My brother David and I were close growing up. He’s a year and a half older than me.
Mom used to tell the story how, when they brought me home from the hospital, David would crouch beside the bassinet and call her when I cried.
Our parents divorced when I was five. After that, Mom was always busy, working and going to school. I do not remember much adult supervision.
We lived in a rural area and just ran around, as I remember it.
We loved to climb trees. The best trees are the not-scratchy ones, with branches that radiate out like a platform.
We had a treehouse where we played for hours. Down below it wasn’t dirt but water or lava.
Our house was on a hill and there was a sharp drop off. I was afraid to walk along the edge. But David was a risk taker. He built a ramp, sped his bike down the hill, up the ramp, into the air… crashing onto the grass below. That was Saturdays.
Then there were the years when Mom had a boyfriend she couldn’t get rid of, who was abusive to her. We witnessed that.
David and I were allied against that man. We did not discuss it with words, but we acknowledged what was happening. When one of us saw his white car parked outside, we’d signal, He’s here.
David started getting stomach ulcers. He had to eat Gerber baby food from jars, even at school. I wanted baby food too.
He developed a stutter. Mom took him to speech therapy two hours away and I went too. I’d sit in the lobby reading the cartoons in New Yorker magazines.
David would sleepwalk. He’d stumble around in the dark with his eyes half open. In the daytime, he’d fall asleep anywhere. Once I found him asleep under the kitchen table, not on the floor, but kneeling in front of a chair, his head on the seat, hands on his lap.
We moved away from Mom and went to live with Dad when I was 14. Everything changed.
David drove us to school in an old green Jeep. There was a hole in the floor under my feet so I could see the road rushing by.
I loved high school, had friends, played sports, made good grades. David did too. College was us continuing on the same path. We were doing what we were supposed to do.
David was all set to marry his girlfriend who was friendly and freckled. The wedding invitations had gone out.
One day, Mom and I went to visit David at his apartment. As we pulled up, we joked that of course his place would be a mess. David was never much of a cleaner.
We were surprised to see his apartment was spotless. He said he’d been up all night, cleaning.
A week later, David’s girlfriend called me at work which had never happened before. I was sitting at my desk with a Styrofoam cup of milky coffee and a breakfast biscuit in wax paper, facing a row of metal filing cabinets.
She told me David had disappeared.
It wasn’t a surprise. Or a shock. It was an elevator drop.
She was crying, saying David kept arguing with her father over dumb stuff and wouldn’t let it go. Nothing anyone said or did would calm him. He stormed out and nobody knew where he went.
He was gone for days. Then he called her, speaking in a voice she’d never heard before, cackling, saying things that made no sense. He wouldn’t tell her where he was.
David turned up a few states away. He walked into a motel and lay down on the counter. They called the police. They put him in jail, then they transported him to the ER where he scared everybody, so they moved him to the university hospital’s psychiatric unit.
Those days were a blur. It was the first time I ever saw my father break down and cry.
David’s fiancé broke up with him. Dad moved David into his basement.
David told me he’d stood on the edge and looked over.
These were sad, dark times.
I felt like I had lost my brother. This person was not recognizable. But I was grateful this person was still on the Earth with us.
Months passed. One day, I bumped into a high school friend who asked, Hey did David ever find that safety pin he was looking for?
I heard about an organization called NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness. I wrote to them and they sent me a package. That was the beginning of me learning about mental health.
David eventually climbed out of the hole. He drove to Alaska and worked on a fishing boat. We didn’t hear from him for months. He went to Guatemala and climbed volcanos. Did not call home. He would work for a while then go off somewhere. He went to Russia for a year then came back with a teenage girl.
When their baby was born, I was not surprised how much David loved being a father. Nor was I surprised their marriage was full of fighting.
At my wedding, when it poured rain and the guests were trapped outdoors under a tent, David saved the day by running back and forth to the bar, delivering beer and wine to everyone. My uncle said it was the first wedding he’d been to where the guests got drunk before the ceremony.
I was on maternity leave when David’s long bitter divorce began. I sat on the couch, nursing my newborn, looking at the eucalyptus tree waving in the breeze, hearing the ugly details.
To myself, I explained David’s behavior as symptoms. I thought of him as being on a rickety wooden roller coaster going up and down, round and round.
David saw it differently. It was other people’s fault. He refused to discuss his breakdowns. He never accepted any diagnosis, never did therapy, never took medication.
David got a pilot’s license and started flying cargo planes. He would laugh about the storms.
Women, younger each time, came and went.
When Trump was elected the first time, David went hard right. This was a surprise because our family had always been proud Democrats. But our parents were at the end of their lives. Maybe that freed up David to come out. I told him, I love you even if you vote Republican.
He moved to Latvia. He brought back a young girlfriend. Then he moved to Honduras.
David’s emails were long and rambling with links to YouTube videos of weird guys pontificating. I tried to understand but it was nonsense. I said, David, you’re being radicalized. He said, You’re radicalized.
David argued relentlessly and nothing would soothe him. He said he was “red-pilled.” He sympathized with “incels.” He called me a communist and a parasite. He called my daughters and me “Femi Nazis.”
I started going to NAMI support groups. Whoever invented support groups is a genius, I hope they got rich off that patent. You walk in there, sit in a circle, tell your story, hear their stories, and you cannot believe what people endure. NAMI taught me the three C’s—I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it.
The last time I called David was on his birthday. I was driving on I-10, looking at the brown green desert. David was saying civil war is coming to America, it’s inevitable and necessary. When the call ended, I had to pull over. I felt sick the rest of the day.
I did an accounting. I noticed that I envied my former sisters-in-law because they divorced David. I decided to divorce him too.
I had a little ceremony alone on my yoga mat. I lit a candle. I wished David peace, but I decided I am not my brother’s keeper. I blew out the candle.
If you meet David, you’ll see a handsome charming man who’s full of self-confidence and wild stories.
He taught me one of life’s most important lessons---I cannot change other people. I can change only myself.
I am amazed how liberated I feel, not to be the target of his anger, not to feel responsible for him, not to worry about him.
Maybe someday he’ll do the work and we can start rebuilding. Meanwhile I’m going to live my life, free.