Bourdain, My Brother, and the Physics of Pain
For anyone who has survived an unexpected, crushing loss of a loved one, the news of a public figure’s tragic passing can be triggering. Last week, the world learned the heartbreaking news that chef, writer, music lover, world traveler, rebel, unconventional peacemaker and advocate — or as his Twitter bio simply stated, “Enthusiast” — Anthony Bourdain passed away. The cause — suicide.
Some days, all hope for humanity seems lost. The world feels cold, callous, and cruel. But a week ago Friday, millions of people worldwide were united in their shared feelings of grief and loss over the shocking passing of a larger-than-life character. In some ways, it’s comforting to witness the outpouring of emotion. In other ways, for someone who has suffered a very real and personal loss, it’s somewhat infuriating when it seems that others can feel such empathy for a complete stranger when some showed you little when your entire world had been crushed by death.
When I lost my 32-year-old brother, Al, my only sibling, four years ago, I experienced both the immense, beautiful depths of compassion from some as well as a complete void of understanding and, in some cases, blatant indifference from others. There were the impatient ones who told me I just needed to “get over it and learn to be happy” and others who were superficially sympathetic, up until the point at which they learned it wasn’t cancer or leukemia or some equally ‘socially acceptable’ cause of death. One would assume that because all humans live and die, all humans thus possess an innate understanding of what death means and what it means to the survivors left behind. Spoiler alert: They don’t.
I write this as a survivor, as someone who watched a loved one suffer through a painful life. I watched my brother slowly die for sixteen years. I write this as someone left behind. Someone who’s still endlessly sad, and angry, and disappointed.
From childhood to adulthood in one night
For most people — despite what Hollywood movies have taught us — high school graduation isn’t a magical, dramatic crescendo to adulthood; it’s merely one of those garden-variety milestones. You receive no less than three copies of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” from well-meaning loved ones, you ready yourself to say dreaded goodbyes to your high school besties, and you prepare to live away from home for the first time.
But for me, high school graduation was the actual end of my innocence. An oddly precise line of demarcation that unmistakably signaled the end of my childhood. Like many schools do, my high school sponsored an all-night party at a local hotel to keep the new grads out of trouble. I returned home at 6 a.m., the afterglow of such a big night still with me, to find my mom in the kitchen, in tears, and on the phone. My parents had found paraphernalia in my brother’s room and they were searching for rehab programs. It started out pretty innocuously but ended with a heroin overdose.
Fast forward sixteen years and our family had experienced every pain, fear, humiliation, disappointment, and destruction imaginable. The stories of this type of addiction are often unique only because of the individual, and the end result is almost always the same. For years, I watched my brother suffer through countless inpatient and outpatient rehabs, jail time, homelessness, overdoses, and withdrawals. And our family suffered endlessly along with him. It’s no coincidence that the (once) singular grey streak at the front of my hair appeared at 18; some say it’s wisdom, others creatively told me that it was my ‘insanity trying to escape,’ but deep down, I think it was a physical expression of the extreme stress and worry my body could no longer absorb. The years spent in purgatory tore us apart and I traded what would have been the most carefree days of my life to essentially become a co-parent to my brother. His state of well being became our family’s only barometer, impacting every decision, every action, and every relationship in my adult life.
Macabre milestones
The thing about addiction is that it doesn’t just devour one person; it devours entire families. And it’s a disorienting sensation when you come to the realization that the years of chaos and loss have far surpassed the happy and healthy years. You realize that you’re further away from a happy family dinner than you are from watching your brother suffer through withdrawal. If I didn’t have a few remaining physical reminders of those happy years, I’d struggle to believe they were ever real. And one day, I’ll be the lone steward of those hazy memories, rendering it all the more difficult to convince myself that that was who we once were.
In 2002, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with honors but, unlike my friends who celebrated with dinners and parties alongside elated parents, friends, and family, I ‘celebrated’ with yet another crisis. Al had gotten kicked out of his rehab program on the morning of my honors ceremony and priorities were priorities. My parents spent that afternoon searching for another rehab option that could quickly admit him.
I don’t know if I even ate dinner that night. All I remember is sitting across from my brother at the kitchen table, begging and pleading with him to get clean. Telling him that I loved him and that I could see him wasting away. He was so pale and so skinny and his hair was so thin. His pupils were tiny little pinpricks in eyes that projected no emotion. I was so stupid. Everyone knows you can’t argue with heroin, and yet there I was. That was how I celebrated my college graduation. And now, living in a college town, I can’t help but relieve these moments, like clockwork, every year that graduation rolls around. That tidal wave of happy, grinning families — it’s inescapable.
