Rest In Peace

by ComputerBob

November 23, 2006

Today is the 10th anniversary of my brother's suicide. I fully acknowledge that taking his own life was his own decision; however, as time passes, I develop a deeper understanding of the cripplingly abusive and unrepentantly narcissistic environment in which that decision was made.

In the end, my brother was a deeply flawed, deeply disturbed, lonely, insecure man. His frighteningly bipolar personality was first shaped by, and later exacerbated by extremely dysfunctional, emotionally cannibalistic parents and siblings, who proved to be stubbornly unwilling to understand themselves, tragically unable to help him, and too piously self-righteous to learn any lessons from his death.

While I've forgiven that group of biologically related people for never being what any of us needed it to be, I've spent the past decade trying to exorcise every vestige of its evil legacy from my life.

Rest in peace, Ron. I still love you.

UPDATE: Three months before I wrote this piece, my wife and I chose to permanently separate ourselves from my biological parents and siblings. Several months after I wrote this piece, I explained our rationale in an article called Moving On — one of several articles that I wrote for this site's Abuse Info section.

UPDATE: The suicide of a loved one is something that you learn to live with, but you never really "get over." While the nails have been removed, the nail holes remain. My eulogy for my little brother, is called My Brother, My Sidekick, My Baby. One year after his suicide, I wrote a letter to him called There's No Such Thing As A Good-Looking Corpse. Two years after his suicide, I wrote a cautionary tale for children about him, titled My Little Brother, Ten years after his suicide, when I finally felt like I understood both his life and his death a little better, I wrote Rest In Peace,