Visiting My Brother's Grave
Remembering my brother on the 20th anniversary of his suicide
(My brother’s, sister-in-law’s, nephew’s and niece’s gravestone, Lacey, Washington, Aug 6, 2024 - photo by author)
Seattle to Lacey is seventy-plus miles south, fighting traffic all the way. What would normally be an hour trip in most cities is almost two hours with Seattle traffic. But first, we must go to Shelton, another twenty-five miles in the opposite direction from Lacey, to pick up my sister. As we approached Shelton, we saw miles of cars stopped on the other side of the road, the road we needed to take to the cemetery.
I worried about my sister Lisa, how she would hold up. My own tension settled in my jaw. But what we fought the most was the sunshine. Seattle weather is predictable in the way you know how to tie your shoes. It’s something you do unconsciously, something that needs to be done - dress in layers, grab a raincoat. Not this day. The sky was brilliant, bright blue, clearest of the year, with a brightness that made you shield your eyes from the sun. Light in August, indeed.
This was my first trip to my brother’s grave since he died twenty years before.
I thought he was in Portland, Oregon, place of his death, not 3 hours north of Portland and an hour south of where I had lived for the past 2 years.
I remember talking to a former Southern California neighbor some time after Lynn’s death, who had moved to Bellingham, Washington when I was a teenager. She had been a nurse, and she asked about the family. She hadnt heard. When I told her, she audibly winced on the phone and quietly said, “You don’t get over that.” It’s true. You don’t, but you do find a way to move forward through the molasses of thought and days.
Lisa knew a back way to Lacey. She had made Olympia her home for decades, just as Lynn had made the Pacific Northwest his home - first Olympia then Seattle and Kirkland, Spokane, Portland, establishing churches for the deaf as an Assemblies of God minister. That was years after his hippie days and long before the suicidal impulses, the black shroud of major depressive disorder that ruled his life for 13 years, mental illness at the hands of an angry God whom he loved to the end, until his jump from the Fremont Bridge - August 16, 2004.
Lisa brought a potted plant. I had a pocketful of rocks. Though she never met my brother, Ashley accompanied, always more support than I could ask, my own rock.
The cemetery office felt like high school, a counter and a long book bound with brads at the narrow end. A tall man with shiny slickbacked hair with the look of a 1970s used car salesman, brown slacks, muted yellow shirt, clasped his hands together and welcomed us.
“Are you visiting?”
“We’re from Seattle and Olympia, visiting our brother’s grave.”
“How exciting, welcome! What’s his name?”
“Lynn Hornbrook.”
He keyed in the name and looked puzzled. “He’s not listed, are you sure he’s here?”
“I looked up his gravesite on the internet, and it listed this cemetery and a St. Nicholas’ Garden.”
The man had a placid smile on his face. “I don’t know what that is. There is another Woodlawn cemetery in the area. Let me call over to see if he’s there.”
We hadn’t anticipated another trip. Already we were destined for end of work Friday traffic into Seattle. A delay would put us into the traffic jam.
His call seemed routine, friendly even. “There are some visitors here looking for the grave of Lynn Hornbrook, I can’t find him here, perhaps he’s over there?”
As he’s talking, I’m looking at the gravestone placard on my phone and the listing at Woodlawn Cemetery in Lacey, where we are standing. He hung up the phone.
“I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure where he is. He’s not in the directory. You can look in here. This is a puzzle! Some excitement for the day.” We served as his entertainment, and he was clearly enjoying having company with the living.
He produced a card catalog drawer with yellow cards in it, names and plot numbers of the deceased evidently housed (graved?) on the premises. No listing.
“Is it usual that you misplace a grave?”
“It happens. Can you provide any other information about him?””
I’m sure my amused shock was shielded by the bright sun filtering through the windows, large panels that looked out to the driveway across which were the lawns with flat placards and a large flagpole in the middle, the stars and stripes lazily swaying.
“The grave marker lists four people - he and his wife Jody, and two of their children, Seth, and Ellie, Elizabeth. All with the last name Hornbrook.”
“Oh, that is something then. From time to time, we may not know the location of one decedent, but it would be rare for us to misplace four. Maybe take a look in this book to see if you can find him in there.”
It was a log book, long pages on which 3 or 4 squares were listed with gravesite informaton. Each square was handwritten and it looked machine copied and faded. Not alphabetical, its order eluded us. It would take an hour or two to searchthrough that book.
Now both Ashley and I scoured the Internet looking for more information.
Lisa said, “Jody’s maiden name was Everitt, if that helps.”
“I can look.” The man was clearly enoying this mystery, this game of hide (bury?) and seek.
