by Ron Powers
Friday was garbage-pickup day in Middlebury. I awoke not long after dawn, as usual, to haul the bloated black vinyl bags from the kitchen down the basement stairs and through the garage to the driveway, where they would await the noisy trash-compacting white truck.
It was on my second trip down the stairs, just before I turned left to enter the garage, that I grew aware of a presence off to my right in the basement gloom, and I turned.
There was Kevin, his head bowed, a familiar posture. A dusty little window just under the ceiling, on his far side, allowed some weak morning light to play on his hair, not enough to fire up the gold. For just a fraction of a second I thought I had found him getting some early-morning practice in. Then I realized that he had not moved, and no sound came from his guitar.
20
Insanity and Icarus
We decided that he would be cremated.
He had been his old winsome self on the day of the night that he fastened one end of a short rope to a pipe beneath the basement ceiling and the other around his neck, the final task of his gifted fingers, and dropped from a kitchen chair. He’d taken an amiable ride with one of his Middlebury counselors that afternoon, talking casually about his future. Later in the afternoon, as I was signing papers for some money transaction, he had strolled over and cracked a joke, a pun. He was good at puns, though he rarely made them.
Honoree recalled much later that he had started to say something to her, something serious, that same late afternoon, but he had broken off.
I recall stumbling up the basement stairs after I’d glimpsed him, and then up the stairs to our second-floor bedroom, bellowing Honoree awake. I recall her leaping from bed and standing beside it with her fists clenched, crying out. I recall dialing the goddamn 911. And then returning to those basement stairs to sit and wait for the police and EMT crew, Honoree beside me. I recall how thirsty I was, parched, my throat a mass of cotton. I recall not being able to turn fully to the right to look at the figure I had glimpsed. I recall that my brave wife moved to him and touched him.
It seemed like it took hours upon hours for the EMT crew to arrive and cut Kevin down and place his body on a stretcher. I recall recognizing one of the crew as the host at a restaurant on the edge of town where we had eaten family meals together since the boys were young. Playing connect-the-dots on the children’s menu and dabbing up Kevin’s spilled orange juice. I recall realizing, when the crew transported his body to the ambulance in the driveway, that they were tracing the exact route that Kevin had covered after alighting from our van in 1988 to rush into the house. We asked the stretcher-bearers to pause there so that we could say good-bye to our son.
I recall asking close friends to drive us east, over the mountains, to Montpelier, where Dean was working as a reporter for a small newspaper. It was the route I had planned to travel to pick him up for the drive to Boston and the Red Sox–Yankees game.
I recall the howl that Dean released when I found him and blurted the news to him. I recall how, after several seconds, he forced himself to regain composure and begin planning what must be done next. Begin to guide and shepherd us.
Kevin’s memorial service at the funeral parlor a few nights later drew a cross section of people whose lives he had touched, and letters and floral bouquets from others too far away to attend. The mourners filled the room and the staircase leading down to the crowded parlor and then to the front porch, and then on out into the night air on the lawn below the porch. Kevin’s bandmates from Fall Lineup were there, and his teachers and guitar mentors, and the tall young woman whom he had defended in sixth grade against the future hockey star. She’d arrived with her mother about an hour early, and the two had sat motionless in their folding chairs the whole time, as others filled the room. On a table behind the dais rested Kevin’s black Martin, beneath a bouquet sent by a group of my high school friends from Hannibal.
The Woods Tea Company, which was booked for a gig in another town that night, dispatched their banjo player, Mike Lussen, who had been onstage when I’d boosted Kevin up there that long-ago Sunday afternoon at the Boat House in Burlington. Michael had since become a close friend of our family. I looked into his eyes when he entered the room, and I couldn’t place him.
Our writer and drummer friend from Chagrin Falls, Scott Lax, who had jammed with Kevin at Bread Loaf, made the journey from Ohio by car, and he offered a graceful remembrance.
