The stressor of incarceration proliferates to have reverberating mental health consequences for those connected to the incarcerated, via pathways such as destabilized family economic wellbeing or impaired relationships between family members. — Turney, 2014
My little brother is gone.
What remains unseen are the seeable things that we missed, whatever those things were.
In my dreams since his evanescing, a warped subsistence, somehow ensuring his survival in this world, lures my brother into the catacombs of Cask of Amontillado where, like Fortunato, a tempting amontillado blinds his logic.
Unlike my Uncle Francis, LB wasn’t found on a New Jersey beach with two bullets in his head and a death certificate claiming he had committed suicide.
Nor did he end up like my great uncle Bart, who walked into a Virginia lake one stark spring day, never to be found.
My brother wasn’t murdered, nor did he die from an illness.
He disappeared two years ago when helicopters hovered over his suburban neighborhood and the FBI and state police surrounded his house on a frigid January morning.
He disappeared when they handcuffed him and put him into the squad car, then meandered out of his neighborhood in an orderly line while helicopters buzzed over the trees and faded into the new dawn.
Then it was as though nothing had happened. His neighbors went back to sleep, and the kids went to school in the morning.
A few weeks later, I found his mugshot on the prison website, inmate number A434985-L. He glared at the camera, his sunken eyes terrified yet forlorn, like he’d given in, surrendered. Any sureness in his appearance was a bemused leer, a confidence butchered in the pre-dawn arrest.
His weary face and mussed hair said it all — I’m glad it’s over because I knew you were coming for me. And he did, because the FBI had been watching him for a while.
Examining the past, I realized he knew his time was up. Just months before his arrest, he organized a large family dinner and had cookouts at his house, making certain all of us were there.
There were odd moments of silence when I spoke with him, in what I realized later was a profound shame wrapped around his identity like a garbage bag duct taped over his head.
Like many smart humans, he didn’t plan his exploitations well. He lit up his digital life as though no one would ever discover his footprints, as though once he pressed delete or invested in drive-wiping software, it would be gone forever.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness painsMy sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains — John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
My brother led most of his life on a misguided trajectory, hiding a secret life behind a loving wife, kids, grandchildren, and career.
Looking back in the vast family vault of our childhood, every small crime he attempted backfired.
He nearly blew his eye out of his skull with fireworks in our basement. He restarted a previously anonymous high school newspaper, and the school punished him for openly signing his name after articles.
He crashed my parent’s cars, flipping a flatbed truck in a ditch — and in another vehicle nearly killing a young flutist, crushing her teeth and jaw, ending her future career as a concert musician. In that accident, he ran a red light on a dark parkway, then blamed the other driver as though it couldn’t have possibly been him.
In college, they suspended him for selling stolen used textbooks to students.
I spent hours watching old 8 mm family videos after his arrest, trying to understand, looking for a reprieve from my anger and bitterness, trying to find a clue, a tell that explained what happened to my little brother, what made him do what he did.
In the grainy, now painful scenes, the three of us brothers ramble out of our upstate New York childhood home garage on our bikes, with LB lingering behind, staggering to mount his bike, then nearly falling as he catches it.
The three of us taking turns on our tire swing, LB struggling to climb so that he can ride the tire from the tree. My older brother and I stood underneath him, pushing him up into the willow tree.
Watching the scene again, spring azaleas and daffodil and freshly cut grass bathed my senses, and I felt the texture of the tree bark as though I were there again.
There were other scenes. Later, as a teenager, LB attempting to ski on our family trip to Colorado, his husky body tumbling in the snow, a ski disembodied along with a ski pole as we swooshed by him, spraying sugared snow over his crumpled form.
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. ― James Joyce, Ulysses
And still more movie evidence revealed other quirks. He was clumsy — and neurologically, was something amiss? His noticeable flat affect, his eyes always vacant and far away, his movements full of oddities as he tried to do normal things like holding a pencil, catching a ball, or tying his shoes.
In other videos, he is a toddler with the same sloth-like movements and far away stare. The most obvious feature is his lack of animation common for a toddler.
My brother and I laugh and bolt around the floor while LB merely sits and stares at the camera, or walks on all fours like a dog, with an occasional smile whispering across his quiet face.
Those old videos show a loving, idyllic childhood for three brothers who were nearly inseparable. We spent summer days in our backyard pool and Sundays getting custard after dinner.
In the winters, we tobogganed, spending entire days in our snowsuits, only ceasing for a hot chocolate my mother made.
I realize these musings are a convenience, a way for me to process my pain, that all of my observations of his behavior are a comfort, a way to create a reason he did what he did, a reason for me to comprehend his choices and conjure a place in this indelible void in my life.
Yet, LB was smart, at the top of his class in high school, taking theatre classes, a spot on the debate team — but he took no part in coordinated activities like sports.
My family had nicknamed LB Uncle Buck. He excelled at bullshitting, at being the life of a party, as though his survival in life depended on it. He reminded all of us of actor John Candy — he had that persona, especially when drinking, which he later gave up in his fifties when the doctor insisted he stop or else.
In all of this, the incarceration of a family member is brutal. I’ve sought therapy, read books, and researched until I was numb. I’ve written ten drafts of this piece in the last two years, and that is perhaps the therapy that has helped me most. Writing.
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
My family has become estranged. When we talk or see each other, we no longer discuss LB. We don’t know the status of his trial, the length of his incarceration, or have any discussion of what he will do if he ever returns to a private life. We don’t know what to talk about.
In my grief — a grief that is undefinable and a torrent, like a raging swarm of hornets — I try to calm my soul by connecting with what he left behind.
While I see his wife for dinner and we talk frequently, his kids remain aloof, circulating in a wave of gut smacking pain. His oldest son visits him in prison, while the youngest one severed all communication with his father — he just married in a wedding devoid of a dad.
I miss my little brother. I miss what I thought he was. I miss the parts of him that made others laugh, the parts of a loving dad, of a human that tried but failed miserably because he is ill.
I texted him for a while and sent him books and tried to offer advice. Yet, the more I learned from his wife and ex-wife and even his children — how incredibly manipulative he was — the more anger rose within me.
I no longer knew what to say to him or how I could help him. We have not spoken in over a year. The last thing I told him was that I would always be there for his kids and his wife.
My brother needs help, and what pains me most is that he will never get that help in prison. They only punish what they cannot explain.
Some nights my sleep is jagged. His wife used to tell me things, that a shanked inmate died in front of him, that he only sees an hour of sunlight a week, that he fears that the other inmates will discover his crimes.
And that is a truth. They will discover his past like we did, yet unlike his family, who try to forgive, retribution will be swift.
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