The Cahoots

1: Epilogue 

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Do you think he did it on purpose?”

I pushed Mom’s question to the back of my mind. He was dead. He was dead because schizophrenia killed him. He would never make sense of the voices he heard. Would never surrender to the numbing relief of anti-psychotic drugs. Would never go to college. Fall in love. Get married. He wouldn’t watch me get married. Become an uncle. The life my brother could have had, if not for his illness, flashed in front of me. It was over. Just like that.

“Did he do it on purpose?” Mom continued to ask, weeks and months after his funeral. She needed an answer, and I was the person closest to him, even after he lost his mind, so my answer was as close as she could get to knowing the truth.

The medical examiner didn’t ponder this. Suicide, they ruled in harsh black ink, was the cause of death.

Perhaps it was because the truck driver said Jay suddenly stepped out in front of him. He slammed on his breaks but wasn’t able to come to a complete stop in time. But the truck driver had reason to lie. Involuntary manslaughter pretty much guarantees a suspended license, leading to unemployment and potentially poverty. Accidents happen of course, but they are best to be avoided. And if you hit and kill a homeless man, well, maybe it is easiest for everyone if you rule it a suicide.

That is what I wanted to believe.

It was a convenient lie I held onto in the early hours following Jay’s death. My brother was killed in an accident, I said cautiously, hoping it would eventually sound true. I told people he died quickly and without suffering, reminding them that he had been in a lot of pain and anguish over the past few years. It was a sad ending to a tragic life.

I never really believed it. But suicide was too painful to say and impossible to explain.

It all came to an end so quickly that I almost could pretend it never happened at all. I never moved to Austin. Jay never screamed that I was the devil. Those terrible years could stay locked away in my memory like a bad dream you never tell. Even Google eventually buries old obituaries.

I could look the other way when I see a disheveled stranger pacing the street, shouting nonsense about God or the government. Pretend I don’t recognize the symptoms. I could simply smile when someone makes a joke about panhandlers making more money than we do. Pretend that I don’t know better. I could shrug when people whisper mental illness as if it’s a death sentence. Pretend that my heart hasn’t hardened, or softened. I’m not sure which.

It would be easier to move on with my life, the weight of loving someone unconditionally now lifted from my shoulders. Remembering is painful. Perhaps its better to let the shattered glass lie broken on the floor than to hurt myself trying to put it back together, searching for answers to unanswerable questions.

Along with questions, there are sad truths: Jay was far from alone in his illness. He was one of the 2.2 million Americans living with schizophrenia. His diagnosis, paranoid schizophrenia, was one of the most treatable kinds. With the right combination of medication and therapy, half of those with the illness can manage their symptoms and 15% continue to live the lives they’d begun before their diagnosis. While many people with schizophrenia have trouble holding down a job, the vast majority never wind up on the streets. The illness makes people more likely to attempt suicide, but only a handful, 13%, take their own lives. If Jay had gotten medication at the right time, before he was too paranoid to take it, his life might not have become the worst-case scenario.

Hopefully sharing our story, the opportunities missed and the mistakes I didn’t know we were making, will help bring others a happier ending.