Have Your Hugged Your Driller Today?
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Memories of my brother

My brother’s birthday is coming up, but he won’t be around to celebrate it. He died of a heroin overdose in 1987. Here’s what I have left of him: The hardhat he wore as an oil exploration worker. The old trunk, plastered with decals, that held his clothes and books when he traveled. Old photographs. And of course my memories. Some of the photographs are inherited from my grandmother. On the back of each one she diligently noted the date it was taken and who was in the shot. I’m grateful to her for that. Sometimes I can’t recognize faces from long ago. Looking at them makes me sad. Steve died young. Life wasn’t always kind to him, and he wasn’t always kind to himself. The photos show how he grew. And changed. They stir memories that have been submerged a long time.

I don’t remember where or when this picture of Steve and me was taken. It looks like an airfield. Those are the Wasatch Mountains in the background. Steve and I used to make up stories for hours on end, speaking in the voices of the characters we imagined. Maybe that’s why I rely so much on dialogue in my fiction.

This one with me in the ridiculous dress was taken on Easter. Every year on Easter Sunday we went with Mom and Grandma to an all-you-can eat buffet, always the same one. Steve loved their pie. One year we noticed the restaurant had raised the price for children and blamed the increase on Steve. But I’ve attached that sweet memory to the wrong picture. We’re too young here. The buffet came later.

Here is Steve with Grandma. He was in high school then. Since he lived with Dad and I lived with Mom, we only saw each other on holidays and during summer vacations.

He was a party animal who could down a six-pack faster than anybody. His favorite novel was Crime and Punishment. He got straight and stayed that way for a year or so before he relapsed.

Steve and I lived a thousand miles apart and seldom saw each other as adults. But when we did, things were the same as they always had been. He never stopped being my brother.

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How We Die – Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter

I read Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter while doing research for my novel TALION. I’d never seen anyone die—not yet, anyway—and I needed a clinical account of the process. Nuland explains what happens in the body as life ends. In each chapter he covers a different manner of death: heart attack, old age, Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS, cancer, and so on. He also addresses some of the philosophical issues connected to death and dying.

The book delivered what I needed in the chapter “Murder and Serenity.” When someone is bleeding to death, he goes into shock, his heartbeat ceases, and his muscles spasm in what are known as death agonies. For a few minutes he is “clinically dead,” which means his brain is receiving no oxygen, but with medical intervention he might be revived. Doctors can tell by examining the person whether the effort is likely to succeed. One important clue is the eyes.

If open, [the eyes] are at first glassy and unseeing, but if resuscitation does not commence they will in four or five minutes yield up their sheen and become dulled, as the pupils dilate and forever lose their watchful light. It is as though a thin cloud-gray film has been laid down over each eye . . . . [T]he eyeball soon flattens out, just enough to be noticeable. It is a flatness from which there is no rising. (122-123)

Nuland goes on to discuss the serenity and freedom from pain observed in victims of trauma. When the body is damaged, it produces endorphins, pain-killing chemicals like those in narcotics. He provides several examples of when and how this happens, including soldiers wounded during battle and a child who is murdered.

Though I didn’t use any of Nuland’s material directly, it underlay my accounts of what Rad’s victims endure as he tortures and kills them, forming a base on which my imagination could build.

I didn’t need the other chapters for my research but read them anyway, fascinated by the complexity of the dying process. I learned why my father died of kidney failure even though it was heart failure that put him in the hospital the final time. I learned enough about cancer to suspect my mother had it when fluid accumulated around her lung. The doctor’s diagnosis confirmed my fear.

My mother as a young woman

I noticed a copy of How We Die on the bookshelf in the office of my mother’s oncologist. I doubt it was there because the oncologist needed its medical information; he would have learned all that stuff in school. But the book has more to offer doctors. A physician himself, Nuland questions the wisdom of continuing to treat patients whose illnesses are terminal. In such cases, he argues, treatment often purchases a few extra weeks or months of life at the price of additional suffering.

My mother was such a patient. Chemotherapy would slow the process of her lung cancer but could not cure it. She underwent a few treatments and then decided the trade-off wasn’t worth it. For almost a year afterward she continued to live normally. She and I went to Utah where she visited her sisters a final time. Nuland observes that death seldom comes peacefully, that most of us can expect to suffer in the process. Mom did. Learning how we die has made me less happy, but the knowledge I’ve gained is a trade-off I can accept.

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Me and Steve
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A record of what never happened

My brother was born fourteen months after me, and we played together all the time. We invented characters and acted out stories, making up the plots as we went. We kept our fantasies going for weeks at a time. I think our make-believe began when I was six and Steve was five, during the time our parents’ marriage was self-destructing. It went on for years. We stopped when Steve reached adolescence and became embarrassed to play with a girl.

When I was seven, we wrote down and illustrated one of our stories in a blank coloring book. I remember the paper, pulpy and slightly yellow. I can almost picture my childish lettering and the map of our imaginary country drawn in crayon. But I can’t recall the story. In fact, I can’t recall any of our stories. Since the book was lost long ago and Steve is dead, there’s no way to jog my memory.

This make-believe was a large part of my childhood. It connected me to my brother. Losing it feels like losing part of myself.

An article in the March issue of Wired reassures me that I never had any permanent memories to begin with – not in the sense of having an accurate recollection of our fantasies and the times we spent together creating them. In “The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever,” Jonah Lehrer reports that scientists have isolated the chemicals that create memories and the chemicals that erase them. Great news for post-traumatic stress victims, drug addicts, chronic-pain sufferers, and other people whose lives have generally sucked.

But right now I’m interested in recovering a few memories. Science offers less hope in that direction. It seems none of our memories are accurate anyway since, Lehrer explains, “the very act of remembering changes the memory itself.”

The brain has to synthesize a lot of proteins and fire up lot of neurons every time it creates a memory. As Lehrer puts it, “The past has to be wired into your hardware.” You might think that once the wiring was there, it would stay put. Not really. Various unsavory experiments involving the torture of innocent rodents show that “every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry.” In other words, each time you recall something, the brain rewires the memory, but not quite in the same way.

Illustration from Wired magazine

Nuking a Traumatic Memory

Think about it: every time you remember an event, it becomes less true. If by true you mean what actually happened. The implications are unsettling. Most of us construct a self based on our past – a past we think is real. “That sense of authenticity,” Lehrer says, “is the biggest lie of all.”

It follows that “every memoir should be classified as fiction,” but I disagree with Lehrer’s dismissive conclusion. I think the point of memoir is to bring some stability and permanence to the flux of memory. Once written, the memoir is no longer subject to the vagaries of brain chemistry. At least it records what was true for the writer at the time of writing.

I want to remember the make-believe between me and Steve. So what if it’s not a precise recollection of what happened all those years ago. I’ll take images reduced to ghosts by too many washings in brain enzymes. I’ll take illusions.

 

Illustration from Wired

 

 

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Pictures of My Brother

Steve in Soldier Summit

Lately I’ve been sorting through piles of snapshots inherited from my grandmother. On the back of each one she diligently noted the date and who was in the shot. I’m grateful to her for that. Sometimes I can’t recognize faces from long ago.The purpose of my project is to find photos of Steve, scan them, and send them to his son, Hayden. They’re old photos because Steve died in 1987. Looking at them makes me sad. Steve died young. Life wasn’t always kind to him, and he wasn’t always kind to himself. The photos show how he grew. And changed. They stir memories that have been submerged a long time.
 

Airfield

I don’t remember where or when this picture of Steve and me was taken. It looks like an airfield. Those are the Wasatch Mountains in the background. Steve and I used to make stories for hours on end, speaking in the voices of the characters we imagined. Maybe that’s why I rely so much on dialogue in my fiction.

The one with me in the ridiculous dress was no doubt taken on Easter. Every year on Easter Sunday we went with Mom and Grandma to an all-you-can eat buffet, always the same one. Steve loved their pie. But I’ve attached that sweet memory to the wrong picture. We’re too young here. The buffet came later. 
 

Easter

Steve with Grandma

 
 

Party Animal

He was a party animal who could down a six-pack faster than anybody. His favorite novel was Crime and Punishment.
 
Steve and I lived a thousand miles apart and seldom saw each other as adults. But when we did, things were the same as they had always been. He never stopped being my brother.
 
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Birth Place

I used to have a recurring dream about Soldier Summit, the dying town high in the mountains of Utah where my parents began their marriage and my brother and I first lived. Though it has been years, my memory of the dream remains vivid. I am hiking along a road with snowbanks on both sides and mountains rising in front of me. Then night falls and it begins to snow. Music plays, haunting music with bells. Brilliantly lit houses on the mountainside overlook the road, promising warmth and rest, but I can’t stop. I have to reach Soldier Summit before nightfall. Then the lights from the houses fade. Darkness closes around me.

My mother told me how she waded through hip-deep snow to reach the Hillcrest Cafe where she waited tables and my father cooked. Before buying the cafe, my father worked as a dispatcher at the railroad station in Soldier Summit, but he wanted to be his own boss. Once Mom became pregnant with me, she stopped working at the Hillcrest. She had to be careful. She’d miscarried with her first pregnancy, an older brother or sister that Steve and I might have had.

After Steve was born, fourteen months after me, Dad’s mother came to help Mom take care of us. Nana soon claimed me as her darling, leaving Steve to Mom. Throughout our childhood, I thought Mom loved him more and forgave him things she would never have forgiven me.

I recall only moments of that time in Soldier Summit. I remember waking before dawn in the dim bedroom where Nana and I slept and watching her get dressed. She had on an old-fashioned girdle with garters and stockings but no underpants, and I saw the tuft of gray hair between her legs before she slipped into a dress. I asked where she was going. To Salt Lake, she said, just for the day. I asked if I could come. Not this time, she told me. Sometime later she took me on the train to Salt Lake. We shopped in a huge department store. Then we checked into a hotel so I could take my afternoon nap. This seems unlikely given how little money we had, yet the memory is vivid — the cool sheets and the precipitous view from the window.

Another memory: Steve as a toddler wearing a frilly pink dress, screaming, furious, his red face smeared with tears and snot. Years later I asked Nana about the incident. She told me I was imagining things, nothing of the kind had happened. So I never mentioned it to Steve. But a long time afterward, when both of them were dead, I asked Mom about the memory. Nana had put the dress on Steve, she said, as punishment for wetting the bed. When Dad came home and saw, he cussed Nana out and ordered her to get that dress off him. “It was my fault,” Mom said. “I should’ve stood up to her.”

Steve told me once I had no clue how hard it was being a man. High on speed and beer, he’d nearly fought some guys on the street because one of them said something. He got into vicious fights over matters of respect. I heard about the ones he won. He boasted of beating up a drunk who ruined his hat with a pocket knife.

Earlier this month I went back to Soldier Summit. Steve’s son Hayden, his wife Tonia, and their daughter Aspen came with me. The place I remembered was no longer there. Snow covered the foundations of the demolished houses where Steve and I once played. There were a few new buildings along the highway, but everything I remembered was gone except for one abandoned house and the railroad tracks.

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