“There are certain people in your life you prepare yourself to lose” – Dave Grohl, Nirvana/The Foo Fighters, regarding the tragic death of bandmate Kurt Cobain.
A part of me always knew I would lose Mike early. I expected to. Yet, nothing quite prepares you for the tragedy of losing a sibling much too soon, even if a part of you always knew it was going to happen. My denial lived in me like a thick coating of ice over the frigid water of my debilitating fear that today would be the day I would get the call that he was gone. So, when the call finally came… I was shocked to find myself still completely and utterly unprepared and still falling apart at the seams.
I’ll start with the earliest days, when we didn’t have a care in the world, and tell stories until we reach now, when it often feels like all I seem to have left are cares.
I have 4 brothers, but because of age differences and gaps, I was only close with Mike growing up. Mike was born 3 years after our oldest brother. I was born less than 2 years after that. It took another 5 years before our next brother entered the scene, and then another 2 years after that when our last one came along. This means that I am 5 years younger than our oldest brother and also 5 years older than the next one after me, and 7 years older than the youngest. Mike was less than 2 years older than me, so we had the shortest age gap between us out of everyone. Many people asked us if we were twins at various times growing up, especially once puberty hit for me and we were close to the same height for a while. He was the first best friend I ever had.
My earliest memory involves Mike. I can remember being little enough to have been set to play in a “play pen” (now called “pack n’plays”) with a few toys, and Mike on the outside of it, pressing his face up against the mesh siding in the most grotesque formations to make me laugh. I remember laughing very hard and knowing that he was absolutely the funniest person in my small world. I also remember when he tried to climb up the side of the play pen and made the whole thing tumble over sideways. It scared me and I cried. He frantically hit himself in the face over and over again and made goofy noises to replace my cries with laughter as quickly as possible, so as not to alert the authorities (mom and dad). Of course, it worked. He was always quicker on his feet than I ever was, and than most other people I knew.
Mike and I had very similar personalities and flaws. Of course, we weren’t exactly the same in every way, but we had the same hot-headed temperaments as children, mixed with the same obnoxious tendencies, loudness, defiance, need to be right and have the last word, difficulties with focusing, and optimism to the point of delusion at times. We both loved to be bothersome, and we fixated on bothering each other relentlessly until we’d both explode in hot-headed anger at one another and fists would start to fly. Our dad would often joke that we were either connected at the hip or trying to kill each other, and there was no in-between. The worst punishment was being told we had to separate and no longer look at or speak to one another for a given period of time. Because, even in our moments of blinding fury towards each other, we still preferred to be together over being apart. I always immediately missed him, even if I still also really wanted to hurt him at the same time.
Mike and I both had ADHD/ADD (although because it tends to present differently in women/girls, mine wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood), which made both of us predisposed to issues with drug abuse and other addictions, such as addictions to food, video games, and anything that is stimulating and/or interesting to us. We just can’t stop as easily as most others once we get into doing something we enjoy, or we completely lose track of time and everything else outside of the thing we are fixating on. When people bring up the things that interest us, we also tend to talk about it for way too long, too loudly, overshare, interrupt and talk over others, and just get overall overly excited about it. If you know anyone in my family, this is pretty much all of us to be honest (and most of us have been formally diagnosed with ADHD/ADD).
His story could have very easily been mine as well. I do not believe myself to be any better of a person than he was, and I resent it when people treat me like I am. I believe myself to be lucky to have had many circumstances in my life be different than his. I believe a lot of factors contributed to his life ending up so drastically different than mine, and some of them began in the earliest days of our childhood. I do not believe he “failed” at life because he spent the majority of it battling a very serious and life-threatening substance abuse problem. I believe that it was life (the world) that failed him. I believe that the timing and circumstances of his birth, life, and environment, put him exactly into the path that was his own. It simply always was the way it would be for him. I also don’t think that many other people could have done any better than he did, given the exact same set of circumstances as his. To me, he wasn’t a criminal or an addict or a prison inmate. He was a humble man who selflessly kept giving and trying to help others around him at all times, who treated anyone as a genuine friend (especially the sad, lonely, lost, and broken, who he understood well), who optimistically kept trying and hoping he’d get better, dreaming and always talking of a future that involved helping others like himself someday, until the day he died at the hands of the state prison that repeatedly ignored his requests for medical attention until it was too late. I did, at some level, always expect to lose him much too early in life. However, I never expected to lose him as unjustly as that.