The end of Poltergeist flitted through my brain, “You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones! Why? Why?”
Always saving the day, Ashley found information about Jody online, and a listing for her father Jerry, Gerald, who had received a military burial.
Light bulbs went off aand recognition dawned through the game-like frenzy of the man. “Oh, perhaps they’re in the military wing.” I wondered about that since my brother was anti-war, a true peacenik. But irony would find a way.
He located a Gerald and Gladys Everitt, Jody’s parents, buried in the military wing.
One look outside, all we saw was row upon row of placards at ground level and acres of lawn. Nothing that looked like a wing.
He consulted another book. “Here they are! Let me walk you out.”
The driveway was between the building and the graves. We followed the man’s long stride, directly across the asphalt to the first row of placards nearest the driveway. He mentioned his family owned the cemetery and as a teenager he had mowed the lawns. He knew the cemetery like the back of his hand. Now he worked in the office. If he knew the cemetery as well as he said, he would have walked past this grave placard a million times - four Hornbrooks planted all in a row, right out his front door.
(The view from the gravesite, the flowers my sister brought at the bottom right corner of the picture. - photo by author)
I had steeled myself for this trip, leaned on Ashley, stood strong for my sister prone to anxieties.
We stood in the sun, now a little too hot, the glare even stronger in the early afternoon. There it was - the family tragedy.
My brother dead at 51, suicide.
His son, Seth, 8 years later, dead at 31, suicide.
His middle daughter, distraught and grieving for her brother, dead at 28, 7 months after her brother’s death, suicide.
My sister-in-law, Jody, dead at 60, 10 years after my brother’s death, having survived the deaths of her spouse and her two middle children to suicide. Surely as much as she succumbed to the untreatable cancer, grief led her to an early grave.
I watched my sister, standing and looking at the gravestone. She placed a potted plant at the top of the marker. I placed a stack of stones, one for each of them, on the left side of the plaque, tribute to both my brother’s and my left-handedness.
As in life, so in death.
I squinted against the sun, hot for the Pacific Northwest, feeling the sweat on my back and brow. I had no words.
Twenty years. Easily transported back to the memory that I’ve worn smooth in my mind, like a worry stone, polished to a gleam so bright it would blot this August sun.
It had been twenty years, a long way from the swank marble-floored Virginia hospital room where I held hands with my then-wife and her mother, witnessing the final moments of my then-wife’s father. We were quiet, listening to the beeping machine and the padded footfalls of nurses’s shoes on the hard shiny floors. My phone rang in my pocket, startling me - my parents’ phone number in California. Oh ! They knew where I was, knew how to reach me in case of an emergency . . . would never call unless . . . I thought, Oh, my father!
I excused myself to the hallway, my hands shaking as I pressed the number to call.
My father’s voice startled me, focused as I was on losing a father. And his anguished cry still tears at me today, “He jumped. Lynn. He jumped.”
My tears hit the floor before I could slump where I stood, “Oh, dad.”
A moment we all had dreaded for 13 years,and had maybe, just a little, stopped looking for.
Now in the bright sunlight across the country, in the Pacific Norhtwest, the land where my brother lived his adult life, the land I now call home, I had no tears.
No anger. No sadness. Not even numbness.
An ineffable calm at this life and death around us.
I squinted into the sun, and looked at my sister.
“You okay?” I asked
“Yeah, are you?”
“Yeah.”
Twenty-one years ago today, my brother died.
Sometimes I think of my brother, sister-in-law, nephew, niece. Sometimes I am angry, or sad or numb. He left a great legacy in his work and friendships. The legacy for his own family? Fraught and complicated at best. The legacy for me? A lifetime of writing, of trying to decipher the indecipherable.
It’s a year since I visited my brother’s grave. I meant to write this a year ago to commemorate the twentieth year of his death. I obviously felt no rush. Nothing I write will change anything. Nothing I write can capture that moment when he stood atop that bridge that night and with an incomprehensible swiftness, changed the lives of so many.
I was ten years younger than my brother. Now I’m ten years older than the age he was when he died.
I have lived ten years more than he did. He’s missed so much. And sometimes I feel like I live my life despite/to spite his legacy. Maybe I am meant to tell his story, like he told the stories and preached about his God.
But if I have learned anything at all, it is that to tell his story, I tell my own.
As long as I keep telling his story, his story won’t end.
As for me, ten years older than him now, my story is just beginning.
Miss ya, bro.
Love, me
xoxo
Beautifully written, Lee.
Magnificent.
I am sorry about your family. I think writing about such things help us all become better people.