Before you tried to kill yourself, I loved you most.

It’s possible I don’t remember idealizing you, the way Mother always insisted I had, because to remember would be to feel guilty. But guilty of what? When I heard you’d been hospitalized, many years ago now, with a diagnosis, finally, of depression and social anxiety disorder—after another suicide attempt, I presume—I was an adult, but the obsessive-compulsive disorder of my childhood flared back to life.

At some point growing up I grew older than you. I knew there was little you could teach me; if anything, I had to teach you, lead you. Take care of you.

—

All families are cults. Most of us remain devotees long after we are children, until the day we die. I am still a member, of a kind, the ceaseless revision of these pages my sacred office.

I wrote my first poem for you. Entitled “Snow,” it was influenced, to the precipice of plagiarism, by Langston Hughes’s “My Friend.” Shades of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” too. I can still recite it by heart:

My brother tried to kill himself.
There’s nothing left to say.
Just like raindrops
On a shaking black bough,
He pushed us all—
Thank God for snow.

All of the children in our family felt annoyed and burdened and exhausted by each other’s presence, if not existence. There was no trust, for we so often sold each other’s secrets to the police state of our parents. I’m ashamed of how often I succumbed. Like a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, I felt bad for our parents and judgmental most often of you.

Perhaps it’s fairer to say I needed them more, especially Mother. I knew she was unstable, if not worse, but I saw her as a tragic figure, and one whose tragedy I might someday redeem with my artistry. Your rage—when you showed it—scared me half to death.

Why couldn’t you pretend, I wondered, like I did? Like the rest of us? Why couldn’t you simply hold your tongue and anger inside without cracking? If you could only learn patience, like me, you’d persevere. You could escape. If you could displace, withstand—then you would transcend. That was my plan, at least.

When I was newly diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, a Russian acupuncturist told me that my anger was the reason. Something to do with a misalignment of my Manipura or navel chakra. Anger unspoken causes cancer in organs, she explained, most acutely in the bowels. Her metaphor offended me. We’d just met. I was weak from surgery and I lost my temper—told her she was peddling medieval bullshit—and hobbled out of her office without a single needle pricking my skin. As a writer I’d spent my adult life giving voice to my emotions; anger often foremost, but also longing, regret, loneliness, love. In my quiet way I had been expressing all, and all in the belief that expression would save me.

But sometimes I worry she was right. Maybe I should have lived my anger. Maybe like you, my brother, I should have shouted when younger, should have leapt from that window myself, or better yet pushed one or both of our parents through.

—

Mother sends me to fetch you for dinner and, climbing the stairs, I see your body hanging from a noose. Your feet dance inches off the floor; your body sways, the rope groans. In my mind’s eye, I see your bed sheets sodden with your blood, your wrists and throat slit, your face pallid, drained. Or you in your reading chair with Father’s rifle under your chin, about to trip the trigger with a naked toe—when I knock on your door and say, “Time for dinner, Chris.”

The family never talked about what you’d done, or why, not in any sane way. You did not explain or apologize. Not that you needed to. But didn’t you feel ashamed? Were you worried about me, your brother, how I was changing?

Mother claimed that she took you to a psychologist who diagnosed you as immature. Nothing to worry about. You hadn’t intended to end your life. It was an accident, in a way, and one we would be better off forgetting.

—

You have haunted me, my shadow; or we shadowed each other. As you failed I would succeed. As you were spurned I would win love. As you lived rejected, ignored, I garnered applause. When I failed, as I could not fail to, I suffered with a wretchedness that made me feel like you, or how I imagined you felt, and I would catch an inkling of a realization long in dawning that we were more than brothers: we were not identical but fraternal, compensatory twins.

Once when I assumed we’d never see each other again, I was driving north from Manhattan and found myself pulling off the parkway at the Scarsdale exit. I wanted to see our house, now a home for strangers. I contemplated announcing myself as one of those revenants I remember from childhood who’d materialize at our front door asking, “Can I come in? I grew up here. —My God, everything looks so small!”