“You’re just out of my reach, oh, in the shadows. Still young but weathered grey. And the world got a little more dim tonight… Though you had to go, I won’t forget your light. I will protect your light.” -SYML
This March 1st (2026) marks 5 years now since my brother Mike died. In my last post I talked about the last time I saw him alive, as he died right near the end of the prison sentence determined at that court hearing.
If you haven’t listened to the podcast episodes linked in the prior posting, now is the time to go back and listen to those before proceeding because they tell a lot of details that I will now assume are already known moving forward. Now we should be all caught up on what they accused him of at the prison in order have a scapegoat so a correctional officer wouldn’t get into trouble and how we learned that there is legally no protection against that because, as the lawyer my parents contacted to try and fight their claim or get anyone to investigate it said: they didn’t infringe on any of his civil rights as a prisoner by revoking “privileges.” Or in other words, putting a big ticket on his account to block his access to the commissary wasn’t considered to be infringing on his legal rights as a prisoner because access to the commissary is considered a “privilege,” not a “right.” The commissary, by the way, is their only access to basic hygiene items like toothbrushes, deodorant, soap, etc. These basic hygiene items are not provided by the prison and must be bought at jacked up prices that slave wages or help from loved ones on the outside can pay for. So essentially, they cut off his access to basic hygiene items/care and called this “revoking privileges” because hygiene is apparently not considered a basic human right for prisoners, and nothing in the law can really stop this from happening. They can just kind of do it all they want. Then he got sick with pneumonia, a bacterial infection in his lungs that turned into sepsis, requested to see a doctor, and they delayed/denied him medical care until it was too late.
If you go back to listen to the podcast episodes, I also read out the letters he wrote to me from prison, his own words and his own thoughts on things at that time of his life. His voice is important. His words are important. They are his.
Now, I am prepared to tell about the aftermath: everything that has occurred since his death almost 5 years ago until now. I have sat in the silence with my grief a lot over the past 5 years and over that span of time I have let it transform me into a softer, more aware person. I started to see what I couldn’t before. Grief has a way of doing that if you let it. Sometimes, grief is a tool the universe uses to teach a person empathy or to soften a heart that needs some softening, some humbling. Just as it is for many people, my grief became my wake up call.
Something about Mike’s death feels intentional, fated if you will. These days I lean into the belief that I came here to this life to learn this specific lesson, and then help save others from similar pain by being willing to self-reflect, learn, forgive, and heal out loud for everyone to see. If it saves anyone else, great. I guess the hardest part is knowing what I now know and trying to save others from the same pain but they don’t want to hear it or see it. They want to keep their hardened heart and their tendency to de-humanize other people because it feels so much easier than facing the truth and the pain. I know that some people just won’t, not until death or some other tragedy comes to knock on their own door, claiming someone they personally know and love. The thing about pain is that it eventually will demand to be felt, seen, witnessed. So you can avoid trying to face it or feel it or see it, but eventually it will always come up to the surface and it will hurt even worse the longer it was avoided, plus potentially hurt more people in the process once it finally bubbles up. For anyone who is open to learning from my life lessons, I will gladly lay them all out here. I genuinely hope it helps someone else avoid some pain and soften their heart the easier way. However, if not one soul wants to take anything I have to say seriously I know at the very least that getting it all out of me in written form is beneficial for my own healing. So, heed my warnings or don’t. That is your own call to make.
I returned back into an old notebook I had been using around the time of Mike’s death where I know I wrote out a lot of how I was feeling and what I was experiencing at the time, at the request of the grief counselor I had been seeing then. I honestly haven’t even looked at this notebook since that first year. It truly feels like a time capsule, like I am traveling back to another place in time, to a completely different version of myself altogether. I cringed a lot, as I do when I read my earliest posts from this very blog, which I commit to not going back and rewriting now. I believe in being authentic and at that time, that was exactly who I was, even if she no longer is even by just 5 years later. Not that I would change anything major, just mostly my own storytelling choices, some of my word usage and tone of voice and even some perspective. But I remind myself of the quote “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough” by Alain de Botton.
