My Brother Is Dead

Bill,


They found him in Sheepshead Bay. A pleasure boat cruising by bumped into him. The key to his room at the local assisted living facility where he was living  was in his pocket, so he was readily identified. He had gone out for a walk. One can surmise with a good deal of certainty that he jumped from somewhere. News of most deaths comes to us from a doctor or family member. This death was a police matter, and so my sister received a phone call from a New York City detective. I was out to lunch with an old friend when the phone rang with my sisters name and I knew, in that terrible and certain way that one knows, what she had called to tell me. 


He had been mentally ill for very long time, at least since his teenage years and possibly even longer. He was blessed with a superior intelligence, and cursed with an uncanny capacity for alienating almost everyone who might have cared about him. He graduated from an elite, albeit eccentric college and seven years later washed out of graduate school in clinical psychology when his supervisors realized he was unfit to treat patients. He never married. He spent the remaining 40 years  living in a rent controlled apartment in Brooklyn, working occasionally, living more or less in poverty, borrowing money from all of our relatives until they grew tired of him. From time to time my sister would get a phone call  telling her he was hospitalized. She did what she could for him, although he wore her out too.


He was 7 1/2 years older than me, and he was very kind and protective of me when we were young. As adults however, we became estranged. I hadn't spoken to him in years until I called him at the psych ward some months ago after he slit his wrists. We shared a few polite words of conversation. He remembered that I have 2 children but didn't remember their names. He thanked me for calling but asked me not call again, and that is the last I ever spoke to him. From my sister's account it is not clear how much he knew reality at the end, but the suffering of a 71 year man so utterly alone without even the barest memories of some happier time is reality enough for the choice he made.    


He did not have good parents, and he blamed them throughout his life for his misfortune. I of course had the same parents. By the time I came along his relentless resistance had diminished their  virulence, and I owe him for that. He first ran away from home at 16. My mother read the note he wrote to her sisters over the telephone. I wish I still had it. He told them what he thought of them. It felt awful to hear at the age of nine but now it feels like an extraordinary act of courage. The state cops found him hitchhiking 4 days later on the thruway in Buffalo. My parents went out to fetch him, but he never stopped running after that for long. After a while they just him go. That was easier than trying to fix him. He had this weird romantic notion about the West, and being a cowboy, and would regularly wire for money from some Western Union in Laredo, or Santa Fe, or some such place.


Why I had the ability/fortune to forge ahead in life and he did not is a mystery to me. Mostly I feel grateful and undeserving. I've had a lot of time in the last few weeks to think about whether I could have a made a difference, whether I could have altered the arc of his terribly sad and unbearably lonely time on this planet. Maybe its an excuse to let myself off the hook, but I don't think so. He was inept at most things, but singularly skilled at pushing away anyone who ever loved him.


Right now the medical examiner is dithering over what to do with his body. This being New York, the bizarre, remote possibility of foul play is probably on the ME's mind. Drowning will surely be listed as the cause of death but my sister and I know better. Something essential in him died long ago. Once he's cremated his ashes will be returned to me. I'll hold onto them until this all settles inside me. That will take a while.


Eli