“I’d like to close an account,” I responded to the greeter at a downtown DC retail location of a massive national bank on a rainy Wednesday in June. She smiled and asked my name.
“It’s not in my name, it’s the Estate of Christian Brady Smith, my brother. He died.”
I’d read about micro-expressions, and in the half-beat after I finished speaking I thought I saw a flash of one on the greeter’s face, a moment of brow-furrowing and lips turned downward before she offered a sad smile and her apologies for my loss.
This mundane task, closing a bank account containing a rather small amount of cash, writ large in the year of my life that began the previous summer.
On or about July 22, 2017, my older brother Christian died. I say “on or about” because we do not know when Chris actually died, and we never will. We only know the day and time that my parents found his body, and that he had been deceased for some period of time - a day, maybe a few days.
I know the specific time my mother called me that day to tell me, while she was still in Chris’s home with Chris’s body, and I know the short time I spent sitting on the floor of my bedroom afterward, contemplating the fleeting quiet space between knowing my brother was dead and navigating the fraught emotional landscape now immediately ahead.
Even the specific cause of death - officially nitrous oxide toxicity - is unsatisfyingly incomplete. It’s probable, given that he was surrounded by emptied containers of nitrous, but mostly a ruling by elimination. And it only hints at Chris’s story, involving decades of losing battles and then ultimately the war on mental illness and addiction.
On July 25th, my surviving brother Terry, my parents and I sat in what had once been Chris’s room in my parents’ St. Louis home, reviewing yet again the long list of to-dos when a person dies abruptly at 38 without a will, without a spouse or children, and without anything organized. We agreed I would be executor of Chris’s estate.
I thought it an opportunity to help my parents and to atone for having dismantled my relationship with Chris long before, and it synced well with my lifelong, grueling campaign to be needed and to have control. Losing Chris was an inflection point in my life, and ending this campaign of mine was my rite of passage.
In the week between Chris’s death and funeral, I seized as much control as I could - first researching and hiring a company to clean out Chris’s home, then maintaining constant control over that to-do list, identifying and arranging the purchase of a family-approved burial plot, spearheading the efforts to find a casket made by an Iowa abbey, joining my mom in meetings with the funeral director and the priest, selecting readings and writing intentions for the funeral, writing Chris’s obituary and arranging for it to be published, writing Chris’s eulogy and delivering it with my brother Terry, hiring an estate attorney and managing communications with family and friends, including calling Hillary, Chris’s girlfriend in high school, college and off and on during their 20s, a woman I had loved like a sister through the years they dated, and telling her he was dead.
Doing all of this both fed my need to be needed, and, I thought, allowed me to postpone my own emotions. In the weeks following the funeral I traveled to Houston to help my parents pack up their recently-sold home there, and again I fought off emotions with tasks - the many trips to the Goodwill donation center, attempts to rally my parents’ spirits (whether they were in need of my pep talks or not), and packing up the childhood things of mine there, including numerous journals that I made the mistake of reading, in which I had often vented about how disappointed and angry Chris made me feel.
When I returned to DC from Houston, I hit my own emotional wall. I worked almost entirely from home for ten days and saw no one except the persons delivering food and liquor. I slept erratically and in my walk-in closet, finding my own bedroom both too quiet since I lived alone yet to noisy from my own thoughts. I thought that was I was managing well, but as I checked off the tasks as executor over the ensuing fall, winter and spring, I repeatedly confronted my own inability to meet needs and retain control, as well as my struggle to admit my own emotional needs.
The dismantling of a life’s possessions isn’t easy on many levels, but the sheer logistics of doing so and doing it long-distance challenged my ability to retain control and my unwillingness to ask for help. It felt as though I met roadblocks at every turn, and as I did I would often retreat afterwards to my isolation at home, where I could hide and fall apart without losing control or being a vacuum of need, or so I told myself. Now I know that my family and closest friends knew what I was doing and were trying to intervene.
Selling Chris’s condo, in dire need of renovation, was an early and convoluted step, involving one contract that fell apart at the last minute causing us to relist just before the holiday season began, and ending with me barely able to sign my name on the closing documents in January due to a combination of stress, sadness, respiratory illness, and a hangover. I remain thankful for the calm kindness of our agent, Jim, who responded compassionately and clearly to my erratic and emotionally-unpredictable emails, texts, and calls. I was learning that I actually wanted nothing to do with this job of closing up shop on Chris’s life, yet I wanted it done. Jim bore the initial brunt of that realization.
