The Thread that Unraveled

An awakening.

I’ve let a good bit of time slip away again before picking back up with this tale. I guess that may be an indication of how much it still hurts, even though I like to think I have already let out most of the pain. The fact that I keep trying to avoid writing this all out means it still hurts and I am still trying to avoid it to some degree. I come from a long line of avoiders, so I thank anyone who has been interested in reading any of this over the years for having patience with my slow storytelling full of long frequent pauses. I have largely had to teach myself how to not avoid what hurts so much and I am aware I have not perfected it yet.

I want to start this one off with a song that meant a lot to Mike. This is one he performed at a large church youth event in Provo, Utah when he was around 16 or 17 years old. It was a talent show and he was the only person who got a standing ovation and it was his picture they used in the local newspaper that reported on the event. He definitely stole the night. I know everyone felt just how beautiful his soul was, even if just for this one night I got to see him shine so brightly. It’s an especially precious memory to me because no one else that knew him or I witnessed this powerful moment of his life. We were far away from home at this time. Just he and I had been shipped off to Utah to attend this multi-day youth event for teens in Utah. We lived in Florida at the time. Had I not been there to witness, this moment would have been lost forever once he died. But instead, it gets to live on in my mind and I am so so grateful for it because it’s a good one.

Once I allowed myself to step outside of the belief system that had been put onto me since my birth I really, truly, and deeply felt my truest sense of self freely unravel and take shape in its place. In true “me” fashion, it wasn’t enough to stop with that, to end my awakening there. I had to throw myself into my processes of unearthing who I truly am versus who I was forced to be to such as a degree that I took a critical look at every single system, structure, and paradigm that I exist within and has taken some sort of ownership over my being all my life. What started with the realization that the religious system I was raised in actually caused me and my brothers a lot of emotional harm and spiritual trauma went bigger into looking at the role that patriarchy plays within my previous religious system and then to looking at the role patriarchy plays within the rest of the world outside of just that religion. I also took a look at how systemic racism played its role within both my previous religious system and also then the world at large. I looked at our judicial system and saw the same things there; the blatant biases that come naturally to every human being not actively trying to avoid them: white judges having more sympathy for young white people in their court systems because they were more likely to relate to them or think of them as similar to one of their own grandchildren while those who looked different or came from a different culture just seemed less relatable and sometimes scarier due to not knowing enough about them. This occurrence of inherent bias is a natural and very accepted part of the human psyche if you learn anything about the psychology of the human mind, yet what have we done to try to avoid it causing unfair treatment in our society? Not much, and the statistics back this up. Black and brown men end up in prison and with longer sentences than their white counterparts to a huge degree and for the same crimes. I looked at how capitalism upheld and allowed all of these harmful systems of belief to flourish within it: how it encourages keeping people on a hierarchical system and actively keeps certain types of people down in order to allow others to stay above them. Churches, schools, courts, prisons, and all major institutions within capitalism uphold and promote the same. I recognized all the ways these systems of belief harmed my brother and I recognized all the ways these systems of belief harmed me too.

When Mike died it cracked my soul right open. I felt that crack and I immediately ran as far inward into myself as I could go, seeking comfort within the deepest parts of my soul that I could find. I cried into the night on many occasions in the earliest couple of years, jealously clutching my grief to my heart as hard as I could, refusing to let it leave me. I had made friends with my grief. I had built a home for myself inside of it. I knew that grief had to take up the space in my heart that housed my love for my brother Mike because something had to fill the space a person once occupied in my life. This is the job of grief. It is the placeholder in your life that takes up the space something else used to occupy.

The last time Mike was in prison it was because he had been arrested for possession of narcotics and an illegal firearm (because of his record he was not allowed legally to own one, but because of his lifestyle he felt he needed one for his protection). He wasn’t arrested for having killed or harmed anyone violently. He was arrested because he made choices as a child that left him choice-less as an adult, and because the choices, inaction, or ignorance of the adults and wider community in his life at that time didn’t prevent it from happening, and in fact many ways fueled it. He was arrested because he was a sad and broken human being who was fighting like hell every day to survive even while not believing he deserved to, and in fact often slipping up and getting it wrong. But man, did he try to pull himself out of the mud all on his own while the whole world around him watched and did absolutely nothing but blame him for falling.

I had just moved to the same state as Mike again for the first time in several years when he was arrested this time. The court room was the first place I had seen him in years by this point, and it would be the last time I would see him alive.

