In My Brother's Shadow
Creative nonfiction contest entry
Hello everyone! I thought it would be nice to get back to some memoir writing today. Later this week, I will be reading at an open mic. Previously, I read a shortened version of the essay below to an appreciative crowd. It was my first open mic reading experience, so much of it was lost in my memory to nerves. But it was an enjoyable experience, and I hope to follow it up with something fun as well.
The following essay was submitted to a Medium essay contest. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m querying my memoir for traditional publication. I’m seeking reader support for my work. If you can spare the price of one coffee per month, that will go a long way toward creating a sustainable model for me to continue writing. Thank you for all your support and for reading!
In My Brother’s Shadow
My brother’s suicide haunts me to this day.
* * * * *
His death was not relegated to a subordinate clause. No, he made a splash.
I was in a hospital at the time, attending to the death of my father-in-law. “Attending” is an odd word to use when watching someone die, but it felt like a school requirement. My wife and mother-in-law were grieving in their own ways, the one wringing her hands and grabbing for mine, leaving crescent moons in my skin from her fingernails, and the other, scowling and petulant at her perceived abandonment. I supplied moral support and ran small errands for snacks and Styrofoam cups of tea and coffee.
Virginia was hot that August. The cicadas thrummed in the trees. Inside, the new hospital was sterile and quiet except for the beeping of machines and the footsteps of nurses in their white padded shoes gliding along the marble floors as if in a mausoleum. It was as good a time and place to die as any, I suppose.
My parents were across the continent on the West Coast. They knew where I was, our family protocol all these years — Let someone know where you are in case of an accident. In 41 years, no one had ever called. Until that day.
My cellphone played its snappy ringtone during the priest’s last rites and drew the frowns of the women. I quickly silenced the phone in my pocket like a child caught with a flashlight reading a comic book under his bed covers.
During a moment of silence following a prayer, I excused myself to the hall. A California area code, my parents’ number. Focused as I was on my wife’s father, my first thought was for my own father. I raced across the country in my mind, “My father. No, no, not my father.” I trembled when dialing the phone, expecting to hear my mother’s voice. When I heard my father’s, I was immediately confused. “My father, my father . . . aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“Dad?”
“He jumped. Your brother. He jumped.”
My father’s voice cracked with primal pain, that Ur-pain that only a parent can know and that cannot be undone, his first-born son, ten years older than me, dead. A flood of tears hit the cold floor before I could even suck in breath.
“Oh, Dad.”
My brother jumped from the Fremont Bridge in Portland. They found his body floating in the Willamette River. Those are pearls that were his eyes.
We tried to read the signs. Perform a psychological autopsy. It shouldn’t have been difficult. After all, he had major depression for 13 years, had been in and out of institutions, left a paper trail of psychiatrist’s notes and bandages. Not mere suicidal ideation: Acts, cuts and blood. But lately, he had been better, gave speeches for NAMI telling others what depression was like, something to do while, what . . . convalescing? That’s not the right word. Neither is waiting. Waiting for what? To die? When your life’s aim is to die, it’s difficult to keep on living. Like most of us, he didn’t want to wait. We live lives of quiet desperation and immediate gratification. Living becomes the chore. Dying is the sought-after prize, the goal. And no one was as goal oriented as my brother. He always grabbed that brass ring.
He was left alone in a small halfway house at the base of the bridge to write his speeches, contemplate his mortality, read Hamlet. And, of course, he was undergoing a medicine change. Of course he was. What could go wrong?
What did we expect, that he would somehow just snap out of it after all those years? He wasn’t always that way. His death was foretold for 13 years. Why was I so surprised?
He was a long-haired hippie peacenik turned fundamentalist preacher with a scraggly red Jesus beard. We shared a room, bunk beds, and then he did those clichéd hippie things: moved to the garage, put tapestries on the walls, played his America, Harry Nilsson, and Jesus Christ Superstar albums, hung his “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” poster, and hitchhiked the West Coast. He loved nature, and granola, and wheat germ. Hippie food, my father would say. He moved with grace, a bright smile, a willing hand, an open heart. He wasn’t religious then. But he was made in God’s image. To us, he was perfect.
How could we understand, his atheist father and me? We mostly didn’t.
He studied sign language, interpreted in churches, found God. But why do anything part way? He became a preacher, a reverend, shepherd to a flock in the Assemblies of God. He founded churches for the deaf in Seattle, Spokane, Portland. All while loving a wife. All while raising a family. All while doing God’s ceaseless work, his work, all the work — until it was too much. He studied God intently. Did he see God’s foot on the treadle of the loom?
Were there other signs, besides the language he was so skilled at? He stared at television so hypnotically that I could wave my hand in front of his face and he wouldn’t blink.
What had we done? What role did we play? How could we help? Like so many others, our family didn’t talk about it openly. We whispered, sent money so his kids could eat and bills could get paid. “Oh, he’s in the hospital again? That’s too bad. How much do you need?”
His illness was a language for which we had no signs.
When I look in the mirror, I see me. When people look at me, they see my brother.
I called my mom at work after school every day to let her know I got home. Even she couldn’t tell our voices apart on the phone.
“Hi Lynn, honey.”
“Mom, it’s me, Lee.”
“Oh dear, you sure sound like your brother.”
On my first day of high school, the basketball coach approached me on the playground and put his arm around my waist.
