A Death of Despair

A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Picture two boys standing at either end of a long hallway. To an adult, the hallway is nothing remarkable. It connects the rooms of a modest house. If you asked the boys to describe it, they would only say that the hallway is in the home of their grandparents. But, in a secret perspective only for children, this hallway might as well be the Roman colosseum.

The boys have taken every pillow that is theirs to take under the Law of Heaven. Dictated by their grandfather from time out of memory this Law is as follows: “just don’t break anything that will upset your grandmother.”

The two boys —two cousins— have especially taken two big pillows that gave them the idea to do this in the first place. They’ve painstakingly shoved all these pillows under flannel shirts they’ve also taken from their grandfather. Smaller cousins arrive to help and it looks like two knights being armored for battle by their squires.

They each assume a sumo stance at their end of the hallway. This mostly means lifting up their legs one at a time and dropping into a squat. They yell at each other in meaningless sounds that sound to them like Japanese. By telepathy they agree one of these sounds mean “now!” and race at one another down the long hallway.

Pictures on the walls pass in a blur. Photos of each grandchild on the first day of school, paid for by their grandparents and changed faithfully each year. Some weird looking Norwegian children in dresses who are their great-great something or others. The farm where their grandmother grew up in Minnesota.

The collision is brutal. Punches on pillowed stomachs are fair game. They shove and push one another. It’s no mercy. Banging on walls. Rolling into the bathrooms, accidentally at first then sort of on purpose. All the younger cousins love it.

It’s the most fun either of them have ever had in their entire messed up lives. In these brief seasons at their grandparent’s house, they both get something like a normal childhood. They can be a kid, and that’s it. Their whole responsibility is to do things like dress up like a sumo wrestler and fight with their cousin in the hallway.

One of the children, of course, was me. The other was my cousin Timmy.

We were paired in size even though he was a few years older. A few weeks out of every year for as long as either of us had lived we came together at my grandparent’s house. And we did things like sumo wrestle, play three day long games of Monopoly, and build stuff in my grandfather’s wood shop. Or, more often, we’d trample through the woods and point sticks at each other and make machine gun noises.

I owe everything I have today to those weeks at our grandparents.

Timmy pitied me, at first, I think. His parents divorced earlier than he could even remember. No big sister to beat him up. No crazy step-dad to draw tits and dicks on the back of his homework. He’d never been raped, not that I ever made it a point to tell him about what happened to me. Mostly he felt sorry for me because he was from a big city and I was from a tiny mill-town.

Timmy liked to think of himself as worldly and wise beyond his years. He’d tell all the cousins stories about the way the world was and then generously jump into explaining something about economics or science or politics and the only notion we ever had that these were pure fabrication was when my grandfather would thunder in to correct him.

“Goddamnit, Timmy! Stop lying!”

It was harmless fun. We’d laugh about it. He’d even wink at us before going off on another one. For a while, it felt like he was in on the joke.

Except, as we got older, he couldn’t seem to stop lying.

We were paired up in other ways than size. We felt dichotomous. I learned how to tell stories and relate things from what I now call the oral story-telling tradition of the Aberdeen Weyerhaeuser sawmill. I heard stories about people like Bob “Good Enough” or Duncan “Balls-Upon-Us” —who was Greek and a micromanager— throughout my whole childhood, and it just seemed natural to make things big and almost mythical when I talked about them. I learned the knack for finding the funniest way to say something and then I’d set the facts spinning toward that end. It helped to have an Irish grandfather who made you work to earn a grunt and a smile.

Timmy just made shit up out of nothing.

When we were twelve he was adamant that he worked for both the FBI and the Mob. He was the only double agent ever to be working both sides without fear. He killed people, yes, because he was the best assassin alive but they all respected his code that he would never take the life of an innocent woman or a child younger than himself. He could go on long lectures about human anatomy and if you told him he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about he’d guffaw and ask if you realized his father was the Surgeon General of the United States. He carried briefcases filled with soda and pixie sticks and liked to sell them like they were drugs. He never made money or anything out of it, but he liked the idea that he was making all kinds of high stakes deals.

In another world, I think he’s the one that made it instead of me.

When my parents got divorced and my mom remarried a crazy Micronesian islander, I actually won a lottery ticket. My super stable, super sane, super loving grandparents moved to be closer to us to help. By cruel geography, that meant they also moved farther away from Timmy and his family.

