1
“The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.”
-Mary Catherine Bateson
“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.”
-Umberto Eco
“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
-Ken Kesey
The day was normal. The clouds mingled around a muted blue sky and the squirrels rummaged through the leaves scraping for acorns. I was walking back from class when my mom called. My mom has more love in her than any human I’ve met or could imagine exists. It’s a characteristic that vibrates through her and glows out of her skin. It’s also her greatest hindrance and at times shies her away from reality. But what’s the point of being immersed in reality anyway?
She called to chatter her worries through the earpiece on my phone. It was my brother on her mind again. She was worried—again. My mother is a great mom, so thus she’s a worrier. Apparently my dad and brother had gotten into a fight the night before and my mom was nervous because the conversation ended badly and she had failed in her attempts to get a hold of my brother all day.
I directed virtually no comfort to her unsettled mentality; I was strained by midterms and searching my way through a long relationship that had become difficult. I therefore failed to grant the much-needed attention to my family. I ended the call and hurried onto the insignificant obligations of the day. I was going to school in Oregon and my family was still back home in Colorado. Physical distance often results in emotional distance as well. Me being a stubborn, incisive 20 years old, ready to take any and all on likely contributed to the distance between my family and I.
The fight with my brother and my dad didn’t seem like much of a deal, but my mom clearly was hurt by it. It didn’t make sense at the time. My brother Michael, like my mother, also had a lot love. He didn’t entirely make sense, though. Detectives frequently declare that to solve a crime one must determine the motives of the guilty party. My brother’s offenses never became a legal issue and were overall fairly minor—lies, mild stealing (only from friends and family) and being unbelievably messy—but his motives were indecipherable. His most common offense was his affinity to lie. Michael would come up with the most elaborate lies. They were so grand and fascinating, but borderline unbelievable. And every time you’d just fight to hear them as truth. In fact, most of the time you would believe them and disregard Michael’s past of lies and numb the doubt in his truthfulness to an inaudible tremor.
His lies, aside from being a great story, accomplished little to nothing for my brother. Well, other than risking being called out as a liar, which frequently occurred. He left his friends confused and frustrated and my family straining to figure out his motives, or more importantly a way to help him. As a younger brother to Michael, gullibility was the only word in my dictionary. That being said, he was an amazing brother and if he hadn’t beat my gullibility up and down while I was growing up, I’d still spend my nights trying to snag a piece of the moon for a bite of cheese.
My mom always fought and pained herself to determine why my brother lied. My father also fought, but because he could never understand why my brother acted the way he did, he was never able to be at peace with it. But nobody could ever figure out what was wrong with Michael’s mind. He was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, Bipolarity, and Aspergers (a mild form of autism). No diagnoses ever stuck for my brother, nor were any of said diagnoses ever successfully medicated. Finding a way to medicate my brother’s head was less constructive than Sisyphus pushing a boulder across an infinitely flat countryside.
Defining what was wrong with his body, however, was an easier task. At four years old he had began his fight with juvenile onset, type-one diabetes. This is not to be confused with the Diabetes your grandpa gets when he turns 73.
Diabetes is a tricky disease; I was lucky enough to hold it off for 12 years, eight years more of health than my brother was given the chance at. See, diabetes is treatable, but it’s by no means an exact science to treat. It’s a lot of work, with persistent trial and error, to manage the disease. When you mess up, the result is poor health or in some circumstances cold death. Michael had the task of handling diabetes, all the while exploring life with a mind that lacked congruency with the day-to-day operations of modern society. That was his battle.
As for the battle he had encountered with my dad the night prior, well, that started because his cable television was shut off. The exact details of the situation never made it through the deep fog that was about to take over my life. All I can remember is for one reason or another my parents were battling my brother over financial stuff (finance: an incredibly insolent entity; a byproduct of human nature) and had turned off his cable. My brother was a dedicated Denver sports fan and the Colorado Rockies were in the World Series. When he went to turn the game on, he realized the cable was no more. He called my parents and the fight thus ensued.
I admire and respect my parents for more reasons than I can even attempt to articulate. My dad started his own business and built it to be a successful company. He did this while maintaining the fairness and fun that make my dad who he is with his co-workers, employees and customers as well as his friends and family. If my mom develops a passion for anything, it drives her and she will become more educated and articulate about the matter than the ‘experts’ that lead the subject’s field.
They also raised me. I am living a happy life—which means they succeeded, through and through.
But more so than anything else, they poured themselves into trying to help my brother. Attempting to decode parental instincts, my parents tried anything and everything to figure Michael out. Sometimes life is just too complex. When complexity overwhelms, frustration ensues. The combination of frustration and uncompromising love yield implausible power. When that power doesn’t achieve results, frustration is all that’s left.
My dad decided to stand up to Michael that battle. My dad didn’t get caught in the web of deals Michael always created immediately when my parents tried to punish him. My dad hung up the phone without an agreement or plan of action.
2
“If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one–
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.”
-Bhagavad Gita
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
-Yogi Berra
At a quarter past five the wind brought in a darker breed of clouds ready to burst out the day’s gathered humidity. But it’s Eugene and without the rain and the clouds, we wouldn’t have the brilliant green. Eugene is cluttered with trees that create a green canopy wherever you go. It’s a town that frequently allows one step to be in a parking lot and the next in a forest. The lushness survives because of the valley’s dedication to constant moisture, especially in the winter. Located in the southern portion of the Willamette Valley, Eugene swims in an annual 50 inches of rain. It’s no wonder why we call it Green Eugene. And that’s the balance of it; the balance of this place, at least.