“So Lynn, are you going out for basketball again this year?
“Um, no. My name is Lee, and I like baseball. Lynn is my brother and that was 10 years ago.”
Coach walked off shaking his head, having aged a decade in the space of a minute.
At my brother’s memorial — a celebration of life, as they call these affairs — even his psychiatrist, notably stoic, was shaken, his voice quavering with grief. He had that deep depression that occurs in less than 1% of patients that we could not touch. His death did not bring relief.
At the hotel nearby, I played with my great-nephews, six and nine years old, in the pool, throwing and splashing them like my brother did to me when I was small. The old folks watched, wrung their hands, unable to smoke in the enclosed pool area that smelled of sweat and chlorine, smiled at the kids they rarely saw, young life to offset the dead.
Kyle, the oldest, grabbed my hand, looked at it closely, and thrust my arm by the wrist into the air.
“Mom! Mom!”
“What, honey?”
“He has grandpa’s hands.”
I had only just met Kyle. He had never seen me and his grandfather alive together.
Some years later, I had lunch with my brother’s high school girlfriend. She had been like an older sister to me. We spent a couple of hours catching up. They had broken up more than 30 years before and had mostly lost touch. We didn’t talk about my brother. He was in the room though. “Such a tragedy.” “So sad.” And then I saw the familiar staring. Her eyes grew wide. She stopped talking. I looked directly at her.
“What?”
“You have your brother’s arms.”
Did she even see me or merely her dead teenaged lover?
My entire life, my family called me by my brother’s name, Lynn, not Lee, Even distant relatives, family members back East where he was born, called me by his name when they first met me. They called me by his name when they’d known me for years. That’s not just a slip of the tongue. Like his high school girlfriend, they see the ghost within.
I am haunted. I was haunted while he was alive, and now that he’s dead . . .
When he first “got sick,” — how plainly can we speak? When he first tried to kill himself . . . When he first slashed his wrists . . . When he first opened a vein . . . When he first tried to “commit suicide.” We are told not to use that phrase. It’s like he’s doing work, committing himself to a task, like baking bread. When he suicided . . . that term is reserved only for the last attempt, not an attempt at all, a success story.
When I first heard about my brother suffering . . . did he suffer? He seemed to revel in his illness. At a family reunion, he sat with a childhood friend and they gleefully compared notes about their favorite anti-depressants, as if gossiping and sharing dessert recipes. His frame — my frame — had enlarged, now over 300 pounds, 100 pounds more than his healthy backpacking self, medicines and lethargy ballooning him like a Macy’s float.
When my dad told me all those years ago that my brother was ill, I rushed to the counselor’s office. I told the counselor about my preternatural resemblance to my brother.
“When’s my turn,” I asked?
“It doesn’t work that way,” the counselor said.
I did not breathe a sigh of relief. All my life, I have looked around corners. At the first sign of stress, I sought counseling, made time to practice yoga and meditation, read Moby-Dick on repeat, the hard cover version with the Rockwell Kent illustrations that my brother gave me.
When my brother’s middle two children “suicided,” I grew angry. I thought, What did you teach them, brother, by your example? But by that time, my brother’s image had faded. In my head were only stories of him, the legends of his teachings, the care he took with his flock, his rejection of modern technology. I remembered his laughter from childhood before he was ill, a dozen or so clear memories, taking me hiking and canoeing and camping where we fried bologna over an open fire, hitchhiking with me on a vacation in Hawaii the summer after he was married, protecting me from my sisters.
And I kept looking around the corners, watching for the signs of breakage. If you break it, you’ve bought it. Handle with care.
My brother tried to convert me, wanted me to join the church with him. I said the words, invited Jesus into my heart. I did it for my brother, not my mortal soul.
But I was a rebellious teen, defiant even against him. He overstepped his bounds, coerced me with his brotherly clout. I would have done anything he had asked, anything except that. He couldn’t ask me to give up my free will, my belief in myself to make my own way, guided not by an invisible hand but by my own mind. I would make my own decisions in life. I was one of the seeds thrown on rocky soil that didn’t take root. It isn’t my way. My relationship with him was never the same after that.
He went his way. I went mine. And then he got sick.
All my life, I have watched for the crack that would splinter my skull, send lightning bolts through my brain like ineffectual shock treatments.
“It doesn’t work that way,” they said. “It runs in families, but it doesn’t work that way.” Which is it? Because I’d like to know. I howl into the wilderness, but the wind doesn’t answer.
Because of my brother, I have been on high alert for the blight that has desiccated our family tree. Because of my brother, I have taken a different road. His life and teachings have become my gospel. I tell his story. Because to tell his story is to tell my story.
The other day, as I was looking around the corners of my mind in search of the words to explain what I am still doing here, it struck me. I have never lost track of my brother. He is always with me, has never left me.
He didn’t die in vain. He made a choice to end his suffering, something that no one else, no drug, no treatment could do. He had an illness as sure as cancer, his psychiatrist wrote to me. And he had the cure.
His act was brave, climbing and standing on that bridge that night. Always the first. Always the leader, always in charge, always doing the right thing. And he jumped.
I am proud of my brother. He is a part of me.
I don’t look around corners anymore.
He died so that I may live.
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I’ve written a memoir, My Own Private Waste Land, which I’m querying for traditional publication. I’m at work on my second memoir as well as many other assorted writing projects.
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On this substack, 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 . . .
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