The long visits still happened, of course. Timmy got all of that stuff. Spring and Winter Break. Summer. All the holidays. But I got extra time, too. I got to work for my grandfather doing odd jobs, or help out when he started a side business taking sports pictures for the county. Random weekends and weekdays, I got to not be at home. I got to not be home a lot.

Timmy’s father lived in another state but that didn’t make it easier when it turned out that he was a pedophile. Timmy had idolized his father. Half of Timmy’s lies came from his dad, especially anything self-aggrandizing. He was a millionaire who lived the life of a common man out of humility. A doctor who threatened the establishment because he could cure all disease. A spy who wanted to tell the truth. A politician so deft he would soon be the President. And by findings of a Texas court, a pedophile.

I think that’s what broke Timmy, if I’m looking back at it. I don’t know if there was anything that I or anyone could have done after that point. I didn’t even know until decades later, but looking back it’s obvious. It was a bit like when you put a plant in the wrong kind of soil and it starts to wither.

Timmy’s lies were as wild as ever, but suddenly he didn’t seem to care about anything anymore. My grandfather stopped letting him do projects in the wood shop because Timmy kept trying to do things like make paddles to hit his sister. He refused to follow very basic safety rules. Anything he could do to get on my grandfather’s nerves, he did. My grandfather never backed down, trying to reestablish some sense of order for his grandson. It could have been presented better, maybe, but Timmy needed those lines and those boundaries the way a building needs support beams. Timmy found them all too oppressive to accept.

My grandparents took us on a giant motorhome trip around the western states. We made a stop to go and see Mount Rushmore. There was a tourist attraction a few miles down the road, a maze where you had to navigate to four towers and in each tower you could stamp a president’s face on a little postcard. The maze was giant and I had to crawl under a wall after a few hours simply to leave. It left me with dirt all over my pants and shirt. I hadn’t been able to find any of the towers. Timmy was outside eating ice cream. He’d gotten all four presidents in almost no time at all. Not even ten minutes. He insisted that he hadn’t cheated once. Except his clothes were covered with dirt. I called him on it and we almost fought. I remember his tenacity. He hadn’t cheated, once, and he had his lower jaw extended in a snarl. He’d won fair and square. He’d punch me in the mouth if I said otherwise.

Some number of days later he claimed he could kill me with a single touch, that he had been taught this secret technique by a Chinese man who lived all alone on the top of a mountain, but had been forbidden to use it except in defense of his own life. This time I got riled and refused to let it go. I told him if he didn’t kill me with his single death touch technique that very instant that I would kill him, so now it really was to defend his own life and he didn’t have any excuses.

He poked me somewhere on the neck. He hoped right up until the last moment that he’d somehow find the right spot. The truth was that Timmy would have rather killed me than to know himself as a liar. Obviously, I lived.

I did pretend to die for a few minutes. He was my cousin. I loved him even if he made me furious. And it was too funny. We all laughed when I opened my eyes, and even Timmy joined in at the end but I remember walking away from that thinking he was sick and not knowing what to do to help. Not sick in the sense that he was disgusting, but in the sense that something inside of him that was profoundly out of order.

I think my grandparent’s tried to take him from his mom at some point but she refused. Too shameful. Plus, she was learning how to use crystals to heal all kinds of things that could not be touched by modern medicine. Timmy got big time into pot while his mom was trying to figure out how to just sort of hold her hand on people and hum to make their diseases go away. He laughed when me and my brother expressed concern. We were small town people. We didn’t understand that people smoked pot in the big city. Maybe we were small town but his attitude was more concerning, because he clearly just didn’t give a shit anymore.

He bought gangster jewelry, all of it fake, but swore it was real. He was destined for wealth and for greatness. He decided to become a celebrity chef.

My grandparents paid for him to go to culinary school. All I know is that he graduated. What really happened after, I have no idea other than for more wild claims like he was the personal chef of Nolan Ryan. Or that he was the head chef at multiple three star Michelin restaurants. And he certainly wasn’t on drugs. Nope. He was totally sober. And if he was on drugs then he had it totally under control.

I think we had dinner together, once, a few years before my grandmother passed away. I can barely remember. I wasn’t doing well in college. It was too different. Too big city. I couldn’t stand the culture. I felt like the college I’d dreamed about, where professors did complicated research and made world-changing discoveries, was fake. It made it hard to go to class. I was feeling agoraphobic. I’d always been responsible for other people, for my family, my mom and my younger siblings, and I had no idea how to live only for myself. It felt all wrong. And I had won scholarships and felt like I was letting people down. I didn’t fit in that culture and it made me think I might not fit anywhere.

