HERE’S MIKE

I grew accustomed to apologizing for my brother.  There were too many times when I listened to my friends speak of him in hurtful ways; listening to his own children mock him was even worse. There were too many times I joined in.  His behavior embarrassed me.  Sometimes it infuriated me.  I cannot begin to recount the sad and terrible stories, nor do I wish to. There were simply too many, and they were too sad.

 His wife, a nurse for years in Behavioral Health, served him with divorce papers while he was ‘recovering’ in a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt.  It seems particularly cruel when persons fortunate enough to be free from the ravages of mental illness “trump” those who are vulnerable and suffering. These years later, looking back I wonder how it was possible for a professional, working in psychiatric medicine, to ignore the obvious signs of a husband’s severe, clinical depression. I believe she did.  But I understand; it was difficult.  Really difficult.  “He’s miserable to live with.”  I’m sure he was.  For years, the unspoken edict was, “Let him suffer. I have.”  And, yet, all the signs were there.  Not to be missed. Depression. But I admit - I, too, missed them.

Okay.  Actually, I didn’t miss them.  I gave up.  He’s dead now, and the regrets I carry are awful.  When I am asked about him, which is seldom, I first have to ready myself to jump a daunting chasm of stigma.  Everyone in the field of mental health has addressed it ~ how I wish that something intelligent and sensitive and immediate could be done to deal with it!  Wishful thinking. When stigma continues to be the major handicap to intervention, we’re still muddling about in the dark ages. Following a tragedy, how much easier it is to offer a euphemistic expression than to show courageous and intervening action before one strikes. The line given grieving friends and family members is repetitive. Believe me, I know that expression. “There is nothing you could have done…” I’ve said it myself too many times.  And yet, today, given what I’ve come to know, I don’t necessarily believe it is always true.  In the end, what is true is that we are each responsible, in some way, for the people we love.  Period.

 My parents tried to respond, but to something they didn’t understand. I recall so often their being at their wits’ ends.  Loving and supportive people, they were confused. Dumbfounded. Exasperated. Devastated. I felt those same feelings. In the face of my brother’s rage and anger, we all had felt helpless and frightened. Following my mother’s death, my desperate 90-year old father would continuously lament, “I don’t know what to do about Mike.”  And further, “That brother of yours has me really worried…”  As my father was a man of few words, an admission like this was BIG, and I knew that It came from a heart swallowed up in fear. At some point, though, around this time I was done.  I became a true believer in Tough Love.  Anything else was enabling.  “Throw him out!  Let him face the consequences on his own!” I was angry. I hated seeing how my brother’s behavior was tearing up my father.  I was adamant. “That’s the only way he’ll ever learn, Dad,” I shouted. “The only way!” Regrettably, what I’ve learned since my brother’s death is that I could not have been more wrong.  There are other ways…

 Mike didn’t commit suicide.  Not in any of the conventional ways.  A Viet Nam veteran too proud to seek help, once back home, and in order to protect himself against his own vulnerability and pain, he’d worn a mantel of tough-guy resistance. It was only much later when I realized that the albatross around his neck was one of despair. He had been exposed to Agent Orange and, had it been treated, this diagnosis may not necessarily have meant a death sentence.  He refused medical help.    In the end, his loneliness and virtual alienation from family and from nearly everyone in his community aided him in choosing this subtler but equally guaranteed exit.  I am convinced that his cancer was his “holding card.”   And finally, agonizing day after agonizing day, he played it.

There was no obituary.  There were no services.  I don’t remember if I told him I was sorry for not being more present to kindness and compassion during those rough years.  I hope I did. But I did tell him I loved him. And I meant it.  Following the cremation, his youngest son, eager to head out of Dodge, abruptly thrust the urn toward my sister and me and exclaimed, “Here’s Mike.”  We realized then that we were the ones to scatter his ashes somewhere ~ anywhere, really.  We chose the landscaped residential property he had so lovingly tended. The rest were released into the Little Goose Creek, which ran behind our family’s ranch house. Except for the days on which his children had been born, those early Wyoming days had been possibly the only truly happy times in his life.  I wish I’d known…    I miss him.  Hindsight is a painful penance.