The day’s obligations had finally stopped lingering over my shoulder and I was able to decompress. After puttering through papers and playing with my dog Raaja, I sat down and watched out my window as the rain crawled through the night and created a prickly reflection in the black paved roads in front of my house. Everything seemed to move slowly and my emotions experienced an impressive shift, leaving things off center. Comfort felt like it was an imaginary idea created by men living in the clouds. My head felt all at once everyday in my life I had ever experienced numbness and it seemed to compact and linger. I felt motionless and heavy, ostensibly without cause.
Raaja laid still on my bed, her eyes locked on me trying to figure out what I was thinking. Her lanky body stretched across my bed. She was quite an interesting mutt: part Lab, part Pit Bull, part German Sheppard and to top it off, a bit of Rottweiler lived in her veins. For all the beastliness in her blood, she couldn’t have been a sweeter dog.
Dark stripes crawled through her soft brindle fur and her long nose sparkled with moisture. Dogs have the ability to feel and appropriately adapt to the vibes in a room, always with exceptional accuracy. Raaja could tell something was the matter, but she decided to play the supportive, quite co-pilot role. Her eyebrows pinched together and her eyes remained fixed on me making it clear she was there to give me love if I needed it. If not, she would just patiently wait on the bed, shedding light brown hairs all across my blue comforter and torn up pillowcases.
I’m fairly certain she was proud of the disaster she had made of my pillowcases. I had come home one day to find my room littered with feathers. As soon as I opened my door to find my cluttered room to be littered with white feathers, Raaja darted around my rolling office chair to hide under my dark oak desk. She refused to look at me until I told her we could still be friends. How can you not be friends with a dog sweetly curled in a space far too small for her—hiding, tail shaking, covering her ashamed face? Obviously Raaja and I had maintained our relationship through the pillow catastrophe, but my pillows were never the same again. I still find feathers in my room from time to time.
Despite the feathers, I had to love the girl. She wasn’t the type of dog to demand attention from those she didn’t know. Cute dogs provide the incredible service of attracting any female in a 50-foot radius to you; but there are some girls I’d just rather stay away from. I don’t have a specific type of girl I go for, per-say, but I do like a girl that doesn’t get lost in simple conversation. I suppose I do prefer a girl that can eagerly explore multifaceted conversations with me. Raaja had embedded deep within her a fear of the types of girls lacking in conversational skill, whom, for intensive purposes, will be referred to as a beezie (Beezie: an elevator that fails to reach the top floor). Raaja’s anxiety around beezies was no mystery. It turns out when you run at an animal that is unfamiliar with you, with waving arms and a disturbingly high pitched scream to most effectively communicate exactly how cute that dog is, the animal will fear you. Raaja feared beezies.
That night Raaja helped to provide comfort but my head was still heavy. I felt hesitant and shaky. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure it out. It was like I was looking around all the dark corners and under all the dusty rugs to discover the source of my stubborn and sobering mindset. I was almost a third through my junior year in college and things were starting to hit a severe plateau. The insanity of my freshman and sophomore year seemed to have leveled out and life was starting to ask me questions about the future and now’s contribution to it.
I was asking questions too. I wanted to know why classes had become dull. I wanted to understand where my drive and ability to fluidly move forward had gone. I really wanted to fix things with Lindsey, the girl I had loved for the last two years. A solution of any kind was so far away from coming into focus though.
I turned on some folk infused blues music and let my eyes dance around my room. I thought maybe focus could present itself through my green walls, cluttered with ski posters and drawings. My idols and my inked hand made up the general theme of my colorful personal space. A Colorado flag hung above my head, tacked to the ceiling to remind me of my real home. The incandescent light, glowing in the middle of my room, put spots in my sight and contributed to the further blurring of reality.
Clarity failed to present itself so I continued to sort through my room. The tapestry, hanging from wood hooks on a steal curtain rod to conceal my closet, rolled in the breeze of the cool and moist outside air swirling through my open window. I watched the red and yellow diamond shapes raise and crash into the fabric like the ocean’s salty waves. My black tennis shoes sat cluttered with my stained brown dress shoes, only slightly reveled due to the tapestry’s failure to reach the floor.
I paused my music when Lindsey called. Our conversation didn’t last long before it became full on sparring. We had hit that point in a relationship of absolute and unyielding frustration with each other. It was clear we both had great things to offer each other, and had been an incredible source of fun in the last two years—but it was also clear we were struggling, both internally and externally, to work through it. The level of success we had, unfortunately, was a bit lacking.
This particular phone call everything we had ever done wrong to each other was relentlessly coming out. The exact source of the fight I can’t remember. I guess it too got lost in the fog that was to come. Whatever we were fighting about, we both wanted to find balance in it and with each other but continued to find ourselves with empty hands. Sometimes life is just too complex.
We weren’t fighting for long when I was interrupted by what I was looking at as another possible frustration: “Mom” flashed on my caller ID. I told Lindsey to hold and clicked over to my mom. She was shrieking and I could hardly understand her. Finally her frantic and shocked words became unmistakable.
The fog ensued, the smoke suffocated, agony insisted, sticks beat, stabs breached skin, bullets pierced, fire deformed and bombs detonated into my ear and shattered every concept of reality I ever attempted to grasp.
“Michael is dead.”
Every word I had ever come across screeched through my head and none of them had any relevance.
“He’s dead,” my mom said again through heavy breathes that I nearly felt through my phone.
I finally found a word that applied, the only one that made any sense…the only one I could come up with.
“What?”
3
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, simulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
-Albert Einstein
“I like nonsense—it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope…and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.”
-Dr. Seuss
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Michael passed away. At 23, his life had ended because of diabetic ketoacidosis (a condition caused from excessive high blood sugars). It had come full circle far too soon. He lived three of his years without me in his life. I, however, lived all 20 of mine looking up to Michael. I’ve never laughed so hard as I did when with him (phrase copyright Robin Bronk, 2008). He was a force in my life. He taught me how use my imagination to cruise through worlds of GI Joes and Bat Caves. I remember one Christmas my brother and I argued to our parents we needed to know what action figures (and all the accessories, of course never included) that hid, wrapped in and concealed tightly by sparkling paper, under the tree so we could plan accordingly for our setups. Santa’s lips were sealed.
Millions of military and badass bases, containing both the good guys and the bad, came to life and fell to crumbles under our watch. We were the Gods of the worlds that we built, destroyed, and rebuilt just to destroy again in our basement. We organized societies that had clear outlined morals backed by a fearless leader—a leader committed to fight anything evil or wrong. We were righteous, just and fair rulers, and all those who were good in our worlds always survived to see the basement lights flicker on another day. Life stopped when we were in the basement and a new world came to existence in accordance with our high-tech, introspective, free flowing, rampant imaginations. I don’t think it would be a fraudulent official comment for me to assert that between Michael and I, we have at least 12 years of “boss of the world experience”…this is arguably more qualified leadership experience than being the mayor for four years of a frosty, northern city with a population of less than 6,000.
Growing up in Colorado my parents highly encouraged skiing. The house I grew up in was an hour and 15 minuets away from the powdery slopes of the Summit County resorts. My brother and I spent our winters sitting on chair lifts and choking on whiffs of powder while ripping lines through the steep and deep of Winter Park and Copper Mountain. Michael defiantly took the lead on skiing, though. He was always into it and it took me a while to catch up to his passion for the sport. He was always in expert ski groups and I always admired his talent. My ambition finally caught up to my guts and I began to follow his yawning tracks. Before I knew it, I was slippin’ down the mountain with style, creating my own tracks next to and, at times, in front of Michaels. I wore out four pairs of skis, broke two fingers, had one concussion, and tour both my ACL’s floating down the slopes of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains with my brother.
The Rockies are beautiful in the winter. Once I was good enough to keep up, Michael showed me a run he called the Power Lines. That day I was formally introduced to one of the hidden gems in what I considered to be my home mountain.
After taking 20 turns in waist deep, soft powder, you can sit and study the forest that has just gifted you the feeling of floating weightless through space. I think this was the place I first noticed nature’s magnitude. I sat and took a bite of fresh snow and let ice cool my throat as I realized I was immersed in a forest of icy silk. Taught, grey power lines framed the boundary of Copper Mountain. Calm, dead, crying of silence it appeared — but beneath, above, and around existed a world of life crawling in the trees and resting in the frozen precipitation. A golden brown squirrel darted from one snow-covered branch to the next with a stream of white dust following behind. As the squirrel landed, the snow escaped from the high branches and plummeted down to the branches resting below. The trees screamed like the crack of a whip as their limbs rip, split, and tour under the pressure and weight of the peaceful snow. Tiny, frightened birds escaped the falling snow as their black, feathered, remarkably sturdy wings pushed under the brisk, biting, wintry air — thrashing around the tightly nestled trees as they searched for a safe place to hide. The intangibly desperate path of the aerobatic bird led it to a graceful escape into the obscure shadows of the forest. The snow finally rested quietly on the ground and the birds and squirrels disappeared into the white world. The snow sparkled like a diamond protecting the wildlife in the frozen tundra.
Concealed by a white blanket the trunks of the elegant conifers cried to show their dark brown, rough, rich bark to the world. The conical silhouette of dark green clusters of prickly, bristly, pointed needles held the icy silk. The tapered tips of the twigs screamed to the hazy winter grey sky. The power lies are likely the best location I’ve been lucky enough to experience. Michael took me there.
4
“A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.”
-Marguerite Yourcenar
“He’s dead,” my mom repeated.
I still was struggling to find any words that applied.
“What?” I said again.
My mom could no longer articulate what had happened and handed the phone to my dad who confirmed the situation. He told me the police were on the way and he had to go. He hung up before I could protest.
I clicked back to Lindsey.
“Michael’s dead,” I said.
She frantically assured me she’d be right over and hung up.
My stomach spiraled around itself and crawled up my throat as I fell to the floor. I finally found the means to scream and cry. Raaja’s passive role subsided and she jumped down to the floor to comfort me. I curled into a ball and tried to grasp what had just happened with little success.
I clenched my fists and finally found the strength in my legs to stand. I wandered outside into the rain searching for solace and clarity in the humid Eugene air. The numbness I was feeling before I found out about my brothers passing blew up. My body didn’t know if it should feel pain or nothing at all.
The emotions behind death are foreign and bewildering. I wasn’t able to successfully grasp onto any of millions of ideas racing through my head. When Lindsey finally arrived, I began to attempt to articulate what loomed in my mind.
Eventually a sense of calm ensued and I was able to find referential points and ideology to cling to. I spent the rest of my night explaining to my friends what had happened. I left Eugene at 6 am to fly back to my parents.
5
“You gotta love livin’ baby, ‘cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.”
- Frank Sinatra
“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats,”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The summer before my brother’s death I got my first tattoo. On the inside of my left bicep I branded myself with a visual representation of my personal philosophy, which presented itself in a fusion of a Yin-Yang and a spiral. I believe this world survives on balance, circularity and parallel movement. This philosophy breaks down into two principal ideas.
First comes balance. The more sadness and horror we have experienced in our lives, the more possibility we have for great joy and happiness. Our spectrum of emotion is widened each time it is extended in either a positive or negative way. If one lives an entire life of neutrality, their balance will be simple, but the gamut of their emotion and experiences would be severely limited.
Second comes circularity and parallel movement. We are able to make sense of new situations by looking back to the way in which we handled situations in the past. Without this function, we would fail to progress mentally and emotionally through life.
Take a date for example. The first date you go on, you are forced to base the way in which you act on your experience thus far with dating. Obviously, the first date you have a supremely narrow scope of experience, but you still base your actions on what you’ve read in books and magazines, seen in movies, heard from your friends, and so on and so fourth. The second time you go on a date, you are in a similar, or parallel, situation, at least in some form, as you were for that first date. However, you have more experience and you have expanded your circle of familiarity. This experience allows you to spiral outward.
