Twelve years ago this evening, just before 9:30, I walked in the front door of my Venice apartment — which was uncharacteristically ajar — walked through mostly dark spaces and gasped when I found my brother lying, on his back, on the bathroom floor.
It was obvious to me that Paul was dead, and so my first call was to one of my sisters. Only then did I dial 9-1-1.
I telephoned three sets of friends, inviting them to come over and just sit while, in bristling anger and frustration, I danced around the living room of my apartment, irrationally, as if I were trying, circularly, to escape a swarm of lethal bees.
I only could have been more shocked if the lifeless body had belonged to one of my children.
It was, and remains, the second-worst night of my life, savagely more devastating than when Mom died or my beloved grandmother.
In nearly symphonically fluent silence, my brother had led me through the years’ long wreckage of divorce, when I lost my children, two of the three probably permanently.
Along the way to healing, I fell into the bushes and scratched myself raw a hundred times before reaching a clearing, making a full recovery.
Dr. Paul Brought the Cure
My always under-appreciated brother was the mandatory guide that every person needs when a bullet has been fired through the heart of his existence.
You may be able to teach yourself the guitar or how to drive a car.
But you cannot self-teach your way out of the bramble of a coldly calculated divorce.
When the foundational principles of your life suddenly and viciously have been gutted — like a faux surgeon reaching into your aching chest and ripping away your blood-drenched heart — you need a partner, a teacher, a companion with a moral flashlight to steer you back onto the main highway.
Not until years later, after I had met my wife, could I call my brother’s death by its accurate name. My post-death locution was almost laughable.
When I telephoned my father early the next morning, I lacked the courage to be intellectually honest.
“Died” felt as insensitive as tearing a scab.
Grasping, desperately, for a soft landing, I told Pop, “We lost Paul last night.”
Typically, Pop did not immediately react.
The pause was octomom-pregnant.
“Yesssss,” my ever-adaptable, seldom-revelatory father finally said, unhelpfully.
I did not know how to punctuate his response, with a question mark, an exclamation mark, a semi-colon, a period or ellipses.
In a family of enormously demonstrative women, Pop and Paul distinguished themselves by reacting identically, externally, to births, deaths, weddings, vast disappointments, overwhelming victories.
“Yesssss.”
Technically Speaking
But that blank-faced quintessential stoicism was a powerful counter-wheel to the more volatile personality and lifestyle of Paul’s brother.
We only were related by name. We had less in common than I do with Mr. Obama.
For seven years, my brother’s majestic, deceptively elegant but always-wordless leadership was a beacon through the wilderness of my divorce. Ever even-tempered, moderate in all ventures, silently unquenched in many, he established a world record by getting angry only one single time in seven years. I tied that record in about the first five minutes.
When I went home to visit Pop a few weeks ago, my kid sister and I drove to the wind-blown hometown cemetery. I stood by Paul’s grave, reflecting on how he reacted with numbing passivity in his adult years each time he was cheated, over and over.
For reasons beyond the boundaries of this remembrance, I am certain he died of a broken heart, which had knocked on his internal door long before it killed him.