I stumbled my way to the right courtroom after I had taken a fall (twice) on the asphalt of the crosswalk across the busy downtown area. I looked up from the ground to see our oldest brother was actually in one of the cars I had just fallen in front of 2 times in a row. We locked eyes as he stared horrified at the falls he had just watched me take, hand to his mouth. I was in pain but I laughed it off and finished crossing the street to make my way through what felt like a maze of a courthouse. Now I look back and can recognize the way I dissociated through this entire experience, including not being in my own body and mind enough to be able to easily locate where the right court room was. I remember struggling to find it and just barely making it in time. If I remember correctly, even my brother who had been in his car as I was already crossing the crosswalk -falling on the crosswalk- in front of him was already in there before me. I don’t know how that happened other than I was struggling to make my mind and body function that day. I was perhaps being haunted by the fear that had become the 8th member of our family by that point.

Mike locked eyes with me when he saw me out on the bench in the courtroom next to our parents and 2 of our other brothers. He smiled and did a little wave at us all the best he could with his hands cuffed as he shuffled out in the lineup between others who were also going to have their case reviewed by the judge before and after him. It reminded me of a kid looking out for their family while on stage in a school play, just happy to see they showed up in the audience just like they promised they would be. I smiled and waved back, tried to look encouraging. I always believed in him, that this time it would be the last time. He had moments of believing in himself too, he just couldn’t sustain those moments for very long.

He looked so weird to me in his bright orange prison jumpsuit. He didn’t look like him. They made him look like some sort of criminal but I knew that wasn’t who he was, not really. He was one of my favorite people on the entire planet. He had made me laugh until I had tears streaming down my face on more occasions than I could count. His natural (but also hard-earned due to the hours he spent practicing) musical ability on the bass guitar inspired me. His adventurousness and passion for life made my life more colorful. He was so so intelligent. So much so, in fact, that he instantly did the math and corrected the judge on their calculation of his sentencing on the spot and he was right. With as much of a careful measure of non-threatening words as he could muster he spoke up:

“Actually… Your Honor -sir- that’s… not correct. That adds up to less than that”

“Excuse me?” This judge replied, eyebrows raised in surprise. I don’t know that he has ever had someone like my brother correct his math before —someone with the last name Martinez, who has brown skin and a very indigenous-looking face and who is in front of him for drug possession. I am sure he had made all kinds of assumptions about the life and existence of the Latino man he was face-to-face with, and I am sure very few of them would have been correct. However, the math correction Mike made was correct, and it was the difference of several months on his sentencing. If he had nothing else on his side in life he had his own intelligence and quick wit, coupled with a gift of intuition, and I am convinced it was the thing that kept him alive for as long as he was able to make it for. He himself often marveled that he hadn’t died yet and it made him believe he would eventually get healed because, he figured, God must be preserving his life for a reason. He had already had several close calls with death living the risky lifestyle he had been living. He existed right on the fringes of death most of his life, in fact. He danced right on the edge. I always think of Mike when little Simba sticks his head back and says “Danger? Hah! I laugh in the face of danger” in The Lion King. Especially when Simba immediately after shows just how much fear he truly had underneath the surface. That was Mike. So much bravado trying to stave off and hide so much fear and pain.

I remember silent tears streaming down both my and my mom’s faces that day in the court room, my dad and the brothers who lived close enough to attend all looking somber, like the weight of the pain was just as heavy on them too. We all felt the crushing weight that was Mike’s pain extending outward, becoming all of our pain. The way pain does when it is never addressed… Eventually it seeps into everything and everyone around it, consumes everything in its path until all that are left behind are empty shells. That is, until someone is willing to feel it and transform it into the lesson it was always meant to be. This is alchemy. This is what pain can do if we allow it to serve its purpose. If you resist feeling —do not allow it to serve the purpose it came to serve— it will not only never leave you, but it will fester and grow and catch on into other people around you, especially when no one has any emotional boundaries in place. This is exactly what makes a whole society emotionally sick. Pain will always eventually be felt, whether you allow it to be felt willingly, or you fight and resist it every step of the way and end up hurting yourself and others in the process.

I want to share some of the letters Mike wrote to me while he was in prison. However, I realize I already have. So from here, we can jump to a podcast I recorded with my best friend from college, where I read out loud a bunch of the letters he wrote to me, and I talk about his death in my own words. Both the time leading up to it, everything that happened, and how he died. It’s actually broken into 2 parts because there was a lot to say. So if you want to skip over to the podcast for the details immediately surrounding how he died due to the neglect and apathy of our faulty prison system, please feel free since it saves me a bit of typing.

Here is a link to the podcast episode Part 1:

And Part 2: