The Land of My Brother
Where once my brother roamed, I now call home
If you had told me twenty years ago that I would be living in the Pacific Northwest and loving it, I would have told you that there was a better chance of the world being consumed by heat and disasters roaming the land like rampaging dinosaurs. And here we are.
Growing up in southern California, I hated the rain. It’s not that we didn’t get rain, we did. In my memory, when it rained, it rained for weeks, sheets of rain drenching everything in late winter, early spring, flooding streets, filling runoffs and reservoirs, causing mudslides and tangled traffic throughout Los Angeles. But then the sun came out and we’d forget the rain for the next 11 months. A month of rain for sunshine the rest of the year seemed like a good trade off.
Through the years, I’ve moved to and lived in every geographical region of the continental United States, except the upper midwest and the big sky lands of Montana. I lived in southern California (Los Angeles, San Diego), the desert southwest (Albuquerque), the midwestern plains (Kansas), New England (New Haven, Connecticut), coastal central California (Santa Cruz region), the South, ah do declare (Alanna, GA), and finally, the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Washington).
There was no plan to end up here. It’s something that just happened, connected to my partner’s studies and work.
Most of my life and my memoir writing connects with my brother, 10 years older than me, with whom I was confused by friends and relatives for most of my life, despite that fact that he suffered from major depressive disorder for 13 years and committed suicide when he was 51. But the similarity between us haunts me today.
As we drove from Atlanta to California to pick up a car, and then north on I-5 from central California over the mountains of southern Oregon and into Portland, with its iconic Fremont Bridge, the Bridge from which my brother jumped to his death, to the only freedom he could know, and then into Seattle, I feared what the psychic overhang might be moving to my brother’s chosen lands.
It’s almost as if Seattle and the PNW is in my blood, through the blood of my brother. I feel more at home here than I have living almost anywhere else, as if my brother’s tenure here paved the way for me.
My memories visiting my brother are intense pinpoints of light, dots of time marking our shared lives together. I didn’t visit often but any visit with my brother was a cause for celebration, a re-enactment of when we lived under the same roof, shared the same room when we were children, when I was a child and he was a growing teenager.
But each visit with my brother was also tinged with loss.
On one visit, there were kittens at the house. One of the children accidentally dropped a kitten and its nose broke and it had to be euthanized. I remember m sister-in-law, Jody, and her oldest child, Anna, sobbing inconsolably. I was sad, but growing up with 20 feral cats and gathering scores of litters of unhealthy kittens to be destroyed almost ever other month hardened me to the plight of wild cats.
On another visit, as a late teenager to my brother’s house in Spokane, I spent hours on the phone talking with an on again/off again girlfriend, trying to figure things out. The foundation of my first heartbreak was laid in those phone calls.
Later still, several years after my brother’s death, I returned to Seattle and the PNW to participate in a chartered sailing trip with a flotilla of 70 boats, cruising the San Juan Islands out of and sailing to Victoria and Sidney, British Columbia. It would be the last cruise I took with my then-wife, our last season of happiness before the fast implosion of our 15 year marriage, attributable in part to her borderline personality disorder, something her doctors diagnosed but for five years failed to tell us about. Again, loss looms over the PNW.
Recently, as we take a walk our daily walk through Magnuson Park, the second largest park in Seattle, bordering the western shores of Lake Washington with a clear view (weather depending) of Mt. Rainier 100 miles away, I took pictures of stunningly blue skies - completely cloud free.
In the year I’ve lived here, there was been far less rain than I experienced living in Kansas, in New Haven, in Atlanta. The rains have left, the weather of the southern California of my childhood has moved northward. It’s as if the skies of childhood now reign above me.
I knew my brother best when we were kids, when I was a child. At 11 years old, I was the best man at my brother’s wedding, kneeling in my 3-piece peach-colored suit in the wedding photo with his bride, holding the three red kerchiefed Golden Retrievers also in the picture.
I will never know why my brother got sick, became suicidal. Thirteen years is a long time to fight to keep yourself alive. But then, most of us fight to stay alive all of our lives. Until we don’t. Somehow, living in this place that is so associated with my brother for me makes him feel more alive in my life than ever. I have very few memories of him, despite being alive for 41 years before he died. But the memories I have are intensely bright, like a sputtering candle singeing a curious moth.
How close can I get to those memoires, to my brother, before I get burned?
I stare out my window today at the pines in the park across the street. Above, the skies are bright blue again. It’s been a glorious summer, no fires, no smoke-filled skies like last year, sunny, warm. It it weren’t for the pine trees, the Puget Sound, and the Space Needle, one might think it was Los Angeles in spring. It’s September and the weather is changing, almost on cue. Now we have a bit of wind, soon the wind will get stronger and the leaves will fall from the trees. The leaves are changing, golden yellows and reds shade the hillsides, squirrels collect acorns shaped like cartoon drawings, perfect specimens. Our dog, Herman, an almost 5-year old dachshund, perks up at the baby bunnies who quickly hide among the late season blackberry brambles. The last of the berries rot into little black dessicated clusters on their thorny vines.
I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the drying of the lands, the lack of rain that could cure the land of drought, a curse of The Fisher King. Soon, rain will return and revitalize the land. Soon, we will spend our days inside seeking warmth and sheltered from the damp and cold. Soon, the rains will rejuvenate our spirits, enliven us, quicken us, and come for us, like they do for a waiting Prufrock - “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
Until then, brother, I am here with you . . .
To tell your story . . .
To tell my story.
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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 . . .
Just keep writing!