Tommy’s Story
On the last day I saw my brother he seemed to be in his element, throwing crab cages off a dock in Great South Bay and pulling others out, excited to show me what he had caught. Later we visited his friends and I listened to him brag about his younger brother in medical school. But a cloud of deep sadness hung over Tommy and our time together for which neither he nor I had an answer. He had been sober and drug-free for 1 ½ years. But I felt like he was dead.
Tommy had been to numerous doctors throughout his life. Whatever his problem was, we didn’t have the resources or the skill to solve it. On my drive home to Reading, PA, I came to believe that he would not be healed on this earth. At home that night, I wrote all these thoughts in my journal. The next morning I got a phone call that my brother had been found in his underwear in a bathtub in an apartment in Queens, the water still running, abandoned by the last people to see him alive. He was 30.
Tommy’s problems started early in life. At 12 years old he was burglarizing houses. At 16 he went through Phoenix House drug rehabilitation. At 17 he ran away, came home 6 months later, tossed my father a cigar, and announced that he was going to be a grandfather. He broke 15 bones before he reached adulthood. While we were growing up, he covered for me, figuring that he was always in so much trouble he may as well take responsibility for everything bad that happened. He was the life of the party, but had a dark destructive side. He got depressed. He drank a lot. He couldn’t keep a job.
But he was creative. He composed his own music, played guitar, bass and piano by ear and performed at coffeehouses. He was always trying to pull his life together. He got married. He joined a church. He wanted to prove to our father that he was worth something, but our father died before he had the chance.
I keenly remember how helpless we felt. We had no idea what was going on inside of him. Now I understand that my brother had bipolar disorder. I wonder, if we knew then what we know now, if his story could have been rewritten.