my oldest brother

My brother died when I was young. The official cause, I believe, was hypothermia. He went to sleep outside, one night in the middle of an Upstate New York winter. It may have been a lapse in judgement, drugs may have been involved, and it may have been an intentional suicide. If anybody knows for sure, they're not coming forward to let me know.

It was also a cold night when the policeman came to our door. My mother screamed and screamed and I was in the next room, terrified.

Later, probably back at the house after the funeral, I remember overhearing a well-meaning aunt marvelling to someone at how well I was taking it. When she said it, I think I was showing off my new TRS-80 Color Computer, a Christmas gift scant weeks before. At the time, I couldn't figure out whether to be proud of my coping skills or ashamed of my emotional emptiness.

The ground was frozen, so they couldn't bury him for months, until April when it finally thawed. I remember my mother telling me that I didn't have to wear black, but I don't remember anything else about the day of the interment.

The cemetery is on a rural road, called Cemetery Road in fact. I've visited the grave every so often since then, sometimes talking to him, feeling somewhat foolish and melodramatic each time. I stopped by on my last day before I moved West, an essential element of closure for my youth back East. But I've also been there on trips back home since then, always alone. The grave is nearly always in a slightly different place than I remember it.

I don't want to sound like I'm constantly dwelling on the loss. For better or worse, the years have stripped the memory of much of its direct emotional impact. As I said, it happened while I was a self-centered pre-adolescent, so perhaps the initial emotional shock to me wasn't very great. The long-term effects to my family were far more profound than my personal grief.

On the other hand, I am certain that the effects on my development and outlook were considerable. I can't even be sure of all the ways; sometimes it's impossible to trace simple cause-and-effect relationships between all the elements of our history and personalities. I don't think many people could deny that my lifelong interest (bordering on obsession) in death and mental illness is connected to the event. Also, my tendency to adopt or focus on shared interests and aspects of his personality may certainly have been elevated in importance by the enigma of his death.

Grand language aside, I thought he was cool and I wanted to be like him. I guess that's not unusual for a younger brother. Probably the way he died made him more of a mythical figure, making me even more intrigued.

You might say that I've been emotionally distant ever since, refusing to let anybody mean enough to me to hurt me when they inevitably leave. You might say that I've been punishing myself with guilt over not being closer to him when he was alive, or from not being more devastated by his death. You could take it farther and say that I've been fatalistic, morbid, and consciously or unconsciously self-destructive ever since...as part of an attempt to be more like the older brother whom I idolized. It all makes perfect sense, but I just can't say to what extent it's really true.

What do I really know about him?

He was born January 13th, 1961- a Friday the 13th, no less. And he was given the middle name of Patrick, a nice Irish name that acquired its own doomed connotation from at least two other prematurely deceased members of the extended family. Too much can be made of coincidences, but still...

I have only a few distinct memories of his younger days, when he was still living at home all the time. I remember cardboard boxes full of the modular track pieces, tiny wheels, and rotary engines from slot cars...and lots of plastic pieces, Testor's paint jars, and stinky little tubes of glue from model cars. I remember rock records, Boston and Bruce Springsteen and Slowhand, among others, heard through the closed door of the little bedroom at the end of the hall. I remember him playing with Lego's with me.

I remember one night- New Year's, maybe? - when my parents were out and he and the other brother had friends over for a party. There was pizza, always my favorite, and an early bedtime for me. Much laughter and music elsewhere while I lay in the dark. The smell of beer. My parents were not happy afterwards.

I remember getting him into trouble because he let me read his paperback copy of National Lampoon's Bored of the Rings...and apparently it had objectionable content, that I was far too naive to know to conceal from our mother.

He was smart enough to get into college, at a time when college wasn't quite as much of a given as it is now. He joined ROTC- I can still remember adoring the fatigues and marvelling at his discipline. He once mentioned zoology as a potential major. I still carry his college ID card in my wallet. I'm looking at it as I write this. It shows a less handsome face than I remember- does that highlight the weakness in idealizing long-lost people, or just the well-known unflattering tendency of ID photos everywhere?

His right eye wandered, and his nose was big on a lean face. The photo shows him with a scanty moustache and unruly longish hair, a perfect representation of uncounted small-town 70's teenage boys. It looks like he got a much longer, stronger chin than either of his younger siblings.

He was left-handed. I automatically think of him whenever a southpaw reference passes my way.

I don't have any real evidence, but my guess is that he did his share of drugs and drinking. Somehow, I'm less sure that he would have become a cigarette smoker like the rest of us. I'll bet any money that his friends were unusual...perhaps not the hippie crowd that my sister hung with, nor the rockers that my other brother often counted as his friends, but some related combination of stoners, outcasts, and alternative experimenters.

The vinyl and cassettes he left behind formed a lot of the basis for my just-forming musical tastes. They included ska (Madness, Selecter, etc.) and electronic music (Kraftwerk, Our Daughter's Wedding) as well as progressive rock (King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull). I wish we could have talked about music later in my life, once I'd come to know what I was talking about. I wish I could have turned him on to something that I'd found, and that he'd kept coming up with new rare delights to share with me.

Would he have become like my sister, almost totally excluding me from his world? Would he have become like my other brother, a blandly amiable average joe? Would either have them have turned out the way they did had he been around?

I know my other brother would have had a much different life. The two of them were almost as close as twins; a year apart, sharing that little bedroom, at least once sharing a house together. When the older died, the younger fell apart. He drank himself into oblivion for the better part of the next decade, bumming around and disappearing for weeks, months at a time. He's okay now- maybe the best off of any of us kids, really, with a house and a wife and no more self-destructive habits (I can only claim two out of those three). But I can only guess what those lost years cost him, what the depth of his grief really was or is.

My mother has said that my oldest brother kept the peace. He provided a middle ground between the 'wacky' sister and 'good ol' boy' brother, as opposite as possible. He tempered the younger brother's natural resentment for me, as the attention-stealing baby of the family. Deprived of him, we had the choice of coping by growing closer or spiralling apart into our own personal orbits...and it was almost exclusively the latter. We're barely a family anymore- and I think that I'm justified in assuming it would not have happened that way, had he been around. I think we would still be a family today.

My mother sank into neurosis and depression, compounded by the stress of menopause and my own semi-troubled adolescence. Over the course of one decade, she'd lost her firstborn son and three of her own siblings. I'm not sure how much it affected my father, but it couldn't have been easy for him (his father died a few years later as well). He must have been under tremendous strain caring for his wife and children while having to be the strong one- and I'm too much like him to assume that he was strong enough to always deal with it gracefully and positively.

I had some sort of argument with a cousin that was staying with us, and ran off into the woods for an hour or two. When I came back, my father was calling for me. It was the most upset I'd ever seen him; his face was red and it was the only time I've ever heard him use the F word. I think his exact words were "I should punch you in your fucking face." He and my mother were terrified that they'd lose me too.

Later on, while driving my sister and brother to the train station after a holiday visit, my sister revealed that my father had hit the oldest brother more than once. I remember getting spanked maybe two, three times in my life. The other two siblings occasionally made sure that I knew how much better our parents were with me. On the other hand, my mother has said that my sister's memories of abuse were exaggerated, if not fabricated. I don't know who to believe; I have reason to doubt that either one of them tells about such things accurately.

And that's it. The words above are the sum total of my brother's life as I know it, and the effects it's had on me...as far as I can understand them. If I think of anything else, I'll add it later. I don't know that there will be anything more.