A Death in My Family

For the first year after my oldest brother died by suicide, my mother said that he visited her almost every night and rocked her gently in a state she described as in between wakefulness and sleep. “Charley,” she would say to my father who was lying in bed next to her, “Chuck is here. He is here rocking me. Chuck is here.”  

My brother killed himself 20 years ago on January 10, 2003. I was sitting in the passenger seat of my husband’s car in a long line at a car wash that late Friday afternoon. Annoyed that we had to wait to clean the car, my husband used his flip phone, only purchased after 9/11, to check our messages at home, and when he pulled abruptly out of the line of cars we had been idling in, it was because my father’s voice was on our apartment answering machine, screaming that my brother was dead. 

That morning, I had been at the community college where I work interviewing to be the coordinator of the English Division, a position that no one wanted and which I was not qualified to do but was asked by my colleagues to consider. Somewhere around 10:30 in the morning, no food in my stomach and adrenalin attacking my system because I knew I was not going to be offered the position and worried what the exchange would be like with my dean, I felt sweat forming at my hairline and eventually had to wipe it from the back of my ears and neck. I also felt dizzy. The dean made me walk with her through the suite of offices in Academic Services and then down several halls in the building during her loud interrogation and lecture about what the “position” required, and more than once I felt faint. But when she released me from the torture, I rushed to my car, turned on the radio, and sang Cyndi Lauper’s “Hat Full of Stars” over and over again under a cold blue sky to put the whole ordeal out of mind.

The sweat and the dizziness would return by the time we escaped the car wash, called my parents, and then began our way in snow the 80 miles to their home. Later, the feeling that some creature with teeth was eating away at my stomach would accompany the dizziness and sweat. The body shows the ravages of shock and trauma in obvious ways at first. Much later, the adrenalin and dizziness gone, the creature would still be eating away at my insides. 

My brother was 36 when he died. U.S. Army Major Charles William Myskowski took his life with a firearm in a room in the upstairs of a home he and his wife had recently purchased. He was alone in the house except for his dog Moe. There was no suicide note. 

My husband and I often divide our lives together between the time before Chuck died and the time after. We were married for eight years and without children when he left us all behind. Today we are together 28 years with two teens, and still our life together exists in this lopsided fashion. The event, as one would expect, was catastrophic to my family.  

The last twenty years have been a lesson in coping. 

After Chuck’s death, I read everything I could about suicide and learned from other people in his life as much as I could about what led to his end. For awhile, I had shelves filled with books on suicide, but today I have managed to let go of all but two: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron. These books were the first I read and they saw me through the earliest days, and so like a life-jacket, I won’t part with them even though I doubt I’ll need them or read them again; I do find myself in deep waters from time to time, but I’m more buoyant these days and thus less likely to struggle in the tides. Still, I like to look at the spines of these books on the shelf as a reminder of what I have come to understand and what I will never know about my brother.  

I have also worked my way through the theological teachings of my religion regarding what happens to someone after they die by suicide. I believe that Chuck’s pain and suffering did not negate his path to salvation. Fortunately, the Catholic priests and other religious laity I have engaged on the subject have studied scripture with me, confirming for me that my brother’s salvation remains possible. Other “religious” people have not been as kind. Early after his death, I felt like I had to debate these naysayers, but the truth is, once I worked my way through the theological and scholastic philosophies in alignment with my faith, I no longer engaged anyone on the subject. For me, the way to clear answers is to confront and read and pray, and once I emerged from my studies, I have not needed to return to the subject. It’s settled for me that nothing can separate a believer from the Savior. 

Someone who knew Chuck well and had insights into his mental state asked me a month after my brother’s funeral who was suffering the most since his death. Mother? Wife? Siblings? Friends? I instantly identified the question as evil, named it as such to the inquirer, and ended our conversations and interactions forever. Even early on, I knew these paths were not the ones I wanted to follow and that there are people who are not worthy of knowing the loss I feel, and even worse, they seem to enjoy the pain witnessed in others. 

