Horror

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Requiem. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

“I think writing really helps you heal yourself,” [Alice] Walker once told The Times. “I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.” — New York Times Magazine

It’s hard to return to a weekly task in the midst of catastrophe. I sent you the obituaries last week for Sam and Adlai, my brother and nephew, but it all felt too new and too raw to say more about what had happened to them. I guess it always will. To come back here, though, I need to tell you about where I’ve been.

(The rest of this post deals with violent and disturbing subjects.)

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What happened, according to the police in Salt Lake City, is that my brother killed his six-year-old boy with a shotgun, then turned it on himself.

Later that night, Saturday, May 18, my dad saw an email—an odd choice; maybe Sam did it so he could schedule a delayed send—suggesting he was in serious trouble. He raced down the long straightaway of 1300 South to his son’s house and broke the door down and was thrust into the awful role of a first responder who can do nothing to respond and will never shake the scene. He was on the phone with my sister at the time, and she had to break the news to my mom. I don’t bring my phone into the bedroom, so when the dog barked at 4:30 a.m. Eastern and I got up and glanced at the screen on my way to the bathroom, there were 29 missed calls and two texts, from my sister and mom. Each began with one word: “Emergency.“

A psychiatric evaluation made in his teens determined that Sam probably suffered from a severe mood disorder with psychotic features. As I told Robert Gehrke of The Salt Lake Tribune, this illness was intertwined from the beginning with hallucinogenic and psychedelic drug use, which no doubt—in such a young brain—preyed on his susceptibilities. Ten days before my first bike crash, in 2007, Sam also crashed, as my mom always put it: He went through a psychedelic episode so disturbing to him that he agreed to accept treatment, even though he’d recently turned 18 and could not be forced into it. My mom had just finished getting him established in residential care when she flew to Los Angeles to help me come home from the hospital.

The story from there is long, but its more recent chapters carried hints of redemption. Sam and his spouse- and then ex-spouse-to-be, Naomi, had a baby. His name was Adlai. In his vulnerability and that of his parents, and in the brilliance of his heart and mind, Adlai bound my family together as maybe nothing else could have. He also gave his father a defining purpose. It was not any child that would have had the effect he did. He was numinous. Adlai spent more time with Sam in recent years for the benefit of his education, which his parents agreed would be best in Salt Lake City.

But Sam was in bad shape. I knew this, and struggled with it, because relating to Sam had never been easy—or, really, doable—for me and because I was far away and because I knew that the rest of my family was as on it as they could possibly be. He had asked for their help, and opened up to them. Some of the most hopeful signs were in just the last few weeks. My mom and brother and sister and nephew skied together on Mother’s Day. Sam was under the weight of truly crushing debt, and we don’t yet have a good sense of how or when his illness had progressed where it did. But all the signs from him were that he was turning toward his family, that he was moving toward an acceptance that he needed, and could benefit from, a major psychiatric intervention.

The only thing that has brought me any sense of starting to understand what happened next is the model, proposed in psychotherapy, called Internal Family Systems. I’m not an expert, but the key insight put forward by IFS is that our psyche is composed of many parts. While we may think and act in certain contexts as one self—and there is, indeed, an overarching Self from which these parts emanate—beneath (or on top of) this integration is a scrum of contradictory and even battling entities, and any of these may at different times possess control of our thinking and behavior. Thus, and I think only thus, can it be true that a loving father would be the murderer of his son—and that a loving, vulnerable son could wreak ultimate violence on his family.

In Salt Lake City, on a shadowed Saturday in a mud-drenched glen where hundreds of people sat through hours of pouring rain, we said goodbye. Over and over and over people have told me that one or both of those memorials was the most beautiful they’d ever attended. Someone told my dad, he said, that “they came away with this deeply felt understanding that Sam and Adlai were literally two of the most loved individuals anywhere on the earth.” For these truths to live alongside such horror tests the edges of the soul.

James made an altar for each of our dead.

Each day I inevitably see a picture of Adlai, and this reduces me to tears. But I guess reduce is not the right word: What seeing Adlai does is, it elevates me to tears. I ascend to them. On Monday I knelt with James on Adlai’s bedroom floor and blessed him and his father and asked for their blessing. “You’ll know what I mean,” I said to them, quoting a song I sang in choir when I was a few years older than Adlai, “when I say: The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you. And give you peace.” I told them they could always come to me.

This is not a mourning journal, but then neither can I apologize for talking about mourning here. “Some of us might have responded to their deaths by withdrawing and going silent,” a dear friend and mentor wrote to me this week. “I know that is not your way.” Our bodies bring loss with us, and they bring what we have lost. These things accrete in the creative body. Nothing I write, and nowhere I run, will ever be the same as it would be if Sam and Adlai were still with us. Their loss has made the work a different thing.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.