Chris’s car became my albatross. It had last moved when returned to its space, adjacent to my parents’ car, following Chris’s arrest for driving while intoxicated the year before his death. It still bore the marks from that incident, in which Chris had side-swiped a police car legally parked on a street in the middle of the day. The car would not start, and we had neither a key for it nor its title.
I loathed seeing it when visiting my parents, and I dreaded cleaning it out, worried it would be my own mise-en-scene of Chris’s life, with a half-drunk can of Coke, leftover cigarettes, scraps of paper and such. In one act of humility, I asked my father and brother to clean it out, and they did so. We have never discussed what if anything was inside.
Another key was made by a kind man at a Chevrolet dealership who, after listening to my story, charged me $30 rather than ten times that, as was the stated rate. The car was taken by a family friend who repaired it, sold it, and gave the proceeds to charity. He managed to get it started and out of the garage while his girlfriend, an old friend of mine, sat upstairs telling my mother what a horrible person she thinks I am. All of it - the help from my dad and brother, the charity of the dealership, the kindness of our family friend, the vitriol of my former friend - embarrassed me, Humiliated me.
This came as the result of not a failure to be needed, but a failure to expose my own needs. I had spent many years in many friendships trying desperately to be of help, thinking that my only worth was in my ability and willingness to be supportive and give something - whether that was emotional support, time, a place to stay, parties, or anything else.
What I learned after Chris’s death was that when I failed to provide this to friends who had come to expect me to be mostly give without take, my worst and most deeply-seeded fears were realized. Friends since my teenage years largely evaporated on me, and in one particularly humiliating incident I lashed out at some of my oldest friends after our group text had devolved into a litany of messages about how gorgeous each person’s Christmas card was and how incredibly wonderful it is that everyone has these spouses and children. Except, I don’t. Also, this exchange came the day after I had received my brother’s autopsy and about a week before Christmas, which would be the anniversary of the last time I saw him. In a drunken rage I sent some nasty, hateful responses and was met with silence at first, then separate messages from each woman detailing how awful I am and their termination of their multi-decade friendships with me. So be it.
What deserves far more attention than the dark pain of that, though, is the brilliance of other friendships, of those who came to my aid without needing to be asked and who helped me when I had nearly nothing to offer in return. My friends Matt, Nicole and Jackie became my emotional and logistical central command, arranging a car from the airport and sending catered food to feed my extended family the night before Chris’s funeral, while fielding incessant texts from me with patience and grace. My friend Julie flew from DC to be there with me, and my friend Jenna drove from Nashville - both without being asked. My friend Nick, a Marine, arrived from Chicago and agreed without hesitation to be a pallbearer. My friend Annie’s presence calmed me most; we have been friends since first grade, so she knows my family and all of Chris’s struggles. And so many more who kept up with me especially in the long months following his funeral, when life as normal began to nag me again. I learned from these friends how to humbly express my needs, the immense gratefulness of having needs met without having to speak them, and how to relax my vice-grip on control of myself.
Chris’s autopsy answered nearly none my questions, and the few it did bore new questions in their wake. There was no alcohol present - was he sober because he was trying to stop, or because his wrecked body could no longer tolerate even what it craved? The lack of specificity offered no closure; it did nothing to reduce the macabre palette of my depressed imagination. When did he die? How did he die? Did he know he his death was arriving, or was he high enough to be unaware, and was one of these options better than the other? In the darkest months of the year I spent many nights laboriously analyzing these questions, having nightmares about their possible answers, and slowly learning to live with their lack of answers.
In the spring following Chris’s death, as the tasks of my executorship waned and I began to think about the future at least as often as the past, I decided to take a leave of absence from work to exercise self-care. This clear sign that I needed to help myself was not something I had ever done before, and I both hated and loved doing it. I spent the time doing deep work on myself and thoroughly examining my emotions and relationships, and by late spring I felt at peace with the lack of control I had over Chris, over his death, and over my own mourning of him and of our relationship.
A favorite word of mine is “instauration,” meaning “restoration after decay, lapse or dilapidation.” I like the definition, shape and sound of it. It comes from the Latin verb instaurare, “to renew or restore.” As I’ve finally closed Chris’s estate and accepted the evolving nature of my feelings about Chris and our siblinghood, I have a sense of instauration. I am working on restoring myself.
When I arrived home on that wet summer day, - having taken the cashier’s check for the remainder of Chris’s net worth, marched it across the busy street to my own bank, and deposited it - I went into my bedroom and sat quietly on the floor, in the same spot I sat after my mother’s call exactly eleven months prior. The pain is not gone, the torturous gymnastics of accepting what little I know of what happened and wondering what might have been continue, but with them there is a little bit of closure and a moment of quiet. For once, all that’s needed has been done.
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