Our friend Jay Parini delivered the eulogy. His first words were, “Life is suffering…,” and he made the words sound not callous or dismissive, but loving, and absolutely right.
Honoree asked our friend Joe Mark, the academic dean at Castleton College, to read her remarks:
“If love could have saved Kevin, he would still be among us…
“If passion and hard work could have saved Kevin, he would be here with us today. With one so gifted, the effort is not always obvious. But I can tell you that he was devoted to music and to being the finest guitarist he could be…
“If goodness could have saved Kevin, we would have been celebrating his twenty-first birthday with him yesterday…
“For myself, as I experience the terrible pain of Kevin’s loss, I turn to my cherished memories. I am so grateful for having known and loved this beautiful boy who was entrusted to us for a short, sweet time.”
Dean was heroic that evening, as he had been since the moment he’d heard the news of Kevin’s death. He stood straight at the dais and faced the crowd of mourners, and he delivered a simple, eloquent farewell to his brother and guitar partner. Dean had become our family’s pillar. He had taken charge of things from the outset. He counseled us to collect and sequester all of Kevin’s clothing, instruments, drawings, scrapbooks, musical CDs, and other artifacts that would give us pain when we happened upon them in the coming days and years.
He wrote a brave letter to our biweekly newspaper, the Addison Independent, that forthrightly explained Kevin’s psychosis at the time of his suicide:
There is no rationality for his death that we will ever comprehend. Everything in Kevin’s life was geared toward the future. He had a band with which he practiced and performed regularly. He was attending classes at Castleton State College. He was sending out press kits as recently as a day before he died.
I hope that his death can raise awareness about schizoaffective disorder. I hope that by dying, Kevin will give those among us who suffer from psychological disorders the strength to face their problems without fear of being stigmatized.
Kevin continued to improve by increments from the state of mind he was in after his last trip to the hospital. Occasionally he cracked a smile, and we were grateful for it. He had a great academic year at Castleton, making the dean’s list. He and his mother had planned a visit to a spiritual retreat in California. He even joked a little on his last day.
He composed music and lyrics and his desire to do well in this world burned like a flame that shined brightest in my life: he cared for his family, he felt compassion for the indigent, and he was never violent. He was gentle and thoughtful. He had a disarming sense of humor.
Kevin’s absence is one that I will feel all of my life. It hurts to move away from the last day that I spent with him. But I am grateful for the almost 21 years I was given with Kevin. And after God takes back a gift like Kevin, it is a small request to ask Him for enough hope and strength to endure the grief.
It was Dean who’d convinced his mother that the memorial service must be held in Middlebury, rather than Castleton, as she’d initially wanted. Honoree still believed that the town had turned against Dean, and thought of him as he had been publicly portrayed in the aftermath of the terrible accident. Dean’s insistence on Middlebury allowed Honoree to see how many friends remained available to our family, and to us, and it gave her a measure of peace.
Aunts and uncles and cousins and friends gathered from around the country to help us through the first days after the service. They brought casserole dishes and prayers. Condolence l
etters and cards arrived every day. One card that moved us especially was sent by Amy, who had suffered the terrible injuries in the automobile accident.
The July days and nights passed, and our visitors departed one by one and two by two, bearing the empty casserole dishes and our gratitude. Soon we were by ourselves in the house.
One evening soon afterward, Honoree and I sat talking in front of our fireplace, she in a cushioned rocking chair and I on the sofa. I felt a presence, and for just a moment Kevin was in the room, standing over me, asking my forgiveness. I am not a believer in spiritual manifestations. I recognize the moment as classically psychological, perhaps a modified psychic break. I mentioned the sensation to Honoree. And then, less than a minute later, for some reason, I plunged my hand down into the sofa, between the cushion and the armrest, and brought up Kevin’s mobile phone, which he had been missing. The one he had used in Fort Collins to report the bus driver who’d sped past the black man at the stop. I am certain that a rational explanation exists for that as well. Certain.
