DEAR FAMILY

Could my brother have made it any more obvious that he needed our help?

- DAN O'BRIEN

WE HAD JUST RECOVERED FROM OUR FIRST bout of Covid, and we were rewarding ourselves with a trip to Cabo San Lucas that we couldn't really afford. My wife was sunbathing while I strolled with our daughter, nine years old, through the waves along the beach. Returning to our towels, I saw a text on my phone from my brother Tim-"Call me"-and moments later I learned that our older brother Chris was dead.

Perhaps this will be the last time that I feel the need to write about the Thursday afternoon in February 1986 when Chris jumped from a window in the attic of our house in Scarsdale, New York. I was 12, and I witnessed the immediate aftermath: my brother limping toward our front door, barefoot, no jacket, snow matted in the back of his blue sweater and blue jeans, and the back of his mussed blond hair.

That evening, home from the hospital, my mother collapsed in my arms. "Nobody can ever know," she whispered in my ear. "This is a secret we must take to our graves."

My parents didn't provide my brother with any professional help. They denied that he had a problem. His attempted suicide was merely an act of "immaturity," they said. Within months I developed obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I didn't receive treatment, either. Instead I tried to treat myself: Writing-confessionally, secretly-allowed me to feel healthy again.

I grew up the fourth of six children, but my younger brother Tim is the only sibling I still talk to. My parents disowned me in 2006 for unexplained reasons-unexplained but not inexplicable. Their history together is littered with innumerable estrangements; estrangement is a key feature of the paranoid folie à deux of their psychosocial impairment. They left Scarsdale more than 20 years ago and have lived ever since in a gated community in the Upper South. They must be elderly by now.