At the Late Night Double Feature Picture Show
by Ken Bristol –
1st Feature: September 25, 1974 — 44 years ago . . .
The gunshot sounded different from the ones you hear in cowboy western movies. No echo lingered in the air beyond the pulling of the trigger. It was muffled. The walls and doors of the house dampened the bang, as falling snow filters the sounds of winter.
It’s late on a school night. I stopped reading my high school chemistry textbook and ran up the staircase. There, on the bedroom floor, in a pool of dark, purple-red blood, lay my older brother Kevin, dead at 20. He’s on his back, face up, eyes wide open. For some time I could not get that image of him lying on the floor, his face, and especially his eyes, out of my head.
After graduating high school, Kevin struggled with the responsibilities of young adulthood. He bounced from job to job, unable to keep one for any length of time. Kevin started using illegal drugs. Doctors drugged him up, too, on prescription medications. He was volatile. I remember times when he ranted and raved at Mother and at Dad. On occasion, he ranted and raved at me. On many nights he was not at home. Where was he? With whom? I would lie in bed, looking across the room at his empty bed, and wondered each night whether he was coming home or not. It was very distressing, and I did not know how to deal with him. I wished he would get better and stop upsetting all of us. He wasn’t the brother I remembered growing up with. God, we grossly underestimated his emotional needs. We failed him.
Guilt and shame came easily to our Catholic family. I felt grief, guilt, and failure. Our parents must have wrestled with their hearts, minds, and souls incomparably worse than I. As a family, we never sat down and talked about Kevin’s suicide, all that led up to it, all that followed it. Swept everything under the rug. His untimely death was the conclusion of a year during which he gradually slid down emotionally and psychologically. I watched him slide, perhaps unwittingly contributing to his downward spiral, helping it along, not knowing what to do. I was always a quiet, shy kid. After Kevin’s suicide, I clamped down my emotions, kept them all inside, tried not to feel anything.
For a number of years, I couldn’t talk about his death even if I wanted to. My throat would constrict and dry out to the point where I literally could not get the words out. My body would shake, my underarms would perspire, and my eyes would tear up. What a basket case! The new film, Ordinary People was released in theaters, and I had to see this movie. OMG! Tears would not stop streaming down my face. I had difficulty stifling my sobs. Used all my Kleenex and the napkins from the theater concession stand and soaked my sleeves with tears and snot. I trembled in my seat. Perspiration poured out my underarms and drenched my shirt. An embarrassing, exhausting, and cathartic episode. I so identified with the teenager in the film. Afterwards, I tried a few months of psychotherapy. It helped, but I did not continue the sessions.
It has been a journey dealing with grief, guilt, and failure, getting in touch with my own feelings, and reaching out to other people. A work in progress. Like Frodo’s wounded shoulder impaled by a Nazgûl blade in The Lord of the Rings, my heart bears a tender scar that refuses to heal completely. A little pressure on it elicits again fresh tears from fading memories. I have written words here about Kevin’s suicide and its impact on me. But the most important thing of all is that Kevin brought joy, love, and inspiration to me, the rest of the family, and to everyone who interacted with him. His beautiful life, not his tragic death, defined him.
2nd Feature: May 11, 2014 – almost 5 years ago . . .
My oldest brother, David, at 63, took his own life in his garage in Ohio, a pistol shot to the head. Oh, please, not another brother down. He felt trapped, he wrote in his suicide note. Not exactly sure what that note meant. Dave was a family man. He and his wife ran a small independent trucking business. While not wealthy, they were living comfortably. He had previously mentioned his desire to step back from the business a bit, but the reality may have been longer hours and modest income for the foreseeable future. Business, family, latent issues from his military service during the Vietnam War? Questions that will never be answered satisfactorily.
I am actually relieved that both Mother and Dad passed away before David ended his own life. The loss of two sons to suicide would have been too much.
To my brothers Kevin and David and to my parents: I miss you and love you. Be at peace.
“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ”
Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
*The irreverent title comes from a line in a song from an irreverent movie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which was a popular midnight film at college-town theaters in the late 70s and early 80s. With no disrespect to my beloved and departed brothers, off-color humor helps me cope with uncomfortable subjects. Kev and Dave would have approved.