Lives in limbo
While my heart would never allow me to believe that Al would lose the battle I, of course, knew the statistics. ‘Heroin’s a death wish,’ people would rightly say. I would panic before each visit home because, for me, all it took was one look to know if he was “doing okay.” I was the infallible indicator, everyone would ask me, “Beck, what do you think? How’s Al doing? How does he look?” It was always in the eyes. I’d worry he wasn’t eating enough. He’d lost weight. Or he’d be talking too fast. Or too slowly. Sometimes, when I hugged him, it felt like nothing was there — in every way that that could be true.
When you watch someone you love suffer through indescribable pain, you want to take that pain from them, you just want their suffering to stop at any cost. Our hope was that through sobriety and counseling, Al would find happiness and health in life. Something was going to click and it was just a matter of finding that one, mythical thing. In the beginning, we’d go out to dinner to celebrate one-month sober, six-months sober, hell, I think there were even a few one-year sobers in the mix. We just knew that our family was going to be the exception to the statistics, we just had to get through it and we’d revert back to those happy years from which we drifted further and further with each relapse or new crisis.
We were living our lives in limbo, treading water until that moment we located all the pieces and could reconstruct our reality. But, what we naively thought would be but a brief interruption in our lives morphed into many years of struggle, chaos, and heartbreak. For sixteen years, I was afraid to turn the ringer off on my phone. For the first seven or so, I’d take every call, no matter where I was, no matter the time of night. That was what was expected of me: to be available to my family at all times, for all reasons. And yet, years later, when I finally learned to set boundaries and take care of myself, I was judged mercilessly and vilified thoroughly, as though my survival was somehow proof that I just didn’t care enough. I remember one particular call my senior year of college: it was 2 a.m. midweek when my phone rang. I had several midterm exams the next morning but, as I always did, I took the call, worrying that it might be an emergency or that someone might need me. It was Al, just wanting to chat and so I did. Other times, I’d play counselor to my parents. They would call me in tears when there was another relapse and I would listen, try to be strong, and show no emotion so as to not upset or worry them further. In the early days, I remember how crushed we’d be each time he headed off to rehab. Little did we understand then that we should have been celebrating each stint because that meant that Al was still willing to try.
But he, and us as a family, hit so many rock bottoms. There just wasn’t a rock bottom low enough to catalyze that ‘come to God’ moment or whatever you want to call it. And as the years wore on, the truth that none of us wanted to acknowledge became clearer: Our family wasn’t going to get to that happy ending. Well, in all honesty, this was something I only accepted in retrospect and some days, I still don’t.
Those last couple of years, some deeply excruciating thoughts materialized and I began to wonder whether it was selfish to shackle my brother to a life he so desperately wanted to escape. Was it unethical to force him to keep living just because we so desperately wanted him here? The only thing worse than considering such a brutal, ugly thought was the sound of that first shovel-full of dirt striking the pine box and my mother’s shriek when the two made contact. As a night owl and insomniac, these are the kind of thoughts I replay in my head, they torture me as soon as the sun sets. Every damn night.
The Physics of Pain
Bourdain’s death felt like a punch in the gut. I never met the guy, in fact, I often found him to be too intense to watch, and I even referred to him as ‘hipster bait.’ I loved reading his writing and interviews, though. And for someone such as myself, a writer-type still raging against the concept of a mundane adulthood, he was a perfectly rebellious role model. His existence was a testament to the fact that success didn’t necessitate small talk and business casual. He was fearless and outspoken, dark and sarcastic. He was an unlikely voice of reason and diplomacy in a world turned upside down. He spoke out for immigrants; in the era of #MeToo, he became a strong and vocal ally in support of women. He slayed his demons to find success later in life, carving out for himself what appeared to be the world’s most enviable job. He was a foul-mouthed, tatted-up outcast who spoke the truth and yet was beloved by millions — and I respected him.
When I read the news of his passing, I audibly gasped. It felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs. And as I obsessively devoured the flurry of news articles and blog posts about his life, I cried. For a complete stranger.
I spoke with my mother about how sad and shocked I was by Bourdain’s suicide. Her response was that she felt most sorry for his daughter, “When you have children, you give up your right to kill yourself,” she said. As someone who has no children, has never wanted children, who didn’t even like children as a child, this stung. I know she didn’t mean it like it came out. Even so, I said, “So, because I never want children, it’s fine for me to kill myself? That no one would miss me and it would matter to no one?” She explained that of course that was not what she meant but rather you have a responsibility to your child to live. I said that that wasn’t exactly right.
