Holding family secrets up to the light in this season of forgiveness

 By Mary Kay Roth

Doug died.

I’ve long wanted to write a book about my older brother – and those simple two words would serve as the first sentence in the first chapter. Because that’s the one truth I know for sure.

Forty-five years ago, at 26, Doug executed a perfect swan dive in front of a Greyhound bus. I’ve always found it curious that, according to the police report, a witness on the bus did not say he did a swan dive, but that he did a perfect swan dive. For years I have nurtured a fantasy in which I would hunt down that witness and ask why he said the dive was perfect, what Doug looked like flying through the air.

Since that bizarre and awful day, everyone in my family has crafted their own personal version of Doug’s demise. Mom and dad wrote a painstaking obituary that maintained he died in a traffic accident. Initially, my sister harbored a simmering anger that probably helped sustain her, resentments she ultimately soothed and released. My younger brother has always considered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as Doug was a newly returned veteran from the Vietnam War.  

My own truth is that Doug was killed by the ravages of schizophrenia and that he took a leap of faith that day and finally quieted the voices in his head. But no matter which story we chose, ever since that bitter cold November of 1971, it felt like we put my brother’s name to rest when we put him to rest. 

We simply have not really talked much about Doug. And when we have tried, upon occasion, we merely nibble and dance around the edges of truth. 

“How many siblings do you have, Mary?”

• There are just three of us, I’m the middle child.
• There were four of us, my older brother passed away long ago.
• He was always a little different. He survived a war.  He battled addictions.

I was only 21 when Doug died. Afterward I almost flunked out of college, barely finished school and promptly headed for a newspaper job in Florida. Many counseling sessions later, I realize that I was likely attempting to escape a family in crisis, perhaps even terrified I would hear my own voices someday. Through the following years I married, had kids, divorced, found meaningful work, was pretty darned content – astonishingly oblivious to a person who had shaped my life and still haunted my conscience.

Over time, however, even the toughest armor gets brittle. And this spring it cracked wide open when I picked up a 2020 book called, Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker, the true and unflinching tale of a family swallowed whole by schizophrenia. The Galvins lived at the outskirts of Colorado Springs on a coincidentally appropriate street called Hidden Valley Road. On the surface they were a postwar American dream – where the mom tried to bake a pie or a cake every day – while inside the house, life was a nightmare. Six of the 12 Galvin sons would eventually descend into schizophrenia: young men born about the same time as my brother, young men diagnosed in their twenties during the 1970s, also just like my brother.

As I turned the pages of that book, I was almost sucked down into a bewildering undercurrent of long-lost memories that left me breathless. The Galvin brothers brought back a vivid picture of Doug in his final years, a young man who was angry yet kind, distant and disturbed, reckless and lost. And, like the Galvins, my brother’s story consumed our family. 

I remember exactly when the trajectory of our lives began to rock and reel with an ill-omened, official notice: Doug was coming home from military service due to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He had stripped off his Navy uniform and waded out into the ocean, because he heard voices telling him to greet an alien space ship hovering over the waves. 

I remember when he finally returned to Lincoln, a different person than the one who had left, watching him see-saw, week to week, month to month, one moment using mind-numbing and barbaric prescription meds – another moment turning to alcohol and drugs – another moment, attempting to slash his wrists with stained glass broken from a neighborhood church.

Ultimately, I was the last one in our family to see my brother alive. My parents had talked him into going back to college and since I was a senior at the university, each day my dad would drop us off in front of the Student Union.

“Good bye, baby sister, be good,” he said that morning – as he always did.   And he walked away. 

Later that afternoon, Doug disappeared.  It was several days before we discovered he had hopped a plane to Hawaii and was walking along the shoulder of a highway near Honolulu when he decided to jump into the void. More than four decades later my heart still wonders if I should have said something that morning. Nonetheless, a week later we met his casket at the airport, stood beside a freshly-purchased cemetery plot during an early-winter snowfall – and buried the ache. 

This spring, however, I think it’s finally time to dig up those family secrets – hold them up to the light –and take away their power.

My parents would probably have cringed at the thought of this blog, but oh how I wish I could wrap my arms around them and tell them there is absolutely no one to blame. Just like the Galvins, although heartbroken, mom and dad pretended to their friends and colleagues that nothing was wrong – while falling short when faced with an antiquated mental health establishment that knew little about schizophrenia. For years they were consumed and overwhelmed with saving Doug. For years after, they were consumed and overwhelmed with the shame and guilt of letting him go.

“I was crushed,” the mother says in Hidden Valley Road, “because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”

My own mother could have spoken those very words.

“For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member,” the author writes.

Indeed, much like the surviving Galvin siblings, my sister, younger brother and I had lived in the shadow of the child in pain, creating a strange but shared experience that left us with an elusive sense of abandonment – and the lingering, unspoken question: Why couldn’t we save Doug?

I read somewhere that you die twice, once when you stop breathing and a second time, later, when somebody says your name for the last time.  

In this glorious season of light, redemption and resurrection, perhaps it’s finally time to excuse our family for any shortcomings and imagined sins. Time to forgive our brother – and forgive ourselves. 

Perhaps today is the right moment to lift Doug up and truly bring him home. To say his name. 

So, how many brothers and sisters do I have?

I have three siblings. I have an older sister, a younger brother – and I had an older brother who suffered from mental illness and killed himself.   

He was a goofy little kid who made us laugh because he always seemed to hear the beat of different drums. 

He was the smartest of the four of us, easily bored, so he would experiment with unusual ways of taking school tests and drive my mom crazy when she would receive yet another call from the principal.

He hated to dance but loved The Kinks.

He never judged people, though he never let them get too close.

He grew to be the tallest member of our family and eventually enlisted in the Navy after pulling a low lottery number during the Vietnam War. Several years later he returned home, lost in a fog of demons and poisonous voices. He never found his way out.   

He called me baby sister.  I loved him the best I knew how.  

His name was Doug.

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