I felt justified in getting a tattoo because at the time, as a 19 year old wandering through my collegiate years, I was happy. I considered the concept, both visually and philosophically for almost a year and it finally felt like the right time. Life was eminent, fun and relevant and everyday I awoke with a multitude of reasons to grin. Friends of my parents constantly reminded me that these would be the best years of my life and that eventually the ideology and optimistic idealism that currently makes up my being would eventually become watered down and less applicable as I grew older. This tattoo was my attempt to battle age’s effort to deflate my optimism towards the world. Everyday for the rest of my life when I look at the inside of my arm, I will be forced to remember the time in my life when idealism and happiness survived. I will always be in a position to realize I was at least once youthful and ecstatic to be alive.
When I sat in the chair at the tattoo parlor watching my arm endure an eternal sketch, I had no idea I would be strained to confront and investigate the meaning of it less than six months later. Michael’s death has thrown me into a philosophical world-wind and there is no escape in sight.
I still believe in the foundation of my ink and my foundation in circularity and balance, but I now struggle to find balance no matter how hard I look. I have been told the positive sides of my brother’s death. I’ve been told how much stronger I will become as a result, how much more mature I will become, what a better writer I will become. I’ve been told my relationship with the world would become more intense and interesting. Everything I’ve been told about the positive results of my brother’s death has been completely true.
But that balance is devastated when I try to apply the positivity of the situation to my brother. Where are his rewards? His life was far more of a struggle than any child or young adult deserved. I always thought he would snap out of it and get his life together. I figured he’d meet the right woman or have some wild experience that would allow him to mesh more comfortably with the world around him. I’m confident, had his life not been swept away, that would have occurred.
We held a service for my brother. The number of people that came to support my family and pay tribute to Michael’s life blew me away. His service unequivocally was a reflection of what an amazing person he was. Our childhood physician, Dr. Jerry, was one of the many individuals that chose to speak at his service.
“My name is Jerry Ruben and I was Michael’s pediatrician. My wife was a college roommate with Michael’s mom, Robin…that’s how we met. If you knew me, you’d know this is very very difficult for me to speak in front of people but I love Michael so much that I just got encouraged to come up and to say this:
Michael was one of the more unique patients that I’ve ever dealt with. We had many many long conversations – sometimes Robin would bring him in and we would, just the two of us, sit in the room and talk.
And everything I’ve heard about him today, I thought I was the only one that had ever experienced the fact that he could be simultaneously brilliant and maddening all at one time, but I realize that must be a very universal experience.
I think Michael was very gifted with tremendous life insight at a very young age but he was also challenged by health issues – to struggle deeply to find balance. And he knew that balance was what he needed and he knew for him it was a struggle. I think the thing I admired the most about Michael was that he never stopped struggling to find balance.
He did like to argue, but I think he did it just because he had a certain amount of it in him he just had to get out. And when he got it out, he became very authentic. And if you’ve ever experienced a moment with Michael when he was authentic and balanced, then you could write a letter like your son wrote, because your son knew this kid.
When he was authentic and when he was balanced he was a very remarkable human being and for that he will be missed.”
Those words captured Michael.
Michael has been gone for a year now. For the last 12 months I’ve been trying to make peace with my brother’s death. In many ways, I’ve come to peace with it but I still find myself confused and searching for the balance within this inexplicably horrible situation.
Lindsey really supported me, but I didn’t have the strength to work on our relationship–my energy had all been seized in order to keep my head up. We had too many issues to work out and I just couldn’t do it. It was by no means an easy breakup, but I think we both understood the power of circumstances and we both made it out intact.
Despite it all, though, I still maintain overall positivity.
6
“Let’s have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves. “Now thyself” is more important than “know thyself.” Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.”
-Mel Brooks
“Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.”
-E. E. Cummings
I’ve been mingling and floating through a reality that has drained and stuffed my mind with numbness. My time in Eugene has been a navigation of righteous clarity and explosive, shadowed obscurity. And here I sit with half a smile and jittery eyes a year after the travesty that shook my existence to the bitter, broken and bouncing core; that spun my dreams into a whirlwind of excitement and desperation; that made every ounce of my life exponentially more significant and curious—here I sit a year after my brother died dealing and coping with a reality that came into utter and instant existence during the young and dumb stage of my life.
Now I have no choice but to live for the moment, consider the future, and smile as much as possible when I look to the past. I’m grabbing a hold of everything I can snatch. And it’s working. My smiles remain frequent and my eyes comfortably shut most nights. My friends have become family–they have supported me the entire way through and ensured that I laughed along the way. I’ve once again stumbled into love and it’s been an incredibly fun and awesome journey.
The tattoo on my arm is now accompanied by an inked version of Michael skiing across my chest. Everyday I get to look at it and remember all the stress, love, fun, amusement, frustration, and splendor that was Michael for 23 years.
At times I want to shriek and explode; at times I do. But I’m getting through this.
---
Michael was kind and curious. His world was framed by his stories, the stories he told to any ear willing to listen. A glowing smile from cheek to cheek would support my brother’s stories and statistics. His chronicles of fibbed information, however, scuffed his smiling accounts. But truth or severe misrepresentation, Michael’s charm and sincerely good heart allowed his friends and family to shrug it off and love the guy. This was never a simple, comfortable or easy shrug, and many times it came accompanied with confusion, but most of all misunderstanding. Not that people understood my brother incorrectly, they just didn’t understand him. But isn’t that a token that comes with brilliance and creativity? Truth is an extreme case of relativity anyway, and with Michael, the truth was always relative.
“We’d be fools to not ride this strange torpedo to the end.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
“The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.”
-Mary Catherine Bateson
“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.”
-Umberto Eco
“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
-Ken Kesey
The day was normal. The clouds mingled around a muted blue sky and the squirrels rummaged through the leaves scraping for acorns. I was walking back from class when my mom called. My mom has more love in her than any human I’ve met or could imagine exists. It’s a characteristic that vibrates through her and glows out of her skin. It’s also her greatest hindrance and at times shies her away from reality. But what’s the point of being immersed in reality anyway?
She called to chatter her worries through the earpiece on my phone. It was my brother on her mind again. She was worried—again. My mother is a great mom, so thus she’s a worrier. Apparently my dad and brother had gotten into a fight the night before and my mom was nervous because the conversation ended badly and she had failed in her attempts to get a hold of my brother all day.
I directed virtually no comfort to her unsettled mentality; I was strained by midterms and searching my way through a long relationship that had become difficult. I therefore failed to grant the much-needed attention to my family. I ended the call and hurried onto the insignificant obligations of the day. I was going to school in Oregon and my family was still back home in Colorado. Physical distance often results in emotional distance as well. Me being a stubborn, incisive 20 years old, ready to take any and all on likely contributed to the distance between my family and I.
The fight with my brother and my dad didn’t seem like much of a deal, but my mom clearly was hurt by it. It didn’t make sense at the time. My brother Michael, like my mother, also had a lot love. He didn’t entirely make sense, though. Detectives frequently declare that to solve a crime one must determine the motives of the guilty party. My brother’s offenses never became a legal issue and were overall fairly minor—lies, mild stealing (only from friends and family) and being unbelievably messy—but his motives were indecipherable. His most common offense was his affinity to lie. Michael would come up with the most elaborate lies. They were so grand and fascinating, but borderline unbelievable. And every time you’d just fight to hear them as truth. In fact, most of the time you would believe them and disregard Michael’s past of lies and numb the doubt in his truthfulness to an inaudible tremor.
His lies, aside from being a great story, accomplished little to nothing for my brother. Well, other than risking being called out as a liar, which frequently occurred. He left his friends confused and frustrated and my family straining to figure out his motives, or more importantly a way to help him. As a younger brother to Michael, gullibility was the only word in my dictionary. That being said, he was an amazing brother and if he hadn’t beat my gullibility up and down while I was growing up, I’d still spend my nights trying to snag a piece of the moon for a bite of cheese.
My mom always fought and pained herself to determine why my brother lied. My father also fought, but because he could never understand why my brother acted the way he did, he was never able to be at peace with it. But nobody could ever figure out what was wrong with Michael’s mind. He was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, Bipolarity, and Aspergers (a mild form of autism). No diagnoses ever stuck for my brother, nor were any of said diagnoses ever successfully medicated. Finding a way to medicate my brother’s head was less constructive than Sisyphus pushing a boulder across an infinitely flat countryside.
Defining what was wrong with his body, however, was an easier task. At four years old he had began his fight with juvenile onset, type-one diabetes. This is not to be confused with the Diabetes your grandpa gets when he turns 73.
Diabetes is a tricky disease; I was lucky enough to hold it off for 12 years, eight years more of health than my brother was given the chance at. See, diabetes is treatable, but it’s by no means an exact science to treat. It’s a lot of work, with persistent trial and error, to manage the disease. When you mess up, the result is poor health or in some circumstances cold death. Michael had the task of handling diabetes, all the while exploring life with a mind that lacked congruency with the day-to-day operations of modern society. That was his battle.
As for the battle he had encountered with my dad the night prior, well, that started because his cable television was shut off. The exact details of the situation never made it through the deep fog that was about to take over my life. All I can remember is for one reason or another my parents were battling my brother over financial stuff (finance: an incredibly insolent entity; a byproduct of human nature) and had turned off his cable. My brother was a dedicated Denver sports fan and the Colorado Rockies were in the World Series. When he went to turn the game on, he realized the cable was no more. He called my parents and the fight thus ensued.
I admire and respect my parents for more reasons than I can even attempt to articulate. My dad started his own business and built it to be a successful company. He did this while maintaining the fairness and fun that make my dad who he is with his co-workers, employees and customers as well as his friends and family. If my mom develops a passion for anything, it drives her and she will become more educated and articulate about the matter than the ‘experts’ that lead the subject’s field.
They also raised me. I am living a happy life—which means they succeeded, through and through.
But more so than anything else, they poured themselves into trying to help my brother. Attempting to decode parental instincts, my parents tried anything and everything to figure Michael out. Sometimes life is just too complex. When complexity overwhelms, frustration ensues. The combination of frustration and uncompromising love yield implausible power. When that power doesn’t achieve results, frustration is all that’s left.
My dad decided to stand up to Michael that battle. My dad didn’t get caught in the web of deals Michael always created immediately when my parents tried to punish him. My dad hung up the phone without an agreement or plan of action.
2
“If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one–
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.”
-Bhagavad Gita
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
-Yogi Berra
At a quarter past five the wind brought in a darker breed of clouds ready to burst out the day’s gathered humidity. But it’s Eugene and without the rain and the clouds, we wouldn’t have the brilliant green. Eugene is cluttered with trees that create a green canopy wherever you go. It’s a town that frequently allows one step to be in a parking lot and the next in a forest. The lushness survives because of the valley’s dedication to constant moisture, especially in the winter. Located in the southern portion of the Willamette Valley, Eugene swims in an annual 50 inches of rain. It’s no wonder why we call it Green Eugene. And that’s the balance of it; the balance of this place, at least.
The day’s obligations had finally stopped lingering over my shoulder and I was able to decompress. After puttering through papers and playing with my dog Raaja, I sat down and watched out my window as the rain crawled through the night and created a prickly reflection in the black paved roads in front of my house. Everything seemed to move slowly and my emotions experienced an impressive shift, leaving things off center. Comfort felt like it was an imaginary idea created by men living in the clouds. My head felt all at once everyday in my life I had ever experienced numbness and it seemed to compact and linger. I felt motionless and heavy, ostensibly without cause.
Raaja laid still on my bed, her eyes locked on me trying to figure out what I was thinking. Her lanky body stretched across my bed. She was quite an interesting mutt: part Lab, part Pit Bull, part German Sheppard and to top it off, a bit of Rottweiler lived in her veins. For all the beastliness in her blood, she couldn’t have been a sweeter dog.
Dark stripes crawled through her soft brindle fur and her long nose sparkled with moisture. Dogs have the ability to feel and appropriately adapt to the vibes in a room, always with exceptional accuracy. Raaja could tell something was the matter, but she decided to play the supportive, quite co-pilot role. Her eyebrows pinched together and her eyes remained fixed on me making it clear she was there to give me love if I needed it. If not, she would just patiently wait on the bed, shedding light brown hairs all across my blue comforter and torn up pillowcases.
I’m fairly certain she was proud of the disaster she had made of my pillowcases. I had come home one day to find my room littered with feathers. As soon as I opened my door to find my cluttered room to be littered with white feathers, Raaja darted around my rolling office chair to hide under my dark oak desk. She refused to look at me until I told her we could still be friends. How can you not be friends with a dog sweetly curled in a space far too small for her—hiding, tail shaking, covering her ashamed face? Obviously Raaja and I had maintained our relationship through the pillow catastrophe, but my pillows were never the same again. I still find feathers in my room from time to time.
Despite the feathers, I had to love the girl. She wasn’t the type of dog to demand attention from those she didn’t know. Cute dogs provide the incredible service of attracting any female in a 50-foot radius to you; but there are some girls I’d just rather stay away from. I don’t have a specific type of girl I go for, per-say, but I do like a girl that doesn’t get lost in simple conversation. I suppose I do prefer a girl that can eagerly explore multifaceted conversations with me. Raaja had embedded deep within her a fear of the types of girls lacking in conversational skill, whom, for intensive purposes, will be referred to as a beezie (Beezie: an elevator that fails to reach the top floor). Raaja’s anxiety around beezies was no mystery. It turns out when you run at an animal that is unfamiliar with you, with waving arms and a disturbingly high pitched scream to most effectively communicate exactly how cute that dog is, the animal will fear you. Raaja feared beezies.
That night Raaja helped to provide comfort but my head was still heavy. I felt hesitant and shaky. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure it out. It was like I was looking around all the dark corners and under all the dusty rugs to discover the source of my stubborn and sobering mindset. I was almost a third through my junior year in college and things were starting to hit a severe plateau. The insanity of my freshman and sophomore year seemed to have leveled out and life was starting to ask me questions about the future and now’s contribution to it.
I was asking questions too. I wanted to know why classes had become dull. I wanted to understand where my drive and ability to fluidly move forward had gone. I really wanted to fix things with Lindsey, the girl I had loved for the last two years. A solution of any kind was so far away from coming into focus though.
I turned on some folk infused blues music and let my eyes dance around my room. I thought maybe focus could present itself through my green walls, cluttered with ski posters and drawings. My idols and my inked hand made up the general theme of my colorful personal space. A Colorado flag hung above my head, tacked to the ceiling to remind me of my real home. The incandescent light, glowing in the middle of my room, put spots in my sight and contributed to the further blurring of reality.
Clarity failed to present itself so I continued to sort through my room. The tapestry, hanging from wood hooks on a steal curtain rod to conceal my closet, rolled in the breeze of the cool and moist outside air swirling through my open window. I watched the red and yellow diamond shapes raise and crash into the fabric like the ocean’s salty waves. My black tennis shoes sat cluttered with my stained brown dress shoes, only slightly reveled due to the tapestry’s failure to reach the floor.
I paused my music when Lindsey called. Our conversation didn’t last long before it became full on sparring. We had hit that point in a relationship of absolute and unyielding frustration with each other. It was clear we both had great things to offer each other, and had been an incredible source of fun in the last two years—but it was also clear we were struggling, both internally and externally, to work through it. The level of success we had, unfortunately, was a bit lacking.
This particular phone call everything we had ever done wrong to each other was relentlessly coming out. The exact source of the fight I can’t remember. I guess it too got lost in the fog that was to come. Whatever we were fighting about, we both wanted to find balance in it and with each other but continued to find ourselves with empty hands. Sometimes life is just too complex.
We weren’t fighting for long when I was interrupted by what I was looking at as another possible frustration: “Mom” flashed on my caller ID. I told Lindsey to hold and clicked over to my mom. She was shrieking and I could hardly understand her. Finally her frantic and shocked words became unmistakable.
The fog ensued, the smoke suffocated, agony insisted, sticks beat, stabs breached skin, bullets pierced, fire deformed and bombs detonated into my ear and shattered every concept of reality I ever attempted to grasp.
“Michael is dead.”
Every word I had ever come across screeched through my head and none of them had any relevance.
“He’s dead,” my mom said again through heavy breathes that I nearly felt through my phone.
I finally found a word that applied, the only one that made any sense…the only one I could come up with.
“What?”
3
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, simulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
-Albert Einstein
“I like nonsense—it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope…and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.”
-Dr. Seuss
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Michael passed away. At 23, his life had ended because of diabetic ketoacidosis (a condition caused from excessive high blood sugars). It had come full circle far too soon. He lived three of his years without me in his life. I, however, lived all 20 of mine looking up to Michael. I’ve never laughed so hard as I did when with him (phrase copyright Robin Bronk, 2008). He was a force in my life. He taught me how use my imagination to cruise through worlds of GI Joes and Bat Caves. I remember one Christmas my brother and I argued to our parents we needed to know what action figures (and all the accessories, of course never included) that hid, wrapped in and concealed tightly by sparkling paper, under the tree so we could plan accordingly for our setups. Santa’s lips were sealed.
Millions of military and badass bases, containing both the good guys and the bad, came to life and fell to crumbles under our watch. We were the Gods of the worlds that we built, destroyed, and rebuilt just to destroy again in our basement. We organized societies that had clear outlined morals backed by a fearless leader—a leader committed to fight anything evil or wrong. We were righteous, just and fair rulers, and all those who were good in our worlds always survived to see the basement lights flicker on another day. Life stopped when we were in the basement and a new world came to existence in accordance with our high-tech, introspective, free flowing, rampant imaginations. I don’t think it would be a fraudulent official comment for me to assert that between Michael and I, we have at least 12 years of “boss of the world experience”…this is arguably more qualified leadership experience than being the mayor for four years of a frosty, northern city with a population of less than 6,000.
Growing up in Colorado my parents highly encouraged skiing. The house I grew up in was an hour and 15 minuets away from the powdery slopes of the Summit County resorts. My brother and I spent our winters sitting on chair lifts and choking on whiffs of powder while ripping lines through the steep and deep of Winter Park and Copper Mountain. Michael defiantly took the lead on skiing, though. He was always into it and it took me a while to catch up to his passion for the sport. He was always in expert ski groups and I always admired his talent. My ambition finally caught up to my guts and I began to follow his yawning tracks. Before I knew it, I was slippin’ down the mountain with style, creating my own tracks next to and, at times, in front of Michaels. I wore out four pairs of skis, broke two fingers, had one concussion, and tour both my ACL’s floating down the slopes of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains with my brother.
The Rockies are beautiful in the winter. Once I was good enough to keep up, Michael showed me a run he called the Power Lines. That day I was formally introduced to one of the hidden gems in what I considered to be my home mountain.
After taking 20 turns in waist deep, soft powder, you can sit and study the forest that has just gifted you the feeling of floating weightless through space. I think this was the place I first noticed nature’s magnitude. I sat and took a bite of fresh snow and let ice cool my throat as I realized I was immersed in a forest of icy silk. Taught, grey power lines framed the boundary of Copper Mountain. Calm, dead, crying of silence it appeared — but beneath, above, and around existed a world of life crawling in the trees and resting in the frozen precipitation. A golden brown squirrel darted from one snow-covered branch to the next with a stream of white dust following behind. As the squirrel landed, the snow escaped from the high branches and plummeted down to the branches resting below. The trees screamed like the crack of a whip as their limbs rip, split, and tour under the pressure and weight of the peaceful snow. Tiny, frightened birds escaped the falling snow as their black, feathered, remarkably sturdy wings pushed under the brisk, biting, wintry air — thrashing around the tightly nestled trees as they searched for a safe place to hide. The intangibly desperate path of the aerobatic bird led it to a graceful escape into the obscure shadows of the forest. The snow finally rested quietly on the ground and the birds and squirrels disappeared into the white world. The snow sparkled like a diamond protecting the wildlife in the frozen tundra.
Concealed by a white blanket the trunks of the elegant conifers cried to show their dark brown, rough, rich bark to the world. The conical silhouette of dark green clusters of prickly, bristly, pointed needles held the icy silk. The tapered tips of the twigs screamed to the hazy winter grey sky. The power lies are likely the best location I’ve been lucky enough to experience. Michael took me there.
4
“A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.”
-Marguerite Yourcenar
“He’s dead,” my mom repeated.
I still was struggling to find any words that applied.
“What?” I said again.
My mom could no longer articulate what had happened and handed the phone to my dad who confirmed the situation. He told me the police were on the way and he had to go. He hung up before I could protest.
I clicked back to Lindsey.
“Michael’s dead,” I said.
She frantically assured me she’d be right over and hung up.
My stomach spiraled around itself and crawled up my throat as I fell to the floor. I finally found the means to scream and cry. Raaja’s passive role subsided and she jumped down to the floor to comfort me. I curled into a ball and tried to grasp what had just happened with little success.
I clenched my fists and finally found the strength in my legs to stand. I wandered outside into the rain searching for solace and clarity in the humid Eugene air. The numbness I was feeling before I found out about my brothers passing blew up. My body didn’t know if it should feel pain or nothing at all.
The emotions behind death are foreign and bewildering. I wasn’t able to successfully grasp onto any of millions of ideas racing through my head. When Lindsey finally arrived, I began to attempt to articulate what loomed in my mind.
Eventually a sense of calm ensued and I was able to find referential points and ideology to cling to. I spent the rest of my night explaining to my friends what had happened. I left Eugene at 6 am to fly back to my parents.
5
“You gotta love livin’ baby, ‘cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.”
- Frank Sinatra
“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats,”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The summer before my brother’s death I got my first tattoo. On the inside of my left bicep I branded myself with a visual representation of my personal philosophy, which presented itself in a fusion of a Yin-Yang and a spiral. I believe this world survives on balance, circularity and parallel movement. This philosophy breaks down into two principal ideas.
First comes balance. The more sadness and horror we have experienced in our lives, the more possibility we have for great joy and happiness. Our spectrum of emotion is widened each time it is extended in either a positive or negative way. If one lives an entire life of neutrality, their balance will be simple, but the gamut of their emotion and experiences would be severely limited.
Second comes circularity and parallel movement. We are able to make sense of new situations by looking back to the way in which we handled situations in the past. Without this function, we would fail to progress mentally and emotionally through life.
Take a date for example. The first date you go on, you are forced to base the way in which you act on your experience thus far with dating. Obviously, the first date you have a supremely narrow scope of experience, but you still base your actions on what you’ve read in books and magazines, seen in movies, heard from your friends, and so on and so fourth. The second time you go on a date, you are in a similar, or parallel, situation, at least in some form, as you were for that first date. However, you have more experience and you have expanded your circle of familiarity. This experience allows you to spiral outward.
