KATHRYN ROUNTREE
It has not been quite six months since I lost my brother to cancer. I am still new at living in this world without him.
Michael was my younger brother, my only brother. He was my playmate, guinea pig, confidant, and at times a huge pain, as all younger brothers can be.
Once when we were little and in the middle of a childhood squabble, I told him he was adopted. He cried and cried until I finally relented and had him look in the mirror to show him we had the same green eyes, the same wavy brown hair, and the same crooked front teeth, making us true-blue brother and sister.
We had an unusual childhood to say the least. Ours was a made-for-TV movie: Father walks out on family leaving no forwarding address. Mother is left alone to raise three small children in New York City. Baby boy of the family lands a part in an off-Broadway show at age four and becomes a child actor and the sole breadwinner of the family. Fifteen years later, mother sees the father on Mission Impossible TV show and eventually he and the mom remarry. True story.
Michael grows up and earns a scholarship to drama school. He is dangerously handsome, with emerald green eyes and a smile that draws everyone to him. The list of girlfriends is long and at times overlapping. He starts to paint and becomes an artist. He plays baseball like a Hall of Famer. He is an enthusiastic amateur magician and is side-splittingly funny.
Still, his story has many edges to it. His life was like a prism with rays of light that dart off into moments of staggering beauty and unfathomable darkness. There is the depression that haunted him most of his life and had a vice grip on everything he tried to do and accomplish. It began when he was nine years old, when he told us he felt like a cloud of darkness enveloped him. His moods would be unpredictable and often manic. But there was also the kindness that he showed to everyone in need and brought him to tears if an animal was in distress or hurt in anyway.
I would have done anything to help my brother. Walked a thousand miles to cheer him up, battled a dragon, crawled through the mud, fought the unbeatable foe, but the foe was depression and that enemy was ruthless.
Depression was a coward. It hid itself behind my brother’s defensiveness; behind his anger and aloofness. It was also depression that fueled my brother’s alcoholism. The two debilitating diseases had a strangle hold on him, slowly killing him, holding him hostage and keeping him from his family.
Depression stole his ability to be a son, a brother, an uncle, and a boyfriend. Every time he got close to happiness, depression came sneaking in and took him down at the knees. It beat him to a pulp until he finally let go of everyone and everything else. He was shackled by depression but not defeated. Courage became his shield against the dark knight. He’d slip out though the door of his apartment facing the onslaught of New Yorkers scurrying to wherever they go and come to meet me in the park where we would sit on the bleachers and laugh, talk, and watch our beloved baseball. He was like a phoenix emerging from a black hole that let in no light or life, fighting his way back to joy.
Michael made everyone around him laugh. He did magic tricks, loved little children, and the Yankees. He had a little kitchen in his studio apartment and could cook up a one-pot meal, which had five-star gourmet flavors blended into each bite.
On Sunday afternoons for as long as I can remember, I would call my brother in New York and we would spend time on the phone just catching up on the week and our lives. He never married nor had kids, so week after week I would hear about new people coming and going, jobs started and lost, and about new ideas he had for the invention that would finally make him a millionaire.
When he would fall into the deep hole of alcoholism, mixed with a dose of depression and a dash of self-loathing, his life ceased to exist. I would call and leave frantic messages on his machine. “Michael, I am so worried about you. Please call me or I am going to call 911.”
I made threat after threat, fully expecting a call from the landlord informing me that he had found him dead in the apartment. I braced myself time and again for this call over the many years of this pattern. Each time I was certain that it was the end, my phone would ring and there he would be on the other end. “Hi, what are you up to?” he would ask me, as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and I could suddenly breathe again.
After these scares, I would try to come to terms with the knowledge that one day the depression would finally crush his soul beyond reasoning and he would be lost forever. But always, I vowed to fight for him. I would not allow this monster to take my brother from me. When I felt he was in danger, I made him stay on the phone with me, talking all through the night if needed, just to give him a lifeline to hold on to when the demons seemed so strong and his will so weak. As it turned out, depression was not the only enemy he had to face.
The call came on our usual Sunday afternoon catch-up conversations. He sounded stressed and distracted. I asked him what was wrong and he said he had been having stomach pains and thought he had food poisoning. I encourage him to go to the doctor. He had no insurance and ended up going to the emergency room.
The pain turned out to be stage-four colon cancer. He went into surgery before I could even make a plane reservation to get to New York. He had most of his colon removed, along with a gaping hole for a colostomy bag. He woke up alone in a strange hospital room where they told him he had two years to live, maybe.
I was struck by disbelief, devastation, denial, and utter paralysis when he told me, but he seemed to take it well. At least that’s what I thought in the beginning. His world, our world, shattered under the weight of endless treatments, unbearable pain, and the everpresent ticking of the last years, months, and then days of his life.
There are forty-four steps up to the third floor of my brother’s studio apartment on 85th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan. He would now have to climb these steps, getting weaker by the day. He lived in the same apartment for almost thirty years. The walls are covered with his artwork. Working with pastels, he created beautiful images of seascapes and brilliant green and gold tree-lined paths and images of New York. He created amazing 3D replicas of the cartoon characters Popeye and Olive Oil in minute detail. In them, Popeye is fighting off Brutus for the love of his gal, Olive.
When I first arrived in New York from my home in New Mexico to care for him, I climbed those steps, huffing and puffing and wondering how on earth he was able to get up those steps after such a debilitating surgery. Forty-four steps up, forty-four steps down, no matter the purpose.
I lived in two worlds for the next couple of years. I flew back and forth to care for him after a procedure. Left my family in the middle of vacations, if he was in a crisis. Dragged myself up and down the forty-four steps wondering how long he could possibly stay in his apartment, hoping I could convince him to live with me in New Mexico where I could take care of him.
For the next couple of years, he rallied, he faded, was silent at times, but every once in while, we would talk for hours. Fighting cancer, it seemed, gave him an excuse for his depression. Now when the blue moments engulfed him, he blamed the cancer instead of himself.
Eventually, he was moved to a hospice facility in upstate New York, which was like being on another planet to a guy that had never lived outside of the city in his entire life.
Michael was a complete rascal at the beginning and gave the staff fits. He was still strong enough to sneak out the back door and walk to the small town. He often encountered deer on the road as he walked to and from the hospice facility. He tried hitchhiking at times. He asked the ambulance driver in front of the hospice center to give him a ride. The guy looked at him like he was crazy and maybe he was, just a little.
He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to stop him from doing what he wanted with the little time he had left. He wasn’t about to let cancer, doctors, doors with alarms, or even death dictate how he would spend his remaining months.
I was fortunate enough to be with him during the last two weeks of his life. Our time together was bittersweet. We both finally faced the reality of his situation and no longer pretended that remission might be possible. We knew the end was near. During those final days we acted like kids again. We laughed at the same jokes we had been telling each other since childhood, watched our favorite shows on TV, and ate grape popsicles.
Luckily it was spring and the Yankees were playing. His love for the Yankees pulled him through many episodes of depression and now, so close to the end, watching the games on TV made us both feel like it was just another normal Saturday afternoon.
He fought with me about shaving. “I can shave myself,” he would say and take the razor out of my hand. He was so sure he could still use a straight razor and I was afraid his weak hands would slip and he would slice his cheek open. I begged him to let me help him, but stubbornness and independence won out, so I let him shave himself thinking about all the stitches he might need.
When the pain became too much for even the Yankees to distract him, he would push a button that released morphine into his system and then he would drift away from me into a deep, unnatural sleep, and I would lose those precious moments with him.
The last words we said to each other were “I love you.” In the end of everything, I guess that is the best anyone can ask for out of life, in spite of everything. I Love You.
I love you Michael.