At the age of twelve, my younger brother Sparrow took a loop of rope and tied it over a branch of the maple tree in the backyard, then stood on the rickety wooden chair he had dragged out onto the grass and calmly ended his own life.
There were no warning signs, or at least any that I noticed and could reasonably analyze. I could have been one of those people who seized upon every minute detail of my brother’s life and held it to the light like a dusty volume, to pore over again and again, to cull every shred of inferred meaning from it. In psychology, there is a term for this: hindsight bias. Events that have already occurred suddenly become more predictable than they were before they took place. Also known as the “I-knew-it-all-along” phenomenon. I couldn’t do that. I could only remember my brother as he had been, fine-boned and fiery, passionate and whole.
In the beginning there were certain memories. Sparrow liked to take a fishing net and his adventurer knapsack, filled with magnifying glasses and butterfly wings and ornithology books, down to the creek near the house and lie on the rocks in the middle of the rushing water. Sometimes I would follow along behind him, making as little sound as possible, just to sit and watch him. My brother occupied his own space in the world and I could only watch quietly from the sidelines.
But memories like that gradually began to elude me in the weeks after he died. Like ghosts, they crept through the hidden corridors of my heart and fled as silently as they had come. And in the months after his death, my head became clogged not with my recollections of him, but with his possessions. His explorer parka, the collection of shriveled beetle husks resting in a glass jar in his bedroom. Even the rusted, bent-up hangers in his closet. They haunted me, these pure and heartbreaking mementos of his existence. I liked to think of them as Sparrow’s memoirs, dedicated to the ones he left behind. But more and more I began to realize that Sparrow hadn’t left anything behind; he had simply gone forward into another place where the rest of us ceased to exist. In some respects, Sparrow was the one who journeyed into the great beyond, just as he had so longed to during life, while my family and I were the ones who remained stuck in the dark without a flashlight or a map to guide us home.
Two months after Sparrow’s death, I came home from school to find my mother sobbing in the shower. The shower in our bathroom was tiny, covered with yellow curtains and a sliding glass door, so that the inhabitant could not be seen from the outside, but at the same time could watch everything that was going on from the inside. My mother never knew that I knew, but I could hear her, her breath shuddering tremulously beneath the pouring water like a quiet earthquake. At the sound of her misery my heart swelled with a sudden tenderness for her, as if I were the mother and she were the child.
I used to think there were special doctors for healing broken hearts. Maybe they had stethoscopes that could reveal all the hidden fissures and fault lines trailing across the middle of the organ, all those internal wounds that were mentally held together with scotch tape and twine. Maybe if they listened closely enough they could hear the sound of the heart splitting, cracking under the weight of its own pressure, like a ceiling whose beams have been failing for far too long.
Even if there were such a thing as doctors that could heal broken hearts, I don’t think a damn one of them could have healed my mother’s.
Do I think Sparrow would feel remorse if only he were able to see my mother, palms pressed against the shower wall, weeping openly into the hot steam? Perhaps. But I could never see into my brother’s mind; he was sealed up tighter than a bank vault with the highest levels of security. My brother was what some might call an enigma. Those tiny black glasses with their plastic frames surrounded a curious face, one that was so desperate for learning and knowledge but so closed off from those who most wished to understand it. Only a lucky few were let in, one of them being my father. When I was in eighth grade and Sparrow was in first, he and my father always went for a drive in the car late at night. They loved those midnight travels, the hiss of the wheels over the pavement, the cold fogging up the windows like lace. I never knew what they saw out there. I hope they saw beautiful things; I hope they passed strangers in trench coats and dark hats who smiled at them through the windshield. I hope they felt suddenly and irrevocably complete.
And when Sparrow and my father returned home from their travels, my mother and I would usually be in bed. But sometimes, at the sound of the doorknob turning and their footsteps sliding over the floorboards, I would tiptoe downstairs to the kitchen and watch them from behind the staircase, chin in hands. They never spoke. Not even a word. Everything was in the gestures. In the way my father looked at Sparrow, in the way he cupped Sparrow’s face in his palms like a small white egg balancing on a counter.
They drank milk. My father would fetch the carton from the refrigerator, pulling it tenderly from the slot it was held in like a lover. Sparrow poured; my father watched. And there was faith in that gesture, and a kind of hopelessness too. Even the moon knew it. It spilled through the windowpane and soaked their bodies in its yellow light. It illuminated Sparrow’s face wetly, so that all the bones strained delicately against the tender skin. The skin of a ghost, an angel, a broken bird.
Both my mother and my father have aged. I realize that and I take it to heart. I’ve aged too. Sometimes I trace my ribs underneath the cover and marvel at the smallness of my cuticles, the ragged edge of my calluses where so many charcoal pencils have rubbed up against the skin. There are wrinkles on my mother’s face that weren’t there before; her breasts are sagging. The rowdy strands of my father’s hair are turning grey and brittle, like frozen spider webs. Even his muscles are slackening. I know that it was Sparrow who aged us. He aged us as surely as a bullet leaps from a gun, as surely as a tree will bend in winter under the weight of the snow. As surely as all those neurons and synapses in Sparrow’s head were still firing when he hid the length of rope that would eventually kill him under his bed.
But if one thing is true in this world, it is this: living was the purest form of dying Sparrow ever felt, and no one can blame him for doing what he did. We may never understand it, nor may we ever accept it, but we can come to respect that for what it is and what it will be.
Sparrow never left a tangible suicide note. But for me, that one particular scene in the kitchen when Sparrow and my father were drinking milk was Sparrow’s unofficial note. I can still recall the exact instant when Sparrow truly said his goodbyes: his small hand reaching into the cupboard for a drinking glass. The hand disappeared into the darkness and stayed there ever so briefly, before retrieving the glass and coming back out into the light. There. That was it.
Some people don’t write their suicide notes with pen and paper. And that’s alright. But there’s this myth out there that suicide notes are something to be dreaded and feared. They’re not. Suicide notes, no matter the form, are simply letters, just like love letters or greeting cards. They state the reason, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated.
And then, just like their authors, they end.