Prologue: Robbed
Blinding yellow sunlight. Our laughter. The smell of summer. Bedsheets on the clothes line dancing with the breeze. Running around the yard in what feels like slow motion. It’s all that I can feel of this memory. No matter how my mind tries to focus the picture, that’s all that I’m left with. It’s frustrating, this inability to see him clearly.
I have only a handful of memories of my oldest brother Robbie. This ethereal summer vibe of playing tag outside. Freeze tag, ball tag — we played so many different kinds of tag. The memory of our father attacking him on Christmas Eve, mere moments after Rob had come out to him. A vague memory, or at least the memory of a photograph, of Rob and his companion coming to visit my dad and stepmom. A trip to “the city” (that’s what people from Potosi call St. Louis) to visit Rob and the same companion. While the adults talked in the kitchen, I sat alone in the living room.
And then the wispy memory of Rob’s funeral. He was only 25 when he died, making me 13. He had died of pneumonia, according to whispers. The service was held at St. James Catholic Church in town, followed by a burial at St. Joachim cemetery, adjacent to the parochial school he had attended. I did not grow up Catholic, and had only just began going to the small country church near our home, and the service had me a little rattled. It felt barren of emotion, I didn’t know the hymns, or what the smelly, smoky ball was that the priest swung at the attendees — the whole thing struck me as foreign. Looking back, I realize that Rob’s family, my family, also felt foreign to me. The 12 years that separated us, coupled with the fact that he lived with his mom and stepdad and only visited us occasionally, meant that he existed on the periphery of the family that I lived with: Mom, Dad, and my half-sister Karen. Dad, his first wife, Rob’s two full siblings (Shelly and Randy), and Rob’s half-brother Brian all sat in the front row. I sat further in the back with Karen.
That’s it — all of my memories of my brother, Robert Dale Owens (1962–1987).
Sometimes our brains block out memories of traumatic events. So maybe it’s that most of my childhood, until the age of 11 or so, traumatized me enough that my brain has simply blocked many memories for my own protection. In a cruel twist of fate, I have very little recollection of the one sibling with whom I share the most — musical talent, a flair for the dramatic, the ambition to move away from home to pursue our dreams, and a severe case of homosexuality.
There should be memories in my head. I have pictures of him and me in the same room for Christmas, camping, and birthdays. Normally I can look at photos that I’m in and feel them. The velveteen couch cushion against my legs. The laughter in holiday pictures. The smell of cigarette smoke or lemon Pledge. In these photos, it’s almost as if I don’t even recognize myself. There’s some other towhead kid in those pictures, not me.
And as time passed, the anger came. I recognized it in 1999, when I turned 25 and was as old as Rob had ever been or ever would be. As I fumbled through dating and relationships, realizing I would never have an older sibling who really understood everything, the anger worsened. It turned to ire as I made acquaintances with men who were HIV positive, diagnosed the same year as Rob, and yet lived long enough for the lifesaving cocktails that made HIV a manageable condition instead of a death sentence.
And to quote C.S. Lewis, “…I sat with my anger long enough, until she told me that her real name was Grief.”
This grief, unlike any other I have experienced before or after, ate at my soul. At the age of eight, the only grandparent I ever knew passed away. I felt sad, and he doted on me like no one else. But time healed me. My mom’s brother, my Uncle Norman, died the following year. I, again, felt sadness, mostly for my mom. It was the saddest I had seen her. But, again, time eased my sadness (and my mom’s). I lost her to cancer in 2007, and I wasn’t sure I would survive. A lifelong mama’s boy, I sobbed for weeks on end. Time, once again, wrapped me in its thin comfort and held my hand during the long walk to the other side of grief.
But I sank deeper and deeper in my grief for Robbie. And while I know this isn’t really true, it feels like my family left me to face it alone. My family almost never speaks his name.
Then in 1999 my heart, buckling under the pressure of mourning both the life he lived and the one we couldn’t, broke so completely that I had to do something. Armed with only a handful of memories, an unfamiliar name on a death certificate, a banker’s box of photographs and newspaper clippings, and a nascent Internet, I set out to find people outside of my family who may have known and loved the Robbie that I never would.
This is the story of that journey.
This essay is one part in a memoir series documenting the loss of my oldest brother to AIDS, the void that only deepened as I recognized I was also gay, and my search to find him through his friends and loved ones who knew him outside of my family. If you’re interested in reading more, you can read the next chapter here.
