My Brother's Suicide

by ComputerBob

June 6, 2008

My younger brother had started drinking and using illegal drugs when he was 12 years old - the year that I had gotten married and moved away. And over the years, though he got physically older, it seemed like his personality and level of maturity were frozen in time somewhere in his early teens.

Though he was caught doing crazy or illegal things many times, he always managed to escape any real consequences of his behavior — at first, because he was still a child, but later because he had developed the uncanny manipulative skills to be able to talk himself out of trouble. So instead of being sent to juvenile hall or to jail, he kept ending up in counseling, or in expensive rehab, where he told the professionals everything that they wanted to hear — while he kept living a lifestyle that belied everything that he told them.

One time, I drove 400 miles to confront him about his alcoholism and beg him to get some help. He told me what I wanted to hear and I turned around and drove 400 miles back home.

But nothing changed.

One day, he decided to visit a woman who lived several hours away — a woman who he considered to be his girlfriend — but who, like many others before her, probably didn't feel the same way about him.

Like he had done so many times before, he "self-medicated" before the trip, mixing alcohol and prescription drugs that he had obtained through a combination of "doctor shopping" and lying about his "symptoms."

But that time, his self-medication made him drive erratically, and he caused an automobile accident. According to the woman whose car he hit, and who frantically called the police on her cell phone, when he got out of his car to see what had happened, he was so intoxicated that he fell on his face. Then he got back into his car and attempted to drive away.

When the police arrived at the scene, they arrested him for drunk driving, and he spent a couple of nights in jail, a few hundred miles from home. His car was impounded. After years of being able to talk his way out of all kinds of smaller trouble, he suddenly found himself in very serious trouble.

That Friday, he was released on bail, and took a bus back home to his parents' house.

The next morning, I called him, to try to encourage him that he could turn his life around once and for all, and make something good come out of his arrest.

My mother answered the phone. He wasn't there. He had left to go on a walk a few minutes earlier.

I told her that I really wanted to talk to him as soon as possible, and I feared that he might be suicidal.

We talked for 2 1/2 hours. Then suddenly, she said, "Oh, Bob — I've got to go — there's a policeman at the door."

I hung up the phone, turned to my wife and said, "I think my brother is dead."

A few minutes later, my mother called me back. She was screaming. The policeman at the door was from the coroner's office. He had shown her a photograph of my brother's lifeless body and asked her to identify it.

While my mother and I had been talking — while I had been telling her that I was afraid that he might be suicidal — he had stepped onto a nearby railroad track and walked down the track in front of an oncoming freight train whose engineer could do nothing to stop the train until after it had hit him.

While I was on the phone with my mother, my wife was packing a suitcase for me. As soon as I hung up, I started the 400-mile drive to my parents' house, arriving late that night. The next morning, I called all of their relatives and friends, to tell them the news — because as difficult as it was for me to tell everyone that my brother was dead, I knew that it would have been much harder for my parents to call everyone and tell them that their son was dead.

I wrote the eulogy for his memorial service. If you'd like to read it, it's called My Brother, My Sidekick, My Baby.

One year after his suicide, I wrote a letter to my brother. If you'd like to read it, it's called There's No Such Thing As A Good-Looking Corpse.

Two years after his suicide, I wrote a cautionary tale about my brother for children. If you'd like to read it, it's called My Little Brother.

Ten years after his suicide, I finally felt like I had figured out a little bit about both my brother's life and his death, so I wrote a piece called Rest In Peace.