A couple of years back a friend from high school reached across the sundered decades (via Facebook) to ask me a question. Less than a year before her oldest son — a talented young man who had just begun his career in Washington, DC — had been killed in a bicycle accident. She expressed concern for how his three younger brothers would deal with the loss.
She asked me because my older brother had died while I was a sophomore in college. I had faced death as a young man and she wanted to know how it had affected me. She was too polite to point out that my brother’s death had come by his own hand.
Her question affected me in an unexpected way and I don’t think my response was particularly helpful to her. But maybe it holds some truth.
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I read about your son’s death. I can’t permit myself to even try imagining the impact of such a loss. It is too terrifying.
I don’t really know your family and advice on how to cope with such a tragedy would be hollow at best. I can tell you how my brother’s death affected me and why, though I’m not sure it offers any insight or even that you would want to know. My intensity on some subjects can scare people.
I was the last person in my family to see my brother alive. It was evening on Thanksgiving Day of my freshman year in college and I was alone in our living room. My brother stepped out the front door saying he just needed to get some air. It was very warm in the house. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, so I thought nothing of it.
When he didn’t come back we all assumed he had just run away again. A big part of me was glad he was gone. He had come home from Temple University in late November/early December of my senior year in high school and torn my life apart. At the beginning of 12th grade I felt as if I was finally becoming what I wanted to be. I had good grades, good friends; a sense of not just belonging but of being wanted. My brother dropped in like a bomb: raving at everyone, potentially violent; at best a public embarrassment, at worst a madman who might be capable of just about anything. His previous disappearances, usually a day or two before police picked him up somewhere, came as almost a relief to the constant tension of having him around.
His body was found on Easter Sunday about 5 months after he he walked out that door. I didn’t know how to feel at the time. We had not been close before he went insane. He was too brilliant, too talented, too intense for me before he went away to school. After returning from Temple he was a nightmare; barely human, much less my brother. I didn’t think his death ripped a hole in my heart, it felt more like a wound had been closed.
Yet for years after I would be walking in a mall or down a street and think I saw him just up ahead, going in the other direction, standing at a bus stop, getting off the subway. I would dream about him showing up again — reports of his death greatly exaggerated — or never having been gone at all. I would see a movie and wonder what he would have thought of it. I would listen to a song and think he would have liked it. I would hear a violin and suddenly want to cry. He remains an amputated limb in my life; a phantom pain in an arm cut off long ago.
I have been told by therapists that healthy families deal with such things by pulling together. My family was not healthy by any measure. My parents didn’t speak to us about my brother’s death other than that it had happened. Rather than bringing us together, it drove us apart — beginning to expose terrible cracks. My mother became living guilt. My father carefully cultivated an image of someone both aggrieved and grieving. I heard some people speculating at an event soon after his death about how good parents like mine could possibly have sired a black sheep like my brother. “Some kids are just born bad,” one of them said. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out the role my parents played in my brother’s death. Behind the facade of normalcy — even holiness — maintained by my father were unbelievably awful things. In the end, my brother couldn’t live with them.
There would seem to be few parallels between the death of your son and that of my brother. I have read testimonials about him from co-workers, friends and others. They speak of a vibrant, positive, joyous young man cut down as he was beginning to bloom; a young man who loved and was loved by his family. I couldn’t tell you if the circumstances of my brother’s death made my experience easier or more difficult. Death only comes close to acceptable for those who are old and die in their sleep. I have wondered what it would be like if I had a less cluttered picture of my brother. Not just one without craziness and family problems, but one without my compulsive self-comparison to his abilities and accomplishments. Maybe it would be easier if I could just admire him, embrace his memory, and celebrate his life. But I doubt it. Death just isn’t normal and every death is different in how it affects those who are left behind. Some are pulled together, others are torn apart. Sometimes it isn’t clear who is which.
I can’t help but remember the terrible howl from Anne’s husband [she was a slightly younger mutual friend killed shortly after I graduated college] at her funeral. I thought then: This is what devastating loss sounds like. I wondered how it would be possible for him to ever recover but heard only a few weeks later that some were growing frustrated he couldn’t get past mourning.
In the losses I have experienced since having my own children I have simply tried to be honest with them. I have tried to avoid secrets or concealing my emotions. I have tried to respect their expressions of fear and sadness without hiding behind a stoic appearance, the pretense of normalcy or a wall of anger. I say tried because I can’t pretend to have always done well.
My church family has been helpful during those times. Partly it is because our church is so small I can’t simply hide in the back; I have to participate. Partly it is because almost no one tells me how I should feel, what I should do to get through it, or quotes scripture at me as if Job’s words cause everything to make sense. It may have been easy for him to say: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord,” After all, he got back twice as much as he had before.
Most important, no one tells me that time will make everything better, which is good because I’m pretty sure it won’t. Time just makes things different. The arm never grows back, but maybe I can learn to live without it.
Perhaps I should not say any of this at all. I’m already recriminating. Forgive me if I have said things I shouldn’t.
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