There are other people, however, who have brought Chuck back to me at unexpected times, and these experiences are ones that have sustained my love for my brother. Whenever close friends visit Arlington National Cemetery where Chuck is buried, they have taken photos of his grave and texted them to me and left him small tokens of love. Those who knew him well will share a story about him or a description of what the day was like when they went to his grave. In these moments, he is present again to me once more through the kindness of others.

Over the last 20 years, I have been fortunate to have a student in one of the classes I taught who knew my brother because he was in the Army at the same base. The student is one of very few people who understood how to say my last name without being told its correct pronunciation. He wondered if Chuck was my brother-in-law and then when he learned I had kept my birth name, he stayed after class to tell me my brother was a good man and what he remembered about him. And several of Chuck’s military friends have found me online, inquired about my family, and reminded me of how Chuck made them feel and the generous and loving friend he was to people who worked closely with him. These are presents I do not deserve but am grateful when they arrive. 

I have also had to endure countless papers and speeches from college students about suicided parents, siblings, and best friends, and I once found myself weeping openly in a speech class when a student showed a photo of her dead brother in his open casket at his military funeral. The military told her it was a suicide. In the speech, she expressed why that was impossible. I understood her sentiments; I realized where she was in her grief; I knew I could not help her. 

Through the years, I have learned to trust my feelings and instincts in the classroom. Sometimes when suicide comes up in a poem, essay, or novel, I can share that I am a survivor of sibling suicide. I recently taught a women’s literature course whose reading list was crowded with characters and authors dead by suicide. For 80 minutes near the end of the semester, the students and I discussed the complex reasons for so many suicides and the motivations and mental illnesses of characters and authors who had killed themselves. In the middle of the discussion, I acknowledged to myself that I was okay on this day. And so I revealed that I too was a survivor of sibling suicide. 

At other times, I step back into myself when I meet someone who reveals a past marked with suicidal ideations or a parent suffering to help a suicidal child.  While I would like to be a source of daily support, there are seasons in my life when I just cannot. I don’t apologize; I don’t explain; I try to soothe my sadness and the toothy creature in my stomach. 

In 2008, five years after my brother died, I was notified by a colleague that one of our very favorite students had died by suicide. In fact, she and her younger sister were both my students and both my favorites. They came to the community college and then transferred to four year institutions and went on, I assumed, to be brilliant, happy young women. They both had auburn hair, and the older sister was a fierce political debater in class and the younger was a beautiful writer. 

To be in a classroom with a student who is awakening to her agency in the world is a powerful experience. To be with a brilliant student who is testing her ideas in communion with others is the sacred in the classroom. That such a life, the force of whose being I can feel still, might have used her agency to end her being is the strongest warning I know that even when we are together in a safe place surrounded by wonder, we do not always recognize suffering. 

There is a small bench on my campus that her family had made in her memory. My college was a place where she thrived and where she was loved. The campus is gorgeous throughout much of the year, no matter the season, and I frequently take walks around the grounds and purposefully past the bench. There is nothing left to do but remember her. For me, this is her grave and I bring to her as often as I can my gratitude for the inspiration she gifted me in the classroom. 

I have great love and gratitude for my brother also. I am the fourth of five siblings, and Chuck was five years older than I am and the first born. He was the brother who glued the plastic windows in my dollhouse after my father built it from a kit but did not finish it.  He always let me tag him, and did the same for others, after noticing when I could not catch my mark in backyard games with the neighborhood kids.  He was the one to stay in the water with me and push me to standing on water skis and then swim to me when I fell off of them and suddenly grew aware of deep water and fish swimming around me and nibbling at my toes. He was the only one of my siblings to attend my college graduation. He took my future husband, a comic book writer, to toy and comic book stores and showed interest in his work. They even competed good-naturedly with each other to see who could get a garrison of Star Wars Stormtroopers first. Chuck did. When I abandoned a creative writing scholarship at Southern Illinois University for a “possible” literature scholarship at Iowa State University, he checked up on me through my awful stint as a waitress at Bonanza. And while my mother worried I had made a bad decision by trading Illinois for Iowa, he reminded me that it was my choice.

