The Journey to the Geodetic Center, Part 1
In which I explain our journey to the center of North America and into ourselves.
In August 2004, my then-wife and I were standing with her mother and her daughter in a swanky new hospital in northern Virginia, watching my ex’s father die. Three systems were failing, and it was a matter of time. Several religious persons made their appearance for prayers holding hands and last rites.
During one of those prayers, my cell phone rang. My parents. They knew where I was, so any call to me would be urgent. I let the phone go silent. I waited for a break and went into the echoing hallway to return the call. With all this focus on “father,” I was concerned that something had happened to my own father. I was confused when he answered the phone.
He was crying, “He jumped. Lynn. He jumped.” My brother, 10 years old then me and suffering for 13 years from major depressive disorder, had jumped from the Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon. He was spotted in the scaffolding one night. In the morning, they recovered his body from the Willamette River. It was an outcome so inevitable that we had stopped looking for it. And it was a shock. My tears hit the floor before I even knew I was crying.
What was going to be a week in Virginia seeing my father-in-law through his death and getting my mother-in-law situated with her new freedom turned into a month away from home and work. We flew from Virginia to Portland for my brother’s serice and spent a few days there. Then we returned to Virginia to get my mother-in-law settled. She was completely isolated from the world - not to mention paranoid, racist, and on the bring of insanity. She had never managed a checkbook in her life. She barely drove. She took handfuls of Xanax, a vast supply kept on the counter in plastic snack bottle, one of those large square ones that peanut butter pretzels come on from Costco. So much Xanax for an anxiety disorder that had lasted for 30 plus years. We cataloged all of my father-in-law’s 6,000 books and his coin collections and his assortment of bonds. There was much to do.
And then we returned home to northeast Kansas, 30 miles north of Lawrence. The grass was waist high. The dogs, well cared for by a friend, greeted us like royalty.
As we settled in, I saw the answering machine blinking. I had called work several times and they told me everything was fine and to take care of my personal business. (I was fired from that job the next year). Most of the calls were from work and from family or our friend Amy giving updates about the dogs. But one message stood out, the haunting and haunted voice of my brother, on the night he killed himself.
I started crying even before listen to the whole message, clicking it off. The red light blinked slowly on the machine, indicating an unheard message, like the staring eye of Hal. I started the message again. From the memoir:
Hello Lee, this is Lynn, I was just calling to say hi and see how you are doing. (sigh) I guess I’ll talk to you later. Love ya brother--and that was it, the electronic voice recording the time as August 15 at night, and I checked the records, that was the night, a call for help and my tears fresh and whole, I wasn’t here, I could’ve said something, but I wasn’t here, and QT, it’s okay baby, it wasn’t your fault, it wouldn’t have mattered, he struggled for so long
But it would have mattered. It would have mattered to me to have those last few minutes to say good bye, even if I didn’t know it was good bye. Instead, I missed the call, came to it as bitter after taste.
Next week, I’ll share a portion of my memoir with you about our trip to the geodetic center of North America - an actual trip that serves as a metaphor for my journey inward.
Thank you for reading. I write about my memoir, My Own Private Waste Land, and making my memoir as I seek traditional publication. My memoir tells the story of a decade of my life in which toxic relationships and other people’s mental illnesses drove me to the breaking point and how I wrested control of my life back again, all wrapped in the cloak and mantle of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
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mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
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alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
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