We left Middlebury that autumn of 2005 for Castleton, thirty miles to the south. Honoree had joined the administration at the college there. We spent that benumbed winter as caretakers of a two-hundred-year-old white-clapboard farmhouse that sat off to itself atop a knoll a few miles south of the college campus. The farmhouse was owned by a seventy-year-old former Rockette and dancer at the Copacabana, who lifted our spirits in the days before she departed for Arizona and winter with her relatives. A henna-haired diva of high style and peppery wit, Alice directed me to mix the gin-and-tonics in her living room (“Float the gin!”) while she conjured her glamour years. She loved recalling the night at the Copa when she twirled her crinoline skirt at the edge of the stage and knocked a drink out of George Raft’s hand. Raft was a movie star who specialized in playing gangsters. Ever the lady, Alice stepped out of the dance line and bent over to mop Raft’s soggy lapels.
“What did he say?” I asked, always eager to hear a story’s continuation.
“He said, ‘My god, they’re real!’” Alice replied, beaming.
Honoree spent her days at the college; I spent them robotically walking the nearby dirt roads, and writing. In the evenings we huddled together on the couch, a fire going and blankets over our legs, and watched every classic movie in Netflix’s inventory. In the greening-up spring, we searched for a house. We signed a purchase contract on the second one we looked at, a small low-slung chalet, its two stories built into a hill above Castleton, with a pine woods at the rear and a front view that faced the Green Mountains to the southwest. It is the house we live in now.
Dean’s strength of character and his stability—his apparent stability—undergirded our family’s recovery. (My wife and I have always wondered whether the shock of Kevin’s death moved Dean’s prodromal phase a little further along.) Dean was twenty-three when Kevin died, and he had gained experience in newspapering in Colorado and Vermont. He continued to write powerful political essays for the website OpEdNews. He held to a strenuous regimen of weight training and riding his bicycle in the hills of Vermont, or the West, or wherever he happened to be.
In the spring of 2006 he secured an internship at the Nation, and he lived for several months in an apartment in New York. At the end of his final day, he met Honoree and me in a departure lounge at Kennedy Airport for a weeklong trip to Positano, Italy. I could not help grinning when we spotted him striding slap-footed into the lounge under an enormous backpack, his thatch of dark hair uncombed as usual, and his nose buried with perfect unconcern in a bright-yellow book, Italian for Dummies. He proved to be no dummy during the flight to Naples: he chatted up two Italian flight attendants and got their phone numbers. Once in Positano, it took him all of one day to strike up a weeklong romantic friendship with a pretty, curly-haired young clerk in a bookstore a block up the hill from the coastal Saracen tower six hundred feet above the Mediterranean, where we stayed. The sunlight playing on the sea beyond the nearly vertical town, the hiking on the mountains above with his cheerful new companion gripping her basket of bread and cheese, the nights strolling with us along the sandy beach between the sea-scented harbor and the lighted string of outdoor restaurants that faced it—all this helped bring restoration to Dean, and it restored Honoree and me to watch him savor it. We boarded a bus departing Positano on a morning when a great rainbow arced out of the mountains into the Mediterranean, and we flew home from Naples and back into the flow of time.
Dean was our joy and foundation in those early years After, and he is our joy and foundation today. But the years in between presented a path to him, a path steeper and rockier, more forbidding, and more perilous than any he had cleared out in the Rocky Mountains during his college years. He had rid himself of his dependency on alcohol, for a long time, anyway. Yet the disease that took his brother’s life still moved, on its own slow, insidious timetable, toward manifestation.
For a while, Dean lived a young adventurer’s dream. In 2006, he set out upon a cross-country drive from Vermont to Albuquerque, where, through connections forged by his old man, he worked for a while on the location set for the movie In the Valley of Elah. He served as an unpaid assistant to the director, Paul Haggis, who graciously provided Dean with a small office, his name affixed to the door. Dean later remarked that the highlight of his moviemaking career was fixing a hot cup of tea for Tommy Lee Jones. An old girlfriend got in touch with him, and he decided that she was even more attractive than Tommy Lee. He paid his thanks to Paul Haggis and accompanied the young woman up to Portland, Oregon. Their romance dissipated, but in Portland he found an outlet for his political passions. He joined Working America, the progressive grassroots organizing group affiliated with the AFL-CIO. He went door-to-door in working-class neighborhoods, talking up the virtues of workers’ rights and affordable health care. He was promoted to field manager, training freshly recruited teams in the skills of canvassing, persuasion, and leadership.
The organization returned him to Albuquerque in January 2008 with the title Canvass Director. He supervised a labor campaign office with a staff of more than twenty people who spread out through the city’s neighborhoods, continuing the mission of building affordable-care advocacy. He joined the state’s lieutenant governor and secretary of state to give presentations on the issue.
Correspondence from Dean was upbeat and hopeful during that time. Of course, living across the continent from him as we were, we could not keep up with every detail of his life. We didn’t know, for instance, that he had stopped writing songs and had put aside his guitar. These things represented an era that was now painful to him, and he closed it off in his thoughts.
The reason for Dean’s departure from New Mexico the following year, he told us, was that he missed New England. Although he had been doing spectacularly well with Working America out there, our first and only reaction to this news was that we were happy to have him nearer to home.
He took an apartment in Portland, Maine, bought an old green pickup truck, and found a canvassing job with the Maine People’s Alliance, a group similar to Working America. Before long he was clattering around the small towns of the vast state in the truck, meeting with small-business owners to learn their views on affordable health care and talking up its benefits.
Dean held another motive for coming east. He had met a young woman online. She lived in Maine. He’d viewed her profile on an Internet dating site, a site that matched people who loved the outdoors. After pulling up roots and leaving behind a job that was rewarding his career hopes, and crossing the country with the fantasy of commencing a union with the love of his life—and, no doubt, ending his loneliness—Dean instead stumbled into emotional disaster. He found himself mired in the thrall of an archetypal figure, the Unattainable Other.
Most people are able to make peace with such rites of passage over time. Those with fragile neurological structures are less equipped to achieve closure. When the inevitable breakup happened, Dean buckled under the shock of it
. In a decade’s time he had withstood two, and perhaps three blows against his flawed scaffolding of sanity. His ability to pull himself back from the madness gathering in him, even as it occasionally abraded his thoughts and behavior, was in retrospect an almost unfathomable accomplishment. When compared with the virulence of Kevin’s affliction and the rapidity of his brain’s disintegration into irreversible ruin, Dean’s case also offers evidence of how profoundly variable the “spectrum” of mental illness can be. It took this fourth blow, ironically the least of all of them in the scheme of things, to send Dean’s scaffold crashing. His membrane of psychic protection shredded, he experienced this loss as a negation of his worth and a rebuff to his ardent love for the woman.
He stayed on around Portland for a while after the woman announced that it was over, disbelieving that it was true. He dated a few other women, but he no longer possessed the self-command that had shored him up for so many years. His intensity frightened women now, as did his intolerance for deviation from his expectations. (We pieced this together later, from his terse replies to our questions and from what we could see with our own eyes.)
The Maine People’s Alliance, valuing his grasp of progressive issues and his gift for expressing them with confidence and clarity, was just then providing him a launching pad should he want to make a leap into professional politics. The Alliance sent him to Washington a few times for meetings with its two senators, who then were Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Back in New Mexico he had formed an acquaintanceship with Governor Bill Richardson. He had developed into a forceful public speaker. His good looks and unforced charm seemed to pierce through the impersonal screens that political types erected between themselves and strangers. He won the respect of busy people in government with his forthrightness and grasp of issues while at the same time making them grin in spite of themselves over his boyish spontaneity. He was utterly without pretense, in the line of Kevin and their mother; and he assumed that everyone he met would be the same. Usually, thanks to him, they were.
