Memories

I enjoy writing. It's a great creative outlet that enables me to get my thoughts on paper, but I'm always writing for an audience. Oft-told advice for novelists is that they should imagine the reader who they are and what their interests are. Unfortunately, I do that too well and find myself obsessing about who will be reading what I'm writing.

What will they think, for example, when I say that my brothers are largely incapacitated by mental illness? That I'm an uncaring brother with no hope for their potential? Or that mental illness is a death sentence that prevents everyone affected by it from having a full life?

The truth, as usual, is a little more complicated. My memories of my younger brother David often center around the time when he was a senior in high school. My parents had moved to Seattle for Dad's work, and David had returned to Springfield, Oregon to stay with friends from church and finish his senior year. He seemed to be at the top of his game. (In retrospect, part of it may have been the effects of bipolar disorder.)

He was working two part-time jobs, going to school, while still seeming to find time for friends, music and developing style. I was beginning to really admire my little brother. Instead of the constant shadow that I couldn't escape, he was really turning into someone special. (Not that he wasn't before, but I was actually beginning to see something there I hadn't seen before.)

Move forward several years. We had both moved to Seattle to live with our family. David was working as a janitor at Pike Place Market. We were both taking classes at community college.

Then things began to turn sour.

David would begin to disappear for weeks at a time. This wasn't entirely new. When he was a teenager he would often hang out with friends either fishing, playing Dungeons & Dragons, etc and we would have no idea where he was and when he would be coming back. This was different, though. He would always be back in the wee hours of the morning.

After him being gone for several days without word from him, we began to be really word. We made the rounds calling friends, hospitals, etc with no success. He would finally re-emerge at a friend's place. I'm fairly certain that, at times, he was sleeping under bridges (which gives me a whole new perspective on the homeless situation.)

As things progressed, we began to learn that this was more than a rebellious or independent streak in David. He began to tell us of hallucinations and paranoid episodes. Naturally, this was kind of freaky for us. He was still our brother and son. He began to get help but as I mentioned earlier this did not come easily and eventually meant that we had to turn responsibility for him over to the state.

I love the kind, warm-hearted brother I have now, but I miss the brother I admired for different reasons as we approached adulthood.