I was too shy. I drove slowly in my rental car down our dead end to the turnaround and up again—conspicuous, no doubt; a shady character. Our old neighbor, Mrs. McCourt, wrinkled and wreathed now with cottony hair, studied me over the loop of her splashing garden hose. Our house looked the same. Smaller, yes. Cleaner. Almost harmless. I did not stop.

I parked in the lot at the Village Hall, the local government building where you worked as Director of Information Technology, and stepped out beside your car: the black Pontiac Fiero. So you still drove it. Littered with trash from take-out, as ever; a remote-controlled hot rod on the passenger seat and assorted other gadgets. I was on my way to rehearse a play of mine somewhere in New England, another roman à clef of our childhood. In that moment—staring at the toys in your car, anticipating several weeks of toying with my theatrical “play”—I pitied us both, until my fear of seeing you sent me on my way.

Because we have never grown up, you and I. Perhaps this time, with this memoir, I will succeed. I will write it, finally, and finally forget it. “Why can’t you just forget?” Mother always chastised me.

As you have had your computers, your thrumming servers, your supposed virginity, I have had my obsessions and compulsions, these stories of our childhood, or my childhood at least. I have written plays for more than two decades, and while I have tried to write seriously, I have never been able to shake the feeling that the theater is largely a clubhouse for the immature and indolent, the narcissistic and pretentious rich—artist and audience alike. When they rebuff me I judge them; when they praise me I am complicit. When not writing plays I attempt poetry. This pursuit feels more dignified, though I don’t know why; poets are paid even less than playwrights, if any of us are paid at all.

I have never wanted to write screenplays or TV. I don’t want to be told what to write, don’t want to have to please. I want to be loved for myself alone, I suppose, and not my actress’s yellow hair.

I procrastinated having children till I was forty because I felt like I was twenty still, or twelve. How could I grow up when I’d yet to transmute our family’s leaden pain into golden art and fame?

Fatherhood, then my wife’s cancer, then mine, all in a three-year span, propelled me miles downstream. Swiftly I found myself intimately identifying with those shuffling along sidewalks, enfeebled, or rolling themselves, or pushed by their tired hired help. Though I hope I have years or decades in me yet, I lament that I’ve been robbed of the adulthood I had only begun to live.

Yet I return, I return to these stories of my youth, our youth, now. Now more than ever—not so much a retreat into nostalgia as a momentary reprieve from time.

—

Depression, sickness of any kind, paralysis or decay—death, inescapably—has always shocked me out the door and into life. Exertion. If not out of doors then into the wilderness of the page. Disquietude inspired me. I mistook activity for the obverse of suicide. But there were times, in the years after our parents disowned me, or forced me to disown them (both are true), when I felt such shame and abasement that an image of my self-inflicted demise would flash before my mind: a gun in my mouth, my neck in a noose. I never made plans. I might sleep more. I drank more, which I now accept as an attenuated attempt at suicide. I also enjoyed it—the drinking and, probably, the flirtation with martyrdom.

When I was younger I considered you a coward. I could never do what you had done, I told myself and others. What always stopped me cold was the thought of harming those I’d leave behind. I carry the scars of the potential suicide’s survivor. Obviously, perhaps by definition, I have never been depressed like you.

With an illness like cancer, of course, the thought of euthanasia is never far away. But that is a question one hopes to never answer.

Recently a psychiatrist asked me, before he could prescribe me more meds, if I was “experiencing thoughts of self-harm.” Especially with my life and my wife’s life, and the possibility of an unmarred childhood for our young daughter, so threatened. I was weeks away from my second surgery, when they would remove a portion of my liver, and I answered the doctor loudly—almost a shout—“No, no—I want to live.” 

—

Your sickness was my first awakening. I’d been alive, of course, but never with an awareness of death before that afternoon in February, as I sat beside our sister on the floor of the attic room across the hallway from our father’s office and the open window you’d jumped from (though I didn’t know that yet). I was certain you were sick. Not with sadness—my fear was for your body, and mine.

Perhaps, I reasoned, you had a fever so high that you had to—in a demented attempt to cool your body—jump three stories down to the snow below.

For years I’d hear you vomiting in our bathroom at night. Or throwing up in your room above mine. The sound of your retching seemed to reverberate in the wood and pipes and windows of the house. Almost always you were coughing. Sometimes it turned out you were sick, as kids are.

As soon as I heard it—Oh no, oh no, oh no, I’d speak in my mind in my bed; I’d pray, Please, God, let Chris not be sick. Please, God. Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .

The morning in the kitchen my wife felt the lump in her breast, then asked me to feel it too. For confirmation. I couldn’t. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” was what I said, sinking into a chair. My luck had turned. Time had run out. Some trial now set to begin. I prayed, and pray still: Please, God, let Jessica heal. Let me heal. Help us both heal so that we may live to love our young daughter into her adulthood. Please, God. Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .

I thought at first it was the stress of caring for a sick wife that was causing me to cramp, to shiver, sometimes so violently that I’d have to come home in the middle of a warm morning to wrap myself up in blankets in bed. I vomited driving downtown in my car; and once in the middle of the night before another of my wife’s chemo treatments. I was suffering in empathy, I told myself, and I felt almost proud. But of course it would turn out that I was sick too.

—

Sickness is the price of love. Sickness may prove love, may even redeem it. I believed it then and I know it now. Love without sickness is frivolous, at least childish, and in any case tentative. You can never forever avoid it. Everybody will find themselves nailed to the cross, from time to time—and then, of course, that last time. Oh no, oh no, oh no, Christ surely thought before he cried aloud, “My God, why . . . ?” If somebody is not willing—mother, father, brother, child—to let themselves become stained in sick, feces, blood, tears; not willing to fall sick with us and for us, then, as it has been with our family, as it has been between us, my brother, perhaps love is not enough, perhaps love itself is sick. 

—

If artists are healers then I have tried to heal myself. To heal you too if I could and if I can.

As a boy I wrote stories and poems because I enjoyed being told I was “good.” Your despair taught me that entertainment lies—lies pleasurably and perhaps perforce—but art must tell the truth, or the truth will kill the art, maybe the artist too, with solitude, alcohol . . . Your leap from the window of our attic was a terrible act of invention that I am still, in my way, hoping to emulate—but also to elevate. I mean to raise you up.

You gave my life a purpose. Perhaps this was a curse. I felt passive to my passion, and too often still do. But I had conviction and direction: your stagnation sent me to Ireland, London, Paris, Seville, Provence, Edinburgh, Vienna, Salzburg, Mexico City, Chiapas, Beijing, Shanghai, the Arctic, not to mention everywhere my writing has borne me within the wide country of my people—Vermont, Tennessee, Key West, Wisconsin, California . . . This is bragging, yes, but self-amazement too; as a child I feared I’d never break free of the whirlpool of our house. When my friends foundered in search of themselves and careers, I steered my incautious course, navigating by the pole star of my calling.

I was profoundly confused: I required success. Grandiose, obnoxiously sure of myself—that is, not sure at all—I was often fraudulent and therefore always an artist.

Thanks to you I knew my life would be a sequence of compulsive strivings to solve the mystery of my suffering, even the suffering of others, even yours; if only I could tell my tales more perfectly. I believed language a cure, and still do.

But this is rhetoric and not what happened.

—

Christmas morning you unwrapped a ray gun. Piercing bleeps with red bulb blinks. Your eyes guttered over a chalky smile. Depression already infested your bones. This was the winter you would try to leap free.

Your report card was mostly Cs and Ds. Another mother would have wondered why her smartest child, the one with the highest IQ and near-perfect SATs, wasn’t studying anymore. Why you stayed in your room, washed yourself poorly.

She railed at you in the kitchen, in sinking sidelong light, waving the incriminating slip of paper in your face. She would have to tell Father when he got home (from wherever he was). She took me to the grocery store. Carrie, almost six, and Baby Timmy must have come too. Maybe Peter. Curiously, conspicuously, I remember only Mother and me.

