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.
My mother told Tim, and Tim told me, that Chris had been found on the floor of his bathroom by the superintendent of his apartment building in Scarsdale. It appeared that he had been brushing his teeth, leading my mother to suggest that a heart attack or stroke had killed him in a flash. It was a shame, my mother said, because Chris was reinventing himself. He had retired early from his civil-service job in IT and was starting a business. He was taking daily walks and losing weight. There wouldn’t be an autopsy, she said, but a toxicology report would be issued in four or five months. This was the official story that my mother, and presumably my father, wanted established and disseminated.
That day in Cabo San Lucas, on the phone with Tim, I shared my suspicion. I told him that I had been waiting since 1986 to hear that Chris had killed himself. He was hospitalised briefly in the early 2000s, and likely there were other such hospital stays. He didn’t have friends and had never had a romantic relationship, as far as I knew. He was without social support of any kind.
But this was all circumstantial evidence. I felt guilty; I didn’t want my brother’s death to be a suicide, his final weeks and days a torment of hopelessness. Thankfully I had an out: my mother’s story. Perhaps the toxicology would come back clean. Perhaps his death at the age of 53 was essentially an accident and nobody was to blame.
Spring, then summer passed. I heard nothing about the toxicology report. A friend suggested that I request the report myself; I was my brother’s next of kin, after all. I was shocked and a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t already thought of this. Why did I persist in believing that my parents were the ultimate authors of my family’s story? I had fallen back into the passive, benumbed mindset of an abused child, but also I was afraid of learning the truth.
I emailed the medical examiner’s office and the next morning woke to my brother’s toxicology report in my in-box. Lying in bed, I opened the PDF on my phone, scrolling through pages and pages of jargon, numbers, graphs... I emailed the medical examiner’s office again: Was there an official cause of death listed anywhere? The dawn light was growing and glowing around the edges of my bedroom curtains. The woman I was emailing with was named Dawn, I realised. She responded that she was able to share the cause of death, if I wanted to know: “I just don’t like to do that if people aren’t expecting it.” I assured her that I wanted to know. She wrote that it was suicide by poison. She was sorry for my loss.
Naturally I wondered about a note. That same morning I contacted my brother’s local police department and that afternoon received a PDF of their report. “I am sorry for your loss,” the lieutenant wrote.
My brother’s police department sent a PDF of their report. “I am sorry for your loss,” the lieutenant wrote.
This was, by far, the more disturbing document to read, as it involved characters with recognizably human if procedural voices, and an unfolding sequence of events: the smell of “decomposition” permeating the apartment building; the sergeant knocking on the door with “no answer or noise coming from inside”; the superintendent handing the keys to the sergeant who “upon entering” announced himself—“with no answer” again; the sergeant attempting to locate the source of the odor until he observed, through the open door to the bathroom, my brother in the bathtub. The police photographer noticed the suicide note on my brother’s desk. The report stated that my parents were notified that night and provided with the facts of the case. So they had known all along.
Could I see the note, or read its contents? The lieutenant wrote back: “I do not have that information. You may need to FOIL it.” I quickly completed the Freedom of Information form at the town clerk’s website and ten days later received an email explaining that my request was denied “under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Law §87(2)(b), as disclosure would result in an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” The email closed with the notification that I had the right to appeal my denial within 30 days.
I appealed. “As a suicide note is usually addressed to family and friends,” I wrote, “and I am Christopher’s brother, I feel that I should be allowed to read it.” Two weeks later my appeal was granted and I was emailed a scan of his handwritten note. “Dear Family,” it begins. I fell to my knees and wept.
Mental illness has many causes, and usually many causes at once. Was my brother’s debilitating depression the result of our unhappy childhood? He was genetically predisposed to depression, surely, but sadly—tragically, it is fair to say—being raised by my parents didn’t help. And being raised by them did not help in the most literal sense: Early intervention and treatment would have changed the course and the quality of my brother’s life—could have possibly saved his life.
Almost 40 years have passed since that afternoon in February when my brother jumped from our attic window. I don’t feel anger toward my parents but pity for their loss, and a profound sadness that they never changed. With my brother’s death, they chose to turn away, once again, from the reality of who he was and how he suffered. It’s too late for Chris. My parents can no longer help him, but they might help the family, they might help themselves, if they could overcome the shame they feel concerning my brother’s depression and suicide.
Of course, I have my doubts. I don’t know that I should be writing these words, or that I should publish them. I don’t want to worsen my parents’ or my siblings’ grief. I don’t want to disturb readers. I worry that writing about suicide could cause more suicides to occur. I, too, feel the urge to hide, repress, deny, as if silence will keep me safe.
But I remember the burden of the secret of my brother’s depression and that it seemed to spark the sickness of my OCD. And that when I told the truth to the page, I began to heal. I would like to be helpful to some who might read this, if only to deny that the suffering of mental illness is a disgrace, and to assert that such suffering is common and survivable.
My brother’s note of farewell reveals little. He writes that his death is nobody’s fault, and he asks to be forgiven. I wish that he could read these words and know that he does not need my forgiveness. I did not love him in spite of his suffering; I loved him more deeply because of it.
Dan O’Brien is a playwright and poet whose recognition includes a Guggenheim Fellowship and two PEN America Awards. His most recent book is the memoir From Scarsdale: A Childhood. He can be found on Instagram and Bluesky.