The woman who started this blog 4ish years ago was not ready to write much of what I am now ready to write. But 5 years ago… that was fully on the other side of the coin than I am now. It’s wild how grief can cause an ego death just as thoroughly as any drug-induced state possibly could. Yes, here we are 5ish years down the road and I cringe and cry and cringe some more, and then cry some more, as I re-read all the little details that I have since forgotten; brought back to me now, back from the dead to soothe… or to haunt? Probably both.
I acknowledged my issue with avoidance that I struggle with still —as we can all see by how long it has taken for me to write out just a few blog posts— the day that I wrote out all the details of what happened to Mike: 4/08/21. I talked about how shortly before Mike died I had been having a conversation with our oldest brother admitting that I had been avoiding/procrastinating responding to Mike’s letters every time they came. I avoided checking to see if I had any new emails from him and I avoided responding to the ones I had read. Weeks would go by between times he would hear from me, sometimes months. I know he communicated with our oldest brother almost daily. How deeply grateful I am to him for always being there for Mike and being the only one in Mike’s life who consistently was. I love him so much for that.
In the conversation I had with our oldest brother I had confessed to him that I thought perhaps I tended to avoid answering Mike’s letters because I didn’t like being reminded of how sad I was that he was in there, that he was wasting away in a cage like he was. I didn’t like being reminded of his pain. I didn’t like it, so I didn’t look. I couldn’t handle it. Or I chose not to handle it.
I vowed to do better. But soon after this, he died.
He died as everyone looked away from him but our oldest brother. My intuition, and a QHHT hypnotherapy session I once did, tell me that part of his role (although not his entire life purpose) was to go through it all with Mike so he wouldn’t have to do it alone. That he didn’t want Mike to be completely alone and that he also volunteered to be firstborn to shoulder the brunt of young inexperienced emotionally avoidant parents and try to shield the ones who came after him from as much of the generational pain and trauma as possible. If that’s real, I love him so much for that too.
The day that shifted everything:
I was on my way back from a girl’s weekend in Vegas with my sister-in-law, the one married to my younger brother just younger than me, when she got a call from my brother, her husband. Her face turned dead serious as she spoke quietly in Portuguese to him, and I felt like a bowling ball dropped deep into my gut. She put him on speakerphone and he said “Hey, so we’re actually heading out the door right now to… to Tucson.”
I was confused and surprised, “What? Why???”
Then in a very shaky voice he said, “Mike is in the hospital apparently. It’s… it’s really bad. They don’t think he’s going to make it.” His voice cracked as he said it.
“What happened?!?! A drug overdose?” I replied.
“I don’t know, something to do with drugs I guess.” This was incorrect, as those of you who listened to the podcast episode know. You would also know that I constantly feared that any money I gave him would be used to get drugs that would end his life. This was another reason I avoided him. I couldn’t look as he withered away but I also feared making it worse. So, I stayed frozen in my fear and pain most of the time. Doing nothing to help. Doing nothing to hurt. Not knowing what exactly to do. Whenever I could snap myself out of it, I helped here and there. Then I would wait in worry and fear… wait for the call that I accidentally sent him to his grave. I let fear keep me from reaching out, from connecting, from helping.
So when the moment really did come, the first thing I felt was panic. I started racking my brain trying to remember if I had sent the money that I told him just days ago I would send. It was really complicated trying to send him money now because they put that ticket on his account so we couldn’t just send money to his account or he wouldn’t actually get it. He would give me the cash app handle of some friend’s girlfriend on the outside and have it put on his account instead and then his buddy would buy things for him from the commissary. This didn’t always work and it was complicated so it wasn’t something he was having anyone do for him too often, but he had been very sick lately and just wanted something to eat that he wouldn’t have to get out of bed and go to the food hall to go get. “Did I ever end up sending that money through?” I frantically thought to myself. I actually tried but was having trouble with the site the prison system uses for emailing inmates. It seemed to be down. So, I resolved to do it once I got home from this trip. I exhaled, but it did not dispel the fear in me.
I told him we would head straight to Tucson as well and meet them there. I worked on calming myself enough to be able to get the words out and then called my husband to let him know. I had a strong feeling that this was it: the moment I knew I didn’t want to see. The one I had been avoiding thinking about ever coming. Some part of me deep down knew from the moment my younger brother’s voice cracked. And I knew he knew too. A Pisces like him recognizes. That crack was truth speaking out “This is it.”
The happy chatter my sister-in-law and I shared at the start of the drive turned into a heavy silence, and a steady stream of silent tears became the woebegone rivers forging their paths down the stony terrain of my face. This was our state for the entire rest of the 4 hours we still had left until Tucson. She comforted but she also let the silence be, and sometimes that is just what is best. A Scorpio like her understands: Sometimes, we just gotta let things be silent and still.
When we finally got to Tucson I got an update from my parents and younger brother who had been there. They had let my parents through but were not wanting to let my brother and I back to see him because we were “not on the approved list.” There was a whole long back and forth, including a call made to the warden of the prison, and hours later we were finally let back.
We were not allowed to bring back our phones or anything else to the ICU where he was, so there are no photos, which is fine with me. He didn’t even look like himself anyway. I mean, he did. There was the same crab tattoo to signify his sun sign, cancer, the same letters to spell out his daughter’s name tattooed right over his heart; but what lie there on that bed in the ICU being made to breathe by violent machines was just a vacant body and I knew it. I felt it before I even talked to the doctor. I remember it being the first thing I felt. I know my younger brother felt this too because he said so later on. Like I said, a Pisces knows. They feel/sense these things at a deeper level than words or logic can express. I think all people with major water sign placements do, as the water element is highly intuitive.
I asked the doctor what was going on, why this happened, and how drugs came into play.
“What? Drugs? No, this was sepsis from an infection that looks like it started in his lungs and then spread to his bloodstream.” He seemed perplexed by the fact that drugs kept being brought up at all. I asked him the direct question no one else seemed to want to ask: if he thought he was going to even make it through the night.
“No, I don’t think so unfortunately. I hate to say never, because you know miracles do happen as I have seen with my own eyes, but at this point that’s what it would take: a miracle.” I felt a strong sense of finality with his words and a confirmation was sent to my heart in that moment: “this is it.”
I told my parents when we went outside because I wanted them to emotionally prepare themselves. My dad, unsurprisingly, did not want to hear it. My mom, as usual, looked somber but said nothing. We got the call just past midnight that night.
The drive home was a 2 hour one for me, after a long day filled with hours of driving already. My younger brother and his wife called and asked if I was okay to drive myself home or if I would prefer to have them take me and then come get my car tomorrow when I come back to the hospital again (assuming we all will come every day we can, to see him and sit with him for as long as we were allowed to), but I knew there was no going back to that hospital. I also knew Mike was joining me for my drive home and I welcomed his haunting company. I wanted to allow silence to let me feel his presence nearby. More silent tears the whole way home… but I felt him there the whole way home too, making sure I made it safely, making sure I wasn’t alone. Just as clearly as if he really had physically been right there in my passenger seat keeping me company. I kept expecting to look over and see him there because of how clearly it felt that he was.
It hits me now how much wisdom lies within grief when we can quiet ourselves enough to listen to it, and when we can allow it to soften us rather than harden us. My brother died at the hands of a very faulty justice system and at the fault of people who couldn’t see beyond the prison jumpsuit and the exterior, who assumed all kinds of things about the person he was because dehumanizing him made it easier to justify putting him in a cage and treating him as sub-human.
Few people beyond my husband know this, but within the last year I myself ended up in the emergency room for pneumonia. I was treated and healed, but there were moments in the thick of it where I couldn’t breathe at all without severe pain and I was scared. The difference between me and Mike was simply access to healthcare and being treated with humanity. I lived on so easily where he died, because circumstances were simply different for me. Circumstances largely beyond either of our control, where it was easy for others to dehumanize him and just walk on by as he suffered. No one looked, no one cared, no one helped. Why? Because of the label: criminal. In this country, when people are in pain and in need of saving/helping we toss them in cages and call them criminals for having acted out and we treat them as irredeemable, unforgivable, worthless… like trash we toss in a garbage bin. Yet, we understand as mothers that when our children act up it is a cry for help, a need not being met. Negative behavior is a way to communicate to the world that all is not well within when someone doesn’t have the means, education, or ability to communicate it any other way. Adults are not so different than that, especially ones who never had any one teach them how to properly express their unmet emotional needs.
