportunity to develop relationships with my own nieces and nephew. They suffered from his illness as well.
When one person in a family is mentally ill, it affects everyone. I was sheltered away from the family, off in Kansas studying to become an English professor. The rest of my family were on the west coast. Even in not being close to my brother for many years, I didn’t realize just how profoundly affected I was by his illness until I started writing my book.
In writing my book, I learned that I could request his psychiatric reports. They will be released to next of kin. But he has two surviving children, and they are next of kin, not his own brother. So I don’t have access to those records.
Since a strong strain of mental illness runs in our family, I think it’s important that we know as much as we can to help those who may have problems. A while back, I had heard that his grandson had developed some issues. I’m not in touch with anyone in my family (except for one), but if I could help even one of them by learning about the mental illness in our family, that would be worth all the struggle to write the book.
Writing about my brother led me to look at the situations and circumstances of my own life. So many of my plans and dreams didn’t work out. So many people in my life had severe mental illnesses.
Next time, since we’re in April, and April is the cruelest month, I’ll explore how this little book (I was thinking about 100 pages and 6 months of writing) about my brother turned into a memoir with a connection to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
If you could share this newsletter with one person, that would be great. My goal is to grow my audience to increase my opportunity to get my memoir traditional published. Thanks!
Have a great weekend! Happy Easter, everyone.