For as much kindness and generosity as he exhibited, however, he also suffered for many years from a combination of bad choices, bad relationships, and bad genetics.

When Chuck died, my parents never once denied that his death was a suicide. From the beginning, they faced the truth, even if they winced and cried whenever they shared the fate of their oldest child, their first born son. And they gave their living children and relatives permission to narrate what had happened. It is one of the most important acts of sacrifice they made because it meant that I never felt ashamed of my brother—his life and his death. Despite the countless times they would have to relive the moment by explaining what happened years after the death, it meant that the truth would offer the rest of us a path to healing, and we would all need it, even if we did not all take it. For after his death, relatives who were both close and distant came forward to reveal their own depression and other family suicides. For awhile, my father collected these stories and relatives with the same commitment I dedicated to reading books and research on suicide. And often he would pound a fist on a table when the numbers of people affected by mental illness in his family genealogy overwhelmed him.

Nine months before his own death from kidney failure and 17 years after Chuck’s passing, my father showed up in my driveway in my parents’ Honda Pilot. I was on my deck on this hot day watering plants, and he yelled to me from the car window to come down and to bring paper.  At this point, he was unable to climb the stairs to the main floor of my house and was tethered to a catheter. I went solemnly to the car with an iPad and sat in the front passenger seat, opened a blank page on the device, and listened and typed for two hours in the air conditioning. 

“I wish I never had any of you,” he said to me through tears. I had heard him say this before and had admonished him because it made it seem like he regretted us. “No,” he said, “I am the reason Chuck died. I am worried about the rest of you and your children and all the grandchildren and great grandchildren to come.” I told him that it was hurtful to wish that he did not have us and that what he really wanted was to have known about the mental illness and to have been able to stop Chuck from killing himself. “No,” he said, “what I really want is for your soul to have been born to someone else without this. Your mother and I would have never had kids if we had known this was your inheritance.” 

I promised him I was recording the names and the stories of all the dead people he suspected suffered from some mental affliction and all the living still suffering. And we talked about the demons that haunted Chuck and what the rest of us would have to confront in ourselves and our children. And we held hands until he was empty and spent. 

In the months to come, he would be in and out of the hospital, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. Late at night on a frequent visit to the emergency department with him and my mother, I would sit in his hospital room and listen to him recount what he knew about Chuck’s life before his death, about why he thought Chuck killed himself, about what he would have done differently in the days before Chuck’s suicide. Chuck never came to him in dreams to offer comfort, and in the weeks before my father’s death, he never stopped thinking and talking about the son who shared his name.

I only had one dream of Chuck several years after he died. He was wearing the shirt he had on when he came to my college graduation. Chuck was a wonderful musician, as was my father, and the saxophone was their instrument of choice. In my dream, he was in a parade as part of a marching band. He came and sat next to me on a bench with the saxophone hanging around his neck. He never looked at me, and he only said “Hi” and then left to catch up to the band. 

And now I am 20 years from the point of impact. My teenagers are tired of me asking them if they are okay. Are you sad? Are you depressed? Do you need to talk today? Do you want to talk to someone other than me? You know that there is no shame in needing help? You know that no matter what I will be there for you? You know that Uncle Chuck might have been saved if we had known, and so you must let me know. The sharp bite in the stomach never goes away completely. In fact, it’s even more urgent because now I understand acutely the torture my father survived for seventeen years after Chuck’s death and that which my mother continues to endure with the loss of this most precious and loved child. If I pray and worry and talk and remind and nag and spy can my little family escape this? Will it skip us?   

But it is too late. We have not been skipped, and I know this when I walk across acres at Arlington National Cemetery with my two kids reading the names on tombstones aloud as they trail behind me to the grave of the uncle they never met. And no matter how many times I visit, I will have to face the dizzying fact that Chuck is here.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Veteran Suicide Prevention

Veteran and Military Suicide Prevention Resources