There are many labels we use in society to help us de-humanize others in order to be able to look away from their pain: criminal, illegal, homeless, lazy… It’s easier to decide they are simply less worthy humans than it is to ask ourselves why or look under the hood to see what might be the real problem. It is easier than admitting we might be wrong or don’t have all the information, and certainly easier than doing the work of caring. Especially because many people know that actually addressing the problem often means making changes to how things are currently being done, and change is hard and inconvenient. So, we look away. We ignore it. We avoid thinking about it. If we take everyone whose pain is spilling out of themselves and lock them up in cages away from the rest of society then we get to pretend like the problems don’t exist. And people like my brother continue to die, completely neglected and cast out from their community instead of helped.
Over the first several months after his death I felt him the strongest as I put together a book to give his daughter. I knew he wanted me to give her something that would help her feel his love for her and I knew, knowing Mike, that had to include music. He felt through music, expressed himself through music, and loved through music. He exists within the very beats and notes of certain songs even now. If I close my eyes and listen to the music that spoke to his soul most, I feel him right there in the songs. So I compiled a book of pictures of him as a baby and growing up, so she would have something of her dad’s. I included a list of songs that I knew would express his love for her. The most interesting part of this whole project was that half of the songs that ended up on her list I hadn’t ever even heard before I started on the project. They just all found there way to me and every time I heard a song that felt right, it got put into a playlist for her.
This is how Mike communicates to me even now: through music.
One time more recently, I went to a psychic medium’s group mediumship night and she said a bunch of stuff to me about Mike, but it was the ride home that really hit me strongest. I said out loud “Ok Mike, you choose the next songs” and I put my playlist on shuffle. On came on the song “Remember Me” from the movie Coco. I thought that was beautiful. Then the song finished, and the next one that came up on shuffle was a different version of the same exact song a second time. The playlist I had on has over 200 songs and is 13 hours long. The odds of that happening randomly were pretty small.
So, in the spirit of the way Mike himself communicates most, below are 3 songs for you.
Remember Me, from Coco, so you can remember what the lyrics say in this song.
One song that I had never heard before it went onto his daughter’s playlist “My Wildest Dreams” by Ron Pope
One song in which I can always feel his presence within the bass notes: “Soul to Squeeze” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This one is because I grew up hearing this bass line coming from Mike’s bedroom incessantly for months and even years as he practiced it and then just loved to play it. A song he felt a deep connection to.
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.
In my last post I described a little of what Mike and I’s teenaged years felt like. To continue on that thread I will tell you that by the time Mike was around 15/16 years old he was deeply buried in the swirling world of his constant drug use, trying to keep his demons from catching up to him. It was easy to go along with the painted perspective that Mike’s pain and problems and illness were all his own fault and that it was simply up to him to stop it himself, and even further: that it was justifiable to be angry with him for his suffering because when his pain spilled out and affected any one of us it was because of his “selfish choices,” as if he was selfishly choosing to annoy us with his bleeding out and cries of pain. It may seem harsh to describe this way, but that’s because what happened was harsh. It was dark, it was devastating, it was full of pain stabbing in from all sides. This is a story of a family engulfed by their collective pain.
By these years everyone was drowning in fear and anger and pain. My parents were distraught and at a complete loss for what to do about 2 sons lost deep in the trenches of their shame and addictions. They tried everything from moving to homeschooling to calling the cops on their sons to scare them into behaving. They tried to use religion to fix them, which only ever made things worse since the religion was so steeped in shaming thought patterns and beliefs that it only inflicted further harm. They did everything but see or address the real pain or acknowledge the ways in which the systems we were living in were harming all of us. They believed what my brothers were doing was sinning and that they were being bad, instead of seeing 2 sad kids that were disconnected, in pain, and trying hard to escape. Something they had learned from the church and other systems/institutions they had grown up in was to blame the “sinner” instead of taking a look at the system instead. This is something toxic systems do to keep people weakened enough to more easily control, and also to keep people from noticing the true source of pain as the systems so we don’t try to leave, overthrow, or change that system. It works well, because instead of ever seeing the system as the problem, people will spend all their time blaming the individual for making bad choices and then blaming themselves for not knowing how to have prevented it from happening. They think the only options available are to blame their kid or blame themselves as the parents, but never dare defy, question, or critique the system itself.