We pulled into the driveway, and I saw you stumbling around the side of the house. Without a jacket. No shoes, just socks. Your pants and shoulders and head were pressed with snow as if you’d been lying down. I pointed you out to Mother.

Remember this, I thought. To master its magic, force yourself to remember.

—

She is kneeling with her hand on your knee as you sit crying—no, you’re sobbing in the breakfast room. I’ve never heard such sounds before. As if speaking in tongues. A tongue of fire not above but inside your head. Without looking at me she says, “Take your sister upstairs to the attic to play.”

Pam’s away at college. Peter appears from nowhere holding Timmy in his arms (from this day on Peter will become “Pete,” the stable one, imperturbable to the point of evanescence). As if sharing some grim gossip he tells me that you have “jumped off the roof,” that Mother has taken you to see Dr. Whitten.

But the roof? How could you have gotten yourself up there? You must’ve fallen ill—I’d heard you coughing through tears, your chest and neck convulsing. And now I’m sure I will fall ill too, I will catch your disease, whatever it is, as I play absently on the carpet beside Carrie across the hallway from Father’s office, where I’d noticed on our way up the stairs that the window was open, in fact the window was gone, unscrewed and removed from its quarter-moon frame and laid aside on the carpet against the wall. Screwdriver and screws scattered on Father’s desk. Beside a note scribbled on a sheet of loose leaf: “Mom, looks like you’ll finally get that playroom you’ve always wanted.”

Because she’d been pressuring you to move up here, to Pam’s vacated garret, for months now, so that her youngest might enjoy the luxury of a room set aside for their toys and playmaking. Or maybe, because already she considered you a disappointment, she wanted to forget you, to exile you upstairs where I play now with my sister, unaware that I’ll never leave this room, never stop sitting upon the carpet beside my sister trying to figure out what has happened to you, what is happening to us.

That night when Mother comes home I lead her up to the attic. I have something to show her. Father’s at the hospital still, the hospital where we’d been born. She says you were “shaking like a leaf” when she left your side. I hand her the note and she reads it. She collapses crying in my arms atop the steep staircase.

“This is a secret,” she whispers in my ear, “we must take to our graves.”

—

What did you let go of when you fell? What will I let go of as I write this? if I finish this? Will I fall to my death or into more life?

You threw yourself through. You jumped from the roof, as Peter said, though you were not on the roof but beneath it; but as symbol, as poetry: you leapt from the pinnacle of our excruciating home like a sacrifice, a scapegoat for our family’s baffling burden of sins.

What courage did it take, what pity, to unscrew the window pane from the window frame that looked like an eye in the face of the house? And had they been screwed shut, truly? And what for? Or were they secured only after by Father to deter a second attempt? There’d been no hinges, no way to open the window without removing the frame and leaning it against the wall, on the carpet, beneath this sudden hole sighing violently with wind. Yes, there had been a screwdriver resting, maybe rolling on the desk; I saw it later. Was the neighborhood quiet? Did anybody come or go below? Crows cawed. Where was Father this whole time? Somehow he had work someplace. How lucky and unlucky for you that you were alone.

You were small but still you had to slip one leg through, straddling the sill like we used to the bannister in the hallway in our jailbreaks for the stairs and our flights outdoors. Then ducking your head and heaving chest through and out; then the other leg, bracing your hands in the frame. The cold clean air, the wisps of your ragged breaths, the sun caught in the branches; you were about to topple like a tear from the house’s open eye. With tears in your eyes too. Or not—dry and dedicated: here was your response.

Or was it first your leg, through and out, then your head—losing your balance and—you slipped over into your biggest mistake?

The nothing is so easily crossed. Three stories should have been enough; you would have been lucky to break your legs, your spine. What broke your fall then? The snow on the shaded side of the house was merely a scab of February thaw. You fell through brittle fanning evergreen branches till you slammed home. Scratched and bruised.

The sky moving its clouds. Crows mocked you.

—

That night Mother cried in my arms at the top of the attic stairs. An angel caught you in your fall, she said, she was sure, laid you out breathing, heart beating, in the snow. A miracle.

You were alive, and you live still.

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