Piecing Together

A few months later, I leave a message on John’s phone, wishing him a happy birthday.

For all the angst and awkwardness I often felt with him, for all his arguments and pontificating and sense of entitlement, he’s mellowed with the years.

Whenever I called Ro at a holiday, she’d ask if I wanted to talk with him. During our guarded conversations, we noticed striking parallels—“I’m growing bonsai,” he said once.

“Me, too!” I answered.

Another time we discovered he was studying Buddhism as I accelerated my exploration of Zen.

We were able to talk about the challenges of being artists, and when I came to see Ro, he and I enjoyed some peaceful visits to the Portland Japanese Garden. I mellowed, too, thanks to a spontaneous choice in an airport bookstore.

In 2006, looking for an airplane read, I grabbed Born On Blue Day by Daniel Tammet—a memoir describing his personal experience of Asperger Syndrome, a disorder now considered part of the autism spectrum.

Social difficulties, lack of empathy, lack of eye contact, verbosity, obsession with a narrow area of interest, difficulty with self-care, excessive blinking, catatonia. My God. That’s what’s wrong with John. This has a name. Nowadays it is easy to see that what felt like selfishness, hypocrisy, and disregard was a disorder. So easy to see now, so hellish to live through.

Afraid of his possible response, it’s some years before I gently broach the subject with him.

But at tea one afternoon, after the Japanese Garden:

“I read an interesting Asperger book, John.”

Some discussion, then “Do you think…?”

“I’ve wondered that myself,” he says, and moves on to other topics.

We couldn’t talk about this, but we could be gentler with one another.

•••

He doesn’t return my birthday call—I’m not surprised, but when Ro’s call to him goes unacknowledged, she keeps calling for a few days. “Please call me back. We want to celebrate your birthday. I’m getting worried about you.”

He doesn’t call. Ro and Mark have never been to his place—he’s never invited them. But they drive the thirty miles and track it down: a tiny one-bedroom attached unit in a small row of five.

They knock, then bang. Still no response. Mark punches 911 into his phone. When the police and paramedics arrive, Mark enters with them and finds John’s body in bed.

“He was dressed for bed,” Mark later told me. “And he had a look of wonder on his face.”

Dying in his bed, a comfort. His living space, a horror.

Though Mark and son Orion spent the next day clearing it and Ro joined them the following day, their efforts will be impossible to detect when I at last arrive, so colossal is the chaos.

Others in our family expressed depression through household neglect, through filth and heaps and hoards, whether it was Mary Kay’s slide into Alzheimer’s and the shared experience of clearing out her heartbreaking place, or that shocking visit to Mom’s apartment after her medical emergency. Even Jim, a widower living with his bachelor sons, needed to be freed of soul-crushing debris when he sold their house. The only way to keep from breaking apart as I did this work was to continually say, “This is so beautiful. This is so very beautiful,” as tears streamed down. And there is something beautiful in being trusted with such ugliness, in being allowed to express love by helping to transform it.

Ro cleaned these anguished spaces with me.

“John’s is worse,” she warns. “No wonder he never invited us. It’s just mountains of trash. But Mark and Orion found four musical instruments buried under papers, garbage, rotting clothes.”

“What about his guitar?” His finest, his most beloved, treasured object: the superb instrument he had saved up to buy and which he played for years: a classical guitar commissioned by master guitarist Julian Bream.

“Hanging on the wall, covered in dust. With a broken string.”

Pierced my heart to hear it. His chief pleasure gave him no pleasure. Bone and blood is the price of coal.

“Not only that. We found dozens of candles, Coleman stove gas, a camo vest, canned food. He was a survivalist. And this heavy locked box. He always told Mom to invest in gold bullion, but when we opened it—Oh, Ree,” she wails.

A revolver and multiple rounds of ammunition.

My peace activist brother, the conscientious objector, lived with unfathomed fear and dread. Paranoia, also characteristic of Asperger’s.

•••

Ro feels I should wait a day before going to his house, so together we tend the thousand details death occasions: writing the obituary, creating the service, finding the funeral home and a place for a post-memorial reception, ordering food, notifying anyone she could remember. She met the grueling challenge of his cremation before I got there.