This is the atmosphere/energy that prevailed until I went off to college. At this point I was mostly angry with and disappointed in Mike because I was under the impression that he could stop using drugs any time he really wanted to but just chose not to and that must just be because he doesn’t want to stop badly enough. I was hurt by that. I was hurt that he would steal from me in order to pawn my stuff to buy drugs. I was hurt that he would drive a vehicle with me in it while high and crash us into construction barriers on the way to early morning seminary. I was hurt and I blamed him because I was taught only to see his fault in all of it.
While I was in college, our parents moved back to Brazil with our youngest 2 brothers (and by this time our oldest brother had come home from his mission, gotten married, and moved off to Arizona) and Mike and I were the only two left living in Florida. I had an opportunity arise where my roommate was getting married and thus leaving our lease, which would mean I would have the whole apartment to myself. I decided to extend an invitation to Mike to move in with me so he could get away from the crowd he was around and get clean. I had high hopes. I drove the hour and a half to where he was living and picked him up, all of his things shoved into a single black trash bag.
He humored me. More than just humored me, I do think he really convinced himself at the start, while he was still feeling good, that he could really do it this time: Just quit, cold turkey —Turn a new leaf and just magically be healed, cured, whole again… just like that. This was his fantastical dream and sometimes I think he truly believed it could be done like that: just skip the healing, avoid working through the pain, and go straight to the healed part. His healing was never going to come about without a lot of work, time, effort, and authenticity, born of love. His healing was never going to come without his tribe rallying around him expressing unconditional love and acceptance of him, without the people mattering most to him actively loving him sans conditions or judgements, sans shaming him.
So Mike and I went on just as naively and innocently as we had as kids, scheming up a plan to really for real run away from home and have a grand adventure together. This time the game of make believe was that we could get him clean simply from wanting to badly enough. We had a really good couple of days but he soon became violently ill from trying to detox completely cold turkey. He asked me if I knew of anywhere to get some methadone nearby. I didn’t. I was helpless as he would throw up in the bathroom and sweat through his sheets in the night. I took him to a priesthood holder for a blessing to help him get through his detox. Later that night Mike laughed as he described “shitting blood” into the toilet and reminded me that detox, especially cold turkey, ain’t for the weak of heart. Again, he asked if I knew of where to get methadone in the area. I could tell he was only getting worse. One more night of suffering and by morning he was gone. All that was left behind was a note saying “I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. Got a greyhound bus back to Orlando” and a pissed off downstairs neighbor saying he borrowed their DVD set and didn’t give it back —plus a few missing DVDs of my own. I had lost him.
I tried to stop and see Mike every time I was in the Orlando area and through those visits I met a couple of the girlfriends he had at different times. There was one he was excited to introduce me to, “she’s so cool, she reminds me a lot of you actually. I think you two will get along.” This would become a sentiment he would express multiple more times about future girlfriends, each time as hopeful as the last. Unbeknownst to me at that time, this one would become the mother of his one and only child. She and I were introduced to each other and he told me he was so in love with her and just really wanted us to know each other and be good friends. He seemed to want me to approve of her I noticed, which surprised me as I hadn’t ever considered until then that he might care what I think. I didn’t realize just how much he cared what everyone thought of him. He always cared so deeply but wanted to act like he didn’t in order to protect himself from the rejection and shame he was so accustomed to feeling.
A few times Mike expressed to me how he had given up on trying to get any “good LDS” girls to date him because none of them would want anything to do with someone who had the kind of life experiences he had had: someone who never served a mission and also had an addiction problem. He was right because the church was actively teaching young women to seek out a returned missionary to marry, and to choose to date and eventually marry only young men with the highest moral caliber and strongest testimonies (AKA the ones following all the rules the hardest). He was very much an outcast within our community system. So, he confided in me that his plan was to instead find a girl who was as “messed up” as he was, and then convert her to Mormonism and they would get clean and mentally healthy together and basically live happily ever after. Even in the midst of all this pain he was trying to figure out a way to conform and fit into one of the systems causing him the most harm and damage on a day-to-day basis. He had been taught to believe everything was his own fault and that he deserved all the hardship he experienced. He was taught to believe that if others didn’t feel safe and loving towards him, it was because he was bad and made it hard to love him. It was so imbedded in him that he was the problem that it came out of his mouth constantly as if it were just fact. I would see a lot of this in the letters he would later write to family members from prison.
There’s a certain amount of mystery within Mike’s adult years for me as by this time we were not living under the same roof anymore and I was off doing all the things that were expected of me: going to college, getting married (to a returned missionary, of course), and starting a family. During that time Mike’s girlfriend had gotten pregnant mere months before I did with our first child. So, I found out I was going to be an aunt maybe just a few months before I found out I was going to also become a mother myself. Mike was ecstatic about this. He was envisioning his life as the daddy and protector of this little girl, and excited to know that she would also soon have a cousin near the same age in my oldest child. He was very excited when I gave birth about 6 months after his baby girl was born and he exclaimed to the world on Facebook that he was an uncle! He could feel his fantastical dream of just kind of “getting over” his substance abuse problem one day within his grasp. He had the romantic love, the growing family, and a future full of hope.
However, his girlfriend was suffering and struggling just as much as he was and unfortunately, they both were in so much pain and struggle that the relationship just couldn’t be healthy and thrive. By the time his daughter was born their relationship had ended and his name was decidedly left off of the birth certificate, much to his dismay and protest. Things had gotten ugly again. He kept trying to find his way into his daughter’s life but he knew that the best thing he could possibly do for her was get clean. So he relocated to Arizona in order to start fresh and get his life together, to prove himself worthy enough to be in her life. Again, he had every intention of finally and magically just ending his drug abuse by just wanting to badly enough. During his time in Arizona he had a lot of ups and downs. He would do well for a while and be earning steady enough income to send money back to his daughter to help support her, and beg for every opportunity he could get to be able to speak to her and see her in video calls. Then he would fall again, slip back into his old ways, and end up arrested and spending time in jail and/or prison again for possession of drugs. He was homeless for a period of time where he lost a ton of weight and looked like a completely different person. Those pictures are still the hardest for me to look at.
Again, he would get into new relationships, each time hoping that somehow redemption and grace for himself would be found within the newest relationship, the newest love. He was so obviously starved for unconditional love and acceptance and was desperately trying to find it anywhere he could from outside of himself. He drifted from person to person silently begging to be loved and accepted, trying to cover up the self hatred he felt with the love and acceptance of others. Always hoping the next person would be the one who wouldn’t judge or reject him or wish he was someone different than he was, who wouldn’t lay the blame for everything at his feet, making him feel that he deserved all the bad things that happened to him in his life. Someone who wouldn’t ever abandon him.
Unfortunately, what Mike truly needed was healing from all the shaming he had endured and was continuing to endure that made him into the bad guy he now fully believed he was. What Mike needed was a rallying support system that could continue to love and accept him fully without walls, without exceptions, without judgments, without criticisms. The thing that all human beings need in order to really thrive: a loving and accepting community. This was not something he would find for himself in this life outside of his relationship with our oldest brother and friends he made that were all drowning alongside him and thus unable to pull him out from the undertow. The most any of them could provide was a sense of camaraderie and understanding.
The last place we left off before I went on hiatus from this blog was how my brother Mike struggled in his earliest years, and how the people and systems around him were already failing to meet his needs from the very start, how his community was failing to support and properly love him at home, at school, and at church, and how he was told to just be better, then left largely alone to his pains and struggles. If you didn’t see any of that in what I’ve already written, go back and read again. I may have initially written the first two posts with more subtlety.
If you think I am fully off the hook myself you’d be wrong. Let’s talk about the me in all of this. Let’s get real. Let’s dive into the shadows. At the same time, we will enter more of the teenage years.
As we grew into our awkward preteen years Mike and I remained close. We went from collecting Pokémon cards together and plotting to run away like Tom Sawyer, to setting out to ride all the craziest and fastest rides at theme parks together once we had made the move to Florida. We stayed up late talking about navigating social life in middle school, telling secrets, or just laughing about stupid things. Some of my favorite nights involved staying up way too late in the kitchen with Mike, sometimes others like our mom and our other brothers, just laughing and laughing. Mike was jovial. He was comfortable being the entertainer: doing an impression, a little dance, or telling jokes to keep everyone laughing. He was incredibly perceptive and intelligent. He read people, the room he was in, situations, everything around him, as if it was as easy as reading a book. He missed very little, especially when it came to people, which was the thing he was always most consistently interested in and focused on.
One thing we did not talk about during the earliest preteen years, was Mike’s drug use. By this time, unbeknownst to me