Lyle
A quiet and painfully shy young man, my baby brother Lyle was. When Marcia Gomes bent down to speak with him at age three, he cried and reached for me. Marcia’s face contorted into a shameful question, one I’ve seen a number of times. What could have possibly happened to this child? Why does he run from people? No child should be riddled with anxiety at such a tender age.
Then I pause, and remember. We are children of alcoholics. We have experienced terrors of the night and fears cemented in our days. We were never physically neglected, but the emotional stuff was scary enough. Not knowing whether or not Mom or Dad were coming home in one piece was sheer torture. I had heard the silent whispers and drunken tangents, rumors of court battles, over-night stays in jail for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Fights inside the home, raging outside the home.
Embarrassment and shame clung tight to us all; all thirteen of us, 7 boys and 6 girls. Lyle was the baby boy, and he literally clung to me with all of his might, as if he would fall, or take a tumble. From day one I clung back. He was my brother, but when he arrived from the hospital, and I was at the age of 16, he became more like my own child. I took him everywhere I went, and empathized feeling his anxiety, because it seemed we, me and Lyle, were anxious all the time, more so than the other siblings.
We loved our parents for sure, and for sure we emulated them by becoming full-fledged alcoholics ourselves. Fast forward to 15 years later, when we had spent an introspective, drunken night at the lake near our home pledging to end the cycle. I would stop drinking because I owed it to my own children and he would go to a rehab in Boston, Massachusetts and become reborn, coming back home with an allergy to alcohol. The sun came up so fast, we thought for sure we were being attacked by aliens, but it was merely the sun. And I swear to God, on the radio, “Here Comes the Sun” by George Harrison played. Not only was it so crazy coincidental, George Harrison was my brother’s favorite Beatle. We looked at one another, mouths agape, seriously happy yet seriously weirded out. For real?
My brother would go on to maintain one year of sobriety. I struggled still. But I was proud of him, and called him on his birthday, April 21, 2000 to congratulate him and to tell him how much I loved him. A few hours go by, and there’s a knock on our door. I peered outside to see police officers. Well, that could only mean one thing - something painful was about to go down. I immediately thought: it’s my brother’s birthday. Did he kill himself? Dear God help me, help us. There had already been a suicide in our family some twenty years earlier, another visit from our town’s finest, informing us another younger brother of mine had taken his life by hanging.
The officers handed my sister a note this day and she fell to the floor. I read the note: “Lyle has been stabbed, a fatal blow to the liver.” We both screamed at the officers, gut-wrenching bellows of sorrow, denying this even being a possibility because it was his birthday after all. This couldn’t possibly happen on his birthday.
Fast forward twenty years later. April 2020 is coming soon, April 21st, my brother’s 48th birthday, and they still have not found the killer(s) of my baby brother. Thoughts of his anxiety and painful societal disorder plague me even more so now, as I have a son who is so similar in nature to Lyle, that not one day goes by that I do not think of him. They are too much like twins. Murder and suicide do not a happy family make.
I’m a writer, and I plan on writing about one topic nonstop. Until they have to pry this pen from my cold dead hands, and that topic is Lyle.