And everything cost money we’ll never see again. Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. Bitter shameful thought: he always expects the cash outlay, even now. But there’s such a thing as human decency.

Late that afternoon, Ro leaves to get Mark at his office.

Alone, I lay on the couch, dreading having to clear out yet another abhorrent malodorous dwelling. Why is this our family signature, I fume. I want to mourn John, not resent him for what he left me to mop up. Do I even have the emotional fortitude to face this? Welcome to the mouth of hell.

It’s not fair. Why do I even have to? What do people who don’t have siblings do? Who cleans up after them?

Whatever I do, it’s never enough. Money was never enough. Concern or questions or gifts were never enough. He couldn’t forgive me for not visiting him in the looney bin.

But if I had gone, what might he have done? Hit me, perhaps. Scalded me with words, surely. His anger was terrifying; his skill in humiliation, unmatched. Whatever the outcome, I wouldn’t feel better for seeing him. Nor would he.

Tears slide. Always feared him. Never felt it so starkly. Shouldn’t be afraid of your own brother. Especially now you know he was impaired. But I was afraid, always.

I suddenly grasped this brutal totality. No wonder he was hard to be around. I was always on the defensive. And while I’d tried over the years to understand and forgive him, it never occurred to me to forgive myself. For being afraid.

At this, my guilt shattered like a mirror dropped.

I don’t have to do this. I email my brother Tom.

“What do landlords do when people leave apartments in this condition?”

He’ll know. He’s a landlord himself. Cleanup may cost a bundle, but it’ll be worth every penny.

•••

Ro and Mark return with unbelievable, magical news.

“The landlord liked John. He says we should take what we want and he’ll take care of the rest. He’ll clear away everything.”

A miracle.

The next day I said to Ro, “So we’re not cleaning up. We’re going on a treasure hunt.” (Albeit with latex gloves and filter masks.)

It was good we had that image of hope. The devastation and embodied despair of his apartment was almost more than I could bear. Darkest, filthiest, most wretched of human dwellings. The sight of his bathroom catapulted sobs out of me. “Oh, no! Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

That anyone should live here. That it was you, Skip.

No descriptions of the indescribable, just the treasures. Carvings from your trip to South America. Your cascade juniper bonsai, still well cared for. In addition to the musical instruments, Ro found a breathtaking appraisal of your guitar. When sold, it would cover funeral expenses and then some.

The real treasure, though, was finding out how many people genuinely liked you. Donating your books at the local library, we found your fellow volunteers were saddened by your death. Such a genial guy. Great jokes. We’ll miss him.

Other folks had enjoyed hiking and camping with you. You’d even been part of a men’s group. Who knew?

•••

Would your life have been different if there had been a diagnosis in your childhood? My teeth ache when I think of your loneliness and your fear.

You had an eyepatch over your social eye, and no one could see it, not even you. How painful not to share your life with someone.

Did people’s actions puzzle you? Did you ever understand how frustrating you could be? Did this hurt, or did you not perceive it? Did you turn then to the guitar, to your books, to your movies, to your pipe when you smoked it, to your garden when you had one, did you just turn away and not ask?

It was a symptom of yours, thinking you didn’t need help, a mean trick your disorder played, for you never really got it, except from Ro and her family.

When I listen to your CD, beneath your Villa-Lobos, your O’Carolan, I hear the very soundtrack of your feelings: your confidence, your pride, your pleasure in intricate fingering, delicate trills, thunderous punctuation, simple strumming. I feel your joy in mastery. I sense your hope, yielding to emotion in the music; your rare frustration with a tricky passage.

I think of the hours, the years of errors an acutely sensitive musician must tolerate to perform a concerto not just accurately, but beautifully. What self-forgiveness and patience he must practice along with the chords, devoting himself not just to technique, but to the highest expression possible. Once the sequences become second nature, he must trust himself to release all preparation and simply play.

Tolerance. Forgiveness. Patience. Devotion. Trust. Exactly what a well-played human life requires.

Listening more deeply, below even the soft chirp of your fingers over the frets, I detect one of the oldest sounds of my life: the familiar sound of your breathing. The music of yourself, audible beyond death.