To his credit, he listened without smirking. But I could see it almost made him relieved to know that I was struggling. He was struggling far more but when I asked him what was going on with his life he refused to give an honest answer. When the chance came to be vulnerable, he refused. Can’t handle the pressure, get out of the kitchen. There would be other smaller things for me to do. You have to look out for number one. You were smart for your hometown but it’s a Big City world out there and it’s for Big City boys like me.

I don’t think we spoke much at all over the next ten years. I wasn’t mad at him, we just drifted apart. We saw each other briefly at my grandmother’s funeral. We smiled and waved but he was wrapped up in his own world. There were a lot of fake business calls to take on his cell phone. Lots of fake jewelry to buy. Lots of celebrities to pretend were after your culinary skills.

He asked to see me specifically the first time he was dying. I hadn’t even known he was sick.

We were both in our early thirties and hadn’t seen each other in forever.

I’d just been promoted and while it was a junior role I felt like I’d finally redeemed myself for dropping out of college. I’d spent a long time feeling like a loser reading books in a call-center, but I was turning it around. I was in charge of big projects. I managed million dollar budgets. I’d bought a real junk heap of a house and was flipping it around. I’d be able to sell it to make a bunch of money. Most of all, I was engaged.

Timmy was a skeleton. Drinking had done something to his liver to make it shut down. He looked like someone you saw in old Holocaust photos. In a rare show of vulnerability, he wanted to hold my hand.

We didn’t talk much. He couldn’t. I struggled to find words.

Then I burst and told him I was so sorry for the Monopoly games where we’d all gang up and yell at him for cheating. It had been so stupid because it was just Monopoly. I could see it more clearly now. We’d set it all up so he’d be tempted to cheat just so we’d catch him, but we loved him and we didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. We’d led him to the role he found in our family because we liked the role of catching him but we should have helped him and found a better way. We should have found a way to help him.

He told me he was so proud of me. And my wife was cute. He wanted to know how I’d done it.

I expected him to die any day after that but he didn’t. He got another chance. On a long phone call, one of only a few, he told me he wanted to go camping. Like we’d talked about doing when we were kids. We’d go out in the middle of nowhere and sit out among the trees but some place with a clearing close by so we could see the stars. He was getting back pay for disability —he was so angry he’d been denied at first, they were so judgemental against him for drinking himself almost to death, but really he hadn’t been drinking at all and it was just some mysterious disease no doctor could diagnose— and he’d spend it all on camping gear. Just me and him, like it had always been.

I told him to save his money and get a car. If we went camping, I could pay for all the supplies. I’d sold my house and I had money. I’d been promoted, too. For the first time in my life, I was Costco Rich, like my grandfather had been. I could walk into a Costco and buy literally anything I wanted. I could get a tent or whatever else. But with a car, Timmy could get a job. With a job he could move out of his mom’s place. I told him I was going to be so busy with moving and we were trying for a baby that we probably couldn’t go camping anytime soon. But if we could find some time then maybe we could do something small. If I regret anything, it’s not finding the time, not that it would have made a difference.

I know my aunt tried to help him get some jobs, but they were all too small for someone who believed he had been Nolan Ryan’s personal chef. He refused them outright. He couldn’t seem to get hired anywhere he considered worthy of his status.

The next few times I saw him he had put a lot of weight back on. You wouldn’t have known he was sick. One of my other aunts hired him to cook for a few family events. She did her best to make him feel professional, but I think he found it condescending. His pride was all rankled up and it was almost impossible to talk to him about anything without hitting a nerve.

One night, when he was obviously drunk even though he promised he would never drink again, he called me and talked for two hours about how he should have had my life. We were the same. We’d always been the same. Why couldn’t he be married and have a job? Something had gone wrong because we’d always been the same. Why didn’t he have the good job? Why couldn’t he have a kid when everyone else had one? That was the part that hit me hardest because my wife and I had only recently found out we were pregnant. I knew how happy I was and it was like I could feel how happy he wasn’t.

His mom had kicked him out. She couldn’t figure out what to do with him because no crystal seemed to help, and he was living with one of her ex-boyfriends who was a hoarder. He said all they did was talk about conspiracy theories and how Bill Clinton had murdered multiple people. Also how women were all bitches and too selfish to know a good man when they saw one. There was no working toilet and if he wanted to go to the bathroom he had to fill up a pitcher full of water to pour into the tank. There were bugs everywhere. He was a few years older than me and almost forty. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

How come it had been so different when we had always been the same?