I felt justified in getting a tattoo because at the time, as a 19 year old wandering through my collegiate years, I was happy. I considered the concept, both visually and philosophically for almost a year and it finally felt like the right time. Life was eminent, fun and relevant and everyday I awoke with a multitude of reasons to grin. Friends of my parents constantly reminded me that these would be the best years of my life and that eventually the ideology and optimistic idealism that currently makes up my being would eventually become watered down and less applicable as I grew older. This tattoo was my attempt to battle age’s effort to deflate my optimism towards the world. Everyday for the rest of my life when I look at the inside of my arm, I will be forced to remember the time in my life when idealism and happiness survived. I will always be in a position to realize I was at least once youthful and ecstatic to be alive.
When I sat in the chair at the tattoo parlor watching my arm endure an eternal sketch, I had no idea I would be strained to confront and investigate the meaning of it less than six months later. Michael’s death has thrown me into a philosophical world-wind and there is no escape in sight.
I still believe in the foundation of my ink and my foundation in circularity and balance, but I now struggle to find balance no matter how hard I look. I have been told the positive sides of my brother’s death. I’ve been told how much stronger I will become as a result, how much more mature I will become, what a better writer I will become. I’ve been told my relationship with the world would become more intense and interesting. Everything I’ve been told about the positive results of my brother’s death has been completely true.
But that balance is devastated when I try to apply the positivity of the situation to my brother. Where are his rewards? His life was far more of a struggle than any child or young adult deserved. I always thought he would snap out of it and get his life together. I figured he’d meet the right woman or have some wild experience that would allow him to mesh more comfortably with the world around him. I’m confident, had his life not been swept away, that would have occurred.
We held a service for my brother. The number of people that came to support my family and pay tribute to Michael’s life blew me away. His service unequivocally was a reflection of what an amazing person he was. Our childhood physician, Dr. Jerry, was one of the many individuals that chose to speak at his service.
“My name is Jerry Ruben and I was Michael’s pediatrician. My wife was a college roommate with Michael’s mom, Robin…that’s how we met. If you knew me, you’d know this is very very difficult for me to speak in front of people but I love Michael so much that I just got encouraged to come up and to say this:
Michael was one of the more unique patients that I’ve ever dealt with. We had many many long conversations – sometimes Robin would bring him in and we would, just the two of us, sit in the room and talk.
And everything I’ve heard about him today, I thought I was the only one that had ever experienced the fact that he could be simultaneously brilliant and maddening all at one time, but I realize that must be a very universal experience.
I think Michael was very gifted with tremendous life insight at a very young age but he was also challenged by health issues – to struggle deeply to find balance. And he knew that balance was what he needed and he knew for him it was a struggle. I think the thing I admired the most about Michael was that he never stopped struggling to find balance.
He did like to argue, but I think he did it just because he had a certain amount of it in him he just had to get out. And when he got it out, he became very authentic. And if you’ve ever experienced a moment with Michael when he was authentic and balanced, then you could write a letter like your son wrote, because your son knew this kid.
When he was authentic and when he was balanced he was a very remarkable human being and for that he will be missed.”
Those words captured Michael.
Michael has been gone for a year now. For the last 12 months I’ve been trying to make peace with my brother’s death. In many ways, I’ve come to peace with it but I still find myself confused and searching for the balance within this inexplicably horrible situation.
Lindsey really supported me, but I didn’t have the strength to work on our relationship–my energy had all been seized in order to keep my head up. We had too many issues to work out and I just couldn’t do it. It was by no means an easy breakup, but I think we both understood the power of circumstances and we both made it out intact.
Despite it all, though, I still maintain overall positivity.
6
“Let’s have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves. “Now thyself” is more important than “know thyself.” Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.”
-Mel Brooks
“Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.”
-E. E. Cummings
I’ve been mingling and floating through a reality that has drained and stuffed my mind with numbness. My time in Eugene has been a navigation of righteous clarity and explosive, shadowed obscurity. And here I sit with half a smile and jittery eyes a year after the travesty that shook my existence to the bitter, broken and bouncing core; that spun my dreams into a whirlwind of excitement and desperation; that made every ounce of my life exponentially more significant and curious—here I sit a year after my brother died dealing and coping with a reality that came into utter and instant existence during the young and dumb stage of my life.
Now I have no choice but to live for the moment, consider the future, and smile as much as possible when I look to the past. I’m grabbing a hold of everything I can snatch. And it’s working. My smiles remain frequent and my eyes comfortably shut most nights. My friends have become family–they have supported me the entire way through and ensured that I laughed along the way. I’ve once again stumbled into love and it’s been an incredibly fun and awesome journey.
The tattoo on my arm is now accompanied by an inked version of Michael skiing across my chest. Everyday I get to look at it and remember all the stress, love, fun, amusement, frustration, and splendor that was Michael for 23 years.
At times I want to shriek and explode; at times I do. But I’m getting through this.
---
Michael was kind and curious. His world was framed by his stories, the stories he told to any ear willing to listen. A glowing smile from cheek to cheek would support my brother’s stories and statistics. His chronicles of fibbed information, however, scuffed his smiling accounts. But truth or severe misrepresentation, Michael’s charm and sincerely good heart allowed his friends and family to shrug it off and love the guy. This was never a simple, comfortable or easy shrug, and many times it came accompanied with confusion, but most of all misunderstanding. Not that people understood my brother incorrectly, they just didn’t understand him. But isn’t that a token that comes with brilliance and creativity? Truth is an extreme case of relativity anyway, and with Michael, the truth was always relative.
“We’d be fools to not ride this strange torpedo to the end.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
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