All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (22 page)

Having seen two towers reduced to a crumble of rubble on fire, I couldn’t help but appreciate the poetic reversal of watching for fires from a tower in the wilderness. It felt like a useful act of witness, like journalism minus the obsession with ephemera. But it’s also the case that in my renewed grief for Dan and all that he had suffered, I wanted to honor the gift he’d given me the last time I saw him, the gift of an incomparable view of mountains and desert from above the great rift valley of the Rio Grande. From the moment I stepped foot inside the seven-by-seven-foot cab of M.J.’s tower I was reminded of the basket of Dan’s balloon, and the unimpeded view from her peak—a view that included the great rift valley of the Rio Grande—called back that long-ago feeling of flight, the dignity and grandeur of floating eye-level with distant mountains. I wanted to perpetuate that feeling. I wanted to live inside of it again, remaining close to what was best in him. If it took an act of intentional downward mobility to do so, trading a job in journalism for a vocation less than a quarter as remunerative, so be it. That great sweep of sky more than made up the difference. The adventure he had dreamed of but never attempted, soaring over the Sandias in a big wind—I could live a version of it every day, afternoons amid the lightning, mornings above the clouds.

I never really left southern New Mexico after that first taste, not in my heart of hearts anyway, although it would take me another two years before I left the city for good. While there during those last dismal winters between fire seasons, I mimicked a human being with cosmopolitan cares but I no longer had any such thing, if indeed I ever had. The first winter I burned through my Dow Jones 401(k) and looked in vain for freelance work; I participated in the big antiwar protest, when half a million people took to the streets to issue a warning on the rush to invade Iraq on ginned-up pretenses. I’d always thought of the city as the natural home of free speech and collective action but I watched while protesters were penned in like hamsters by metal barricades and threatened with arrest on the flimsiest of pretexts. Innocent people were brutally cuffed and stuffed, and cops on horseback charged crowds for no good reason, threatening the safety of parents and the kids they carried on their shoulders. Those of us who lived in the city that suffered the brunt of the terrorist attack made clear our distaste for visiting a misguided version of the devastation on Baghdad, and we were treated like dogs, some of us manhandled and jailed, all of us told to shut up and keep shopping and the wise men in Washington would handle the rest. Marching felt like pissing into a headwind. The storm was coming, and we knew it. Chicken hawks were in charge, itching for glory. But someone had to say no, even if—especially if—those in power viewed us with contempt.

In the bitter last days I worked a series of demoralizing jobs, dreaming of the next fire season, the low point arriving when I signed on at twelve bucks an hour to transcribe tapes of CEOs and senior executives shilling for their companies to something called the
Wall Street Transcript
, which published the interviews verbatim and at preposterous length in a weekly printed booklet. And by tapes I do mean tapes. I played the cassettes with a foot pedal that allowed me to stop the recording or rewind when necessary. I’d have preferred not to suffer such humiliation, but I had to make a living somehow, and the
WST
was the only thing I could find.

At the end of my first fire season I flew to Minneapolis and rented a car for the drive to the little town in southern Minnesota where my parents lived. On the day I was to leave to catch a flight to New York, when they were both home from work for their lunch hour, I asked them to sit with me at the kitchen table. I said I was very sorry for what I was about to tell them but I thought they deserved to know.

My father’s reaction was about what I expected: unemotional, rational in the extreme. That explains some things, he said, when I finished telling him what Emily had told me. I asked him what it explained, not because I didn’t feel similarly—victims of childhood sexual abuse are many times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, for starters—but because I was curious about his take. He said that he’d always suspected Dan of being afraid of sexual intimacy. He’d had so few girlfriends in his life, and when he lost them he was disconsolate in a way that was hard to fathom. Nonetheless, the loss of Wendy, the proximate cause of his suicide, had never seemed a sufficient reason for putting a gun to his head. The fact that he’d carried with him such a secret for most of his life placed his difficulties with women in a new light.

Do you know who it was? he asked.

When I offered a name, his jaw set in resignation tinged with anger.

I can’t say that surprises me, he said.

My mother reacted about as I’d expected too. Her face suddenly drained of color; she wept a few silent tears while my father and I speculated about what it all meant, and then she went to their bedroom and closed the door.

Just before I left to catch a flight home from Minneapolis, my mother reemerged and said to me, There’s a blue notebook in the office, on top of a box in the closet. You can read it if you want.

After she and my father left again for work, I found the notebook and sat at the kitchen table.

June 3rd—I was at work & Bill told me that Bob had called & said to go home for a minute. I thought he’d hurt his back. When I walked in the door, Bob was leaning against the kitchen sink with Father Evers beside him. Bob grabbed me and pulled me against him. I thought he said Dad died, then I realized he said Dan. I was stunned. After a short length of time, sitting on the couch, I asked Father Evers if Dan would go to hell for this—I didn’t know if Dan believed in God. After that I don’t remember much for the next week. My heavy heart was in my throat & I couldn’t swallow or breathe. I couldn’t eat, drink, think, or sleep. The neighbor kid asked his dad why we were having so much fun if Dan had died. He had heard all of these people out on the deck all night long, laughing and telling stories, trying to deal with his death in the best way they knew how.

Sam & Jan went to Granite Falls to tell Lisa & bring her home. Who told Phil about Dan? When did he find out? Was he alone when he heard? How terrible that he had to take that long plane ride by himself.

Dan called Sunday at noon. Thinking back on that conversation, I think he knew what he was going to do. He said he and Wendy were having trouble. I said, “Give her some time.” He said, “Oh I’ll give her a lot of time.” If I had only known, I would have got on a plane right then & gone down to see him. I forgot to tell him “I love you” before I handed the phone to Bob so they could talk about fishing.

Sam & Jan helped us through the funeral decisions. We were told to bring friends in case we couldn’t understand any of the decisions we needed to make. I’m sure that Mr. Almlie thought we would be VERY distressed over this suicide. Lisa was with us & helped make some of the decisions, which I hardly remember. I only knew I didn’t want to bury him, I wanted him alive.

Bob made the decision not to see his body, after Almlie said it wouldn’t be a good idea. I regret that decision to this day, but don’t hold it against Bob. He wanted to remember him like he was, not with a hole blown through his head—maybe he didn’t have his face left? We were glad when Lisa went to the funeral home late the next night when his body finally came in. She came back reporting that he looked fine. She only saw, under the cloth on his face, a bruised looking spot on the one side, & they had his eyes sewn shut. She cut off a small lock of his hair & she brought it back to me. That’s all I have left of him. I keep it in a small coin purse in a drawer. I can’t bring it out to look at because it brings all the heartache back again.

It takes all my strength to not think about him & talk about him. That’s the only way I’ve been able to get through these past 5 yrs.

Even writing this, the tears are flowing so hard I can hardly see the page.

Every year on this day, and on his birthday, I just want to stay in bed. I don’t want to do anything or see anybody. Thank God today fell on Sunday so I didn’t have to go to work.

Were we bad parents that we didn’t raise our son to feel strong enough not to take his own life?

Now when I see a beautiful morning, a beautiful sunset, a bird, lovers in a park, people fishing, I think: Why did he want to give that up? Why did he want to deprive us of his birthdays, his wedding, his children, visits to his home?

I need someone to say the right words to me so that I can deal with this heartbreaking sadness in a positive way because right now—all I do is cry.

I worry about my kids being lonely and being alone.

There are days when I feel guilty for not crying or for being able to sleep.

Double rainbow on his funeral day.

Liberated by writing this down.

When asked how many kids I have, it’s hard to answer three. I’m afraid they’ll ask me about Dan. And if I talk about him, I’ll cry.

It’s my birthday today, Phil called and we talked for 2 hours, some about Dan. I cry while I’m talking but it still feels good to talk.

When I hear a song on the radio that I knew he liked I want to turn it off—but I can’t force myself. If it stays on maybe he is close by listening.

I copied this down, word for word, transcribing through my own tears, and then I returned the notebook to the place where I’d found it, unaware I’d begun writing this book. Until then my thoughts on my brother’s death remained very rarely spoken aloud, mostly locked up in private notebooks—tens of thousands of words’ worth of the most bleak and lugubrious maunderings—but my mother’s brave act of connection set me free. If she could share her innermost thoughts, maybe I could a tell a story worth sharing too, in my own rude way.

Shortly afterward she sent me a package containing VHS tapes of Dan’s varsity wrestling matches. She didn’t think she would ever be able to watch them, so she wanted me to have them, just in case. I’d become the documentarian in the family, the keeper of my brother’s records—photographs, report cards, test score results, 4-H ribbons, bank statements, wrestling tourney programs, balloon pilot logs—which I saved with the usual journalist’s pack-rat mentality, except in this case it had all added up to squat in answer to the major question. I tried twice to watch him but I couldn’t get more than a few minutes in. He was as I remembered, fun to watch, tough in the clinch, a technical master and an escape artist more than a brute force. The incongruity of seeing him alive, grappling his opponents into submission—he won twenty-five matches his senior year—was too much for me.

I was surprised that my father wouldn’t wish to keep the tapes, but then I remembered that more than once over the previous years he’d told me that he refused to dwell in the past, that he would not let his son’s death define his life. I have no reason to doubt that he succeeded through a herculean effort of will, or maybe just a cold shrug of contempt for unpleasantness of any sort. I know for a fact that he thought my interest in the story to be an unhealthy wallowing in darkness—his alien, oversensitive son, gripped by morbid curiosities. His of all the theories I’d heard rang truest, that whatever sickness festered inside his youngest son, the suicidal impulse had been just that, an impulse he mistakenly heeded with the aid of booze and a gun, that all too lethal combination for sad young men. I had the presence of mind to avoid telling my father that I felt certain, almost from the moment I heard the news, that my brother’s death would be the most interesting thing to happen in what remained of my life, that surpassing it in sheer riveting power would take something so horrible as to be unimaginable, or so wonderful as to be unreal, and that to deny these facts would have taken more determination than I possessed. My father went his way, I went mine, and never the twain shall meet, though I’m closer to him now in other ways than I’ve ever been.

Later on, a little bit braver, or maybe merely masochistic, I stuck a tape recorder under both my parents’ noses, one at a time in private moments, conducting what I called
research
, and what came out of it was totally unexpected, some of it funny, some of it sad, most of it wildly off topic. I couldn’t make myself make them talk about it for longer than a question or two, and they weren’t prepared to go there on their own. To speak of it with my mother, in particular, seemed a willful act of torture. I had received a very targeted education in the art of making people talk about uncomfortable things, and still I couldn’t do it, not to them. They’d overcome too much. My father had transformed himself from failed farmer to bank vice president; they traveled now, drank nice wine, cultivated a beautiful garden, had a whole new set of late-life friends. How could I justify continuing to poke at the wound? “All families of suicides are alike,” Janet Malcolm has written. “They wear a kind of permanent letter S on their chests. Their guilt is never assuaged. Their anxiety never lifts. They are freaks among families the way prodigies are freaks among individuals.” That about sums it up, except for the prodigy comparison. By definition, prodigies are blessed with a gift. The families of suicides are not blessed.

In the winter of 2002 I undertook a journey I’d been planning and dreading for months, all the while in silence. I knew well my capacity for anger; I knew, in other words, that I had needed some time to chill. Plan some lines of inquiry. Judge what it was I wanted to know. But since I doubted I’d extract a confession, it was less about what I wanted to know and more about what I wanted
him
to know. Maybe one shred of justice could be wrung from the whole sad affair. He would forever know that I knew.

So I traveled out of my way to see him, in a town better left unnamed. I found him at his workplace—a little flabbier than I remembered him, a bit too falsely jovial, in the manner of an upbeat high school football coach. I hadn’t called ahead to apprise him of my visit. He appeared to be baffled by my coming but he shook my hand, invited me up to his office. I sensed immediately the pride he felt in having an office.