I ignored the weirdness of the call. Instead, I told him what I had done to turn my life around. I’d gone to therapy. I told the therapist every single thing that had happened to me and every single thing that made me afraid, and then I went out and confronted all of those things. I was unnerved by crowds so I made myself go sit in a crowd. I was embarrassed to speak in public so I made myself speak in public. I had to acknowledge and face the things about myself that I didn’t like. One by one, with no bullshit. The truth had set me free.

I told the darkest truth to him. I’d learned how to talk about it in group therapy. I told him how I’d always hated myself, blamed myself for something bad that had happened to me when I was younger. I had been raped. So had a few of my cousins on the other side of the family. I’d been young but I blamed myself for not speaking up. I might have saved them. I had another cousin, like Timmy, who seemed to be fading away. And every time I saw that cousin I thought that I could have saved him if I’d only found the courage to speak up sooner.

Timmy sobbed openly and told me in a broken voice that his dad was a pedophile. It all came out in a rush. He didn’t know how to pretend he didn’t know even though he’d known it since we were boys. Hell, you could google it. He didn’t know how to live knowing that he’d come from such a man. His own sense of self didn’t fit together since he’d found out. And his dad lied all the time. His whole entire life had been based on a lie. I learned how to listen in group therapy. I gave him space and encouragement. For the first time in my memory, Timmy told me the truth. He struggled with it. It wasn’t natural. At times it seemed he was vomiting the truth, but he told me as much of the truth as he could bear. When he was done I told him I loved him and that he could get his life back, if he wanted. It wasn’t too late.

I don’t know if it helped, but I know he took a job shortly after that he had previously considered beneath him. He bought a car. He wasn’t making much money but at least he was doing something. I encouraged him whenever I had the opportunity.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been in dad mode. Little babies need lots of time.

Over that period, I guess Timmy took a turn for the worse. I didn’t know. Nobody told me, but I also didn’t do anything to go find out. I get it. It all sounds so inspirational to talk about getting your life back together but when it’s just you and the cold, long road ahead it’s exhausting. He stopped living with his mom’s ex boyfriend, finding that he preferred to sleep in his car. I don’t blame him. He started using again. I do blame him for that.

Something weird happened to his feet and they became swollen. A few days ago he sent a picture of his feet to his mom. Or so I’ve been told.

One of my aunts found him sleeping in her driveway a few nights ago and sent him off to a motel. She told him he couldn’t sleep inside if he was using. Not when her own son was struggling to stay clean. She couldn’t have the influence. He said he understood.

He was found dead in that same motel a few days ago. He was taking a shower and that’s where the paramedics found him when they got into the room. I bet it felt good to step into a hot shower after living in his car for so long. Especially when his feet hurt. The story I’ve heard so far is that he tripped and just died right there. The water kept running for maybe as long as three days. His mom was the one who told the hotel staff they needed to open the door because she noticed on his cell phone records that he wasn’t calling or texting anyone at all. He’ll be cremated because the body isn’t fit for viewing. I don’t know yet when the service will be.

I wish he would’ve called me again, so I could tell him to come by and that I’d pay for his gas. He could have taken a shower here. We could have gone out to eat and I could have sat with him and watched my son play in the backyard. I wish I had called him, too. I wish most of all I could go back to when we were kids and find a way to make him feel big and important without having to pretend to be somebody else, so that he wouldn’t have had to lie all the time.

We try so hard not to care in our culture. Maybe we do it to save ourselves from drowning. Too many people living on top of each other and you can’t know them all so the only way to live is to affect an attitude of detachment. Oh, well he had lots of chances. Oh, he had no one to blame but himself. He was the one who was getting in his way. Lots of people have hard things happen and they get over them.

Being a dad has changed the way I see all of this. I think about a little boy racing toward me down a hallway with pillows shoved under our grandfather’s shirt. I think of the serious, sober, two hour long deliberations during Christmas break between two grade-schoolers about how a single Navy Seal could probably kill a thousand regular men with his bare hands. The way he smuggled VHS tapes of Ken Shamrock to our grandparent’s house and we were both pretty sure that what we were watching was an illegal fight to the death in an Arabian kingdom. Finding forts under pine trees in the woods and building shelters to stay out of the rain. Climbing so high in the trees that my grandmother would whistle at us because it was the loudest sound she could make to force us to understand we were in danger.

I can’t think of him as some nameless, faceless, homeless person whose entire life is to be stepped over on the way toward other things. Some terrible inconvenience to the hotel staff that they’ll tell stories about to new people. All I can think is, oh God that was my cousin Timmy and he was somebody’s baby.