As I see it, you owe it to all of those people in your life who love you fiercely to keep fighting, to not give up, to not choose suicide; to not overdose, intentionally or otherwise. You owe it to your children to live, sure. But you have just as much an obligation to the friends who need you, to your partner or spouse who unconditionally loves you and intertwines their life within yours, to your parents and siblings who would ache in indescribable pain without you. You owe it to them to live. And while I have sincere compassion for those who suffer, for those who feel hopeless, I want you to know what it’s like to be left behind. To be left to clean up the wreckage or to try to coexist amongst it.
I think the law of the conservation of energy explains it best. If you can remember back to your high school physics class, great. For the rest of us, it’s the law that essentially states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. I think this law applies to pain. When a loved one escapes their own pain through self-medication, self-destructive behaviors, or suicide, their pain does not disappear. It’s transferred directly to those who love them. And those loved ones carry the pain with them until their last days. It never goes away. It never dissipates. The tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, it’s omnipresent. You always ache. The worst part of every day for me are those first few moments of consciousness, those first few seconds after my eyes have opened and I have to slowly run through events and reawaken to the horrible truth that it wasn’t just another one of my nightmares, that this is reality now and my brother is gone.
Coexisting with pain
It’s been four years since Al passed away. When we spoke that afternoon, it was just beginning to snow in DC, though it had been snowing all day in St. Louis. One thing that always stuck with me was when I flew home later that evening, seeing that same snow that he watched fall while we were on the phone. The snow was still there; and somehow, he was not.
I’ll never get used to reciting the Kaddish for my baby brother; I’ll never get used to seeing his name engraved on that piece of granite when I “visit” him. I’ll never get to see him get married, I’ll never meet nieces and nephews, get to goof around together at holiday dinners, quoting ‘The Simpsons,’ talking about new teenybopper pop songs that we should be embarrassed to like, and laughing about Kanye’s latest rant or something. That’s how life was supposed to go.
Yes, as they say, life goes on. Be happy for the good times, they say. Cherish those happy memories. Whatever. If you really knew, you wouldn’t say such stupid things. I choose to keep living, but for those who mourn an unspeakable loss, part of your life is gone forever. It’s not at all cliché to say that part of me died along with my brother. The light behind my eyes is gone and you can see it when I try to smile.
They say that it gets easier as the years pass — but it doesn’t. Not in my experience. You simply learn to coexist with the pain. For me, the bigger challenge is learning to live with the loss of hope because as long as Al was alive, no matter what fresh hell each day brought our family, there was still hope that we’d have those family dinners again. It’s hard learning to carry pain with no promise.
As someone who powerlessly suffered alongside my brother for nearly two decades, I found one particular aspect of the Bourdain coverage to be deeply troubling — the suggestion that places the onus of suicide prevention upon friends and loved ones. I read countless social media posts suggesting that you ‘reach out to your friends and family,’ that ‘one text message or phone call could make a difference.’ It’s wrong, it’s unfair, and it’s inaccurate to place the burden of someone else’s mental health and well being upon anyone other than the one person who has the ability to control the outcome of the situation. That’s not to say that showing kindness and support towards others is a pointless exercise — because it’s not — but control is an illusion.
For those of you who are facing the same struggles with a loved one that I’ve lived through, I’m going to share some advice that I so desperately needed to hear myself: it’s okay to take care of yourself. It’s okay to set boundaries, it absolutely doesn’t mean you don’t love them fiercely or that you care any less. Sacrificing yourself to their addiction or illness helps precisely no one and changes no outcome — and no one has the right to demand that of you. Life is going to move on whether or not they choose sobriety or seek the help they need and you will get left behind. Some people just crave drama; some have a savior complex — avoid them and don’t confuse it for actual concern or compassion for you or your family, it’s only about them and the attention they can get from it. You’re entitled to moments of happiness and peace in the chaos if you can find it. Guilt is an evil, destructive captor, try not to fall prey to it or those who try to manipulate you with it. You do not deserve judgment and cruelty for trying to take care of yourself to survive. You’ll find judgement everywhere; support and understanding are sometimes scarce. Those who’ve not lived it do not understand and those in the midst of it can’t always see the forest for the trees. The decision to accept recovery and sobriety lies in their hands alone, no amount of love or worry or tears will ever change it. TL;DR: You cannot save someone.
My message to those who are suffering — please seek help, please keep fighting. You matter, you are loved, you will be missed, and those who love you most will spend a lifetime questioning, suffering, and carrying your pain. They will be forever an outcast among the living, with one foot firmly and eternally trapped in the past, in the darkness. For them, if not for yourself, please try to find the light.
