u/sheyndl

too long/don't read

My 16 year old brother killed himself 50 years ago today and until the minute of his death passed, I kept feeling like there would be a window in time through which I could step and stop it.

I was only 7, so a lifetime has gone by since then and I can’t quite believe it. I remember thee events of that day like yesterday, albeit through a fog. My mother, grandmother and I were traveling to the airport to pick up family, and all three of us – Mom, Grandma, and I – had had dreams of death the night before. Mom said it was like ghosts walking up and down her back all night long. Grandma had dreamed of our cat being run over in front of a neighbor’s house, and I had dreamed my other grandmother died and I cried all through the night.

Waiting at the airport to pick up the arrving family, my mother was paged. My young cousin and I were left there to sit and wait. We passed our time talking to a man who had a white dog with a curly tail that could be straightened out and would then curl back up into a perfect circle. Mom and Grandma came to say that we, the kids, would be riding home with the police. Mom and Grandma went with a separate police escort to the hospital. My older cousins were there at the house and wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. Finally the oldest cousin told me that my brother was dead. Even typing that sentence still has the power to stop me cold. I cried. I knew what death meant, because death came early and often to our family, but here I cried so hard that my cousin held me to cry on her shoulder and they put a bucket under me. I don’t know if they thought I was going to vomit, but I think I cried so much I started to fill the bucket.

At the hospital when they told our grandmother, she replied “He had such a pretty face.”

My brother, only 16 years old, had stayed home that morning, not wanting to go to the airport, promising to mow the lawn. When we left, he went into my parents’ bedroom, took out one of my father’s handguns, blindfolded himself, and shot himself in the head. Somehow the oldest cousin had felt the need to visit, and she found him. Whether there was more behind that visit, and whether there was a note, we’ll never know. My mother thanks God that the cousin found him, because if we had come home and she had found that scene, she doesn’t know what she might have done.

My father wasn’t home, he was on a fishing trip. They called him to tell him to come home without giving a reason, but my grandmother blew it and said my brother had killed himself. His friend, a police captain, was present for that call and he called the police in my father’s location and told them to do whatever necessary to get my dad on that flight. Basically they had his fishing buddy pour a pint of liquor down his throat and put him on the plane. He was kept under sedation until after the funeral, which he did not attend. In his sedative and alcohol fueled stupor, the best he could do was to call the undertaker (another family friend) and tell him “I want you to write ‘Fair dinkum’ in my son’s book.” And so that phrase stands in the visitation list, among the very few names of those attending. The funeral wasn’t publicized, because of the shame and the shock we felt about his death. For my father, the loss of a 2nd child (my sister had been killed by a drunk driver just 2 years before) proved destructive beyond measure. He began a drinking binge that nearly ruined the family and affects some of us to this day. My father’s mother, who lived with us, was already not a very nice person (I loved her and happened to get along with her very well, perhaps as much as a witch’s familiar gets along with a witch) –– but she took the loss out on my mother, my brother’s stepmother, in fantastically cruel ways, accusing her of killing him whenever they were alone at home together. Physical signs remained as well: blood had run through the 1950s popcorn ceiling, which was repaired with patching and painting but no stippling, so a cross and a circle became a constant reminder –– just look up. How my father and mother continued to sleep in that bedroom for the next 12 years is a bit of a mystery to me. But sometimes we don’t think we have choices.

My brother’s death represented many failures besides our own as a family, and it was a complicated family situation: he and my sisters were born of my father’s first wife. My mother was his seond wife. My father was abusive towards my brother, who felt pulled to his mother even as he loved my own mother and was preparing to be adopted by her. My oldest sister had fled our father’s home in terror even before my mother came along. My brother had also gotten involved with drugs, whether thanks to our older cousins or to his friends at high school is unclear, but it was probably overdetermined. He had told my cousins he was contemplating killing himself, and he had told a young priest at our church as well. But everyone kept mum.

I was young enough that I don’t have much of my brother except his death. I was seven and he had told me he was working on a special surprise for my 8th birthday. I always wonder if it was his death. Maybe it was simply that he was planning to move in with his mother, which he’d apparently been discussing. He used to draw clowns for me. He built and rode a go cart. He was a boy scout, though he did not achieve the rank of eagle. When he had to wear rental costume boots for his 8th grade play, they gave him a blister on his ankle. Our uncle, an MD, had given me a small medical kit for the previous Christmas, so I played doctor and bandaged the blister for him each night before the show. The girl who played his love interest in the show was in fact his girlfriend or so we thought. Years later when I randomly messaged her on Facebook, she described them as just “friends” (well, they were in 8th grade), but said they did like to play word games together. But I do recall him being popular with the girls.

The people who remember him are few: my mother, my surviving sister, her eldest daughter maybe. My mother’s sister. The cousins are distant now and we long left that old neighborhood. And anyway, the neighborhood boys my brother was closest with have died themselves, early I guess: diabetes, heart failure…

Did my brother’s suicide fuck me up? Probably. But what can you do. I guess time helps. Or helps forget. I recently looked at a book on surviving sibling suicide for which I was interviewed over 30 years ago, and reading it now, I’m shocked at my attitudes then – how depressed I was, how certain I was that I would eventually kill myself. Things got better, or less awful anyway, in the intervening years. I had a drinking problem then and would eventually need to get help, with 18 years sober now. And the anniversary hasn’t always been this awful. There have even been anniversaries where it’s an afterthought. But 50 years… Now, dwelling on it like this, even today, has created a tension in my chest, a headache, and makes me very tired.

So what does it mean, my brother’s suicide? In the big picture, not a damn thing I guess. Not to anyone except a very, very few, who hold the memory. I’m not even sure we “hold” the memory because it’s not like we could get rid of it even if we wanted to. It’s included like a fossil. I wouldn’t want to hear “sorry for your loss” because the loss is long ago. The loss is now part of me. It would be like saying “Sorry for your knee” or “Sorry for the color of your eyes.”

But here on the 50th anniversary, I’m dwelling on it, or it’s dwelling in me and I’m obsessing over it, seeking details and why? Because I think that in some synchronous time frame I stop his death? He bailed 50 years ago and I am still stuck with it. I’ll never know why but I can’t let go. The question is whether I’ll tag along and my guess is at some point yes, I likely will. But how soon? Maybe suicide is like sex in high school, and the people who talk about it most are the people who never get it? I even bear the name of a grandfather who did the same...

edited for clarity

S01E06 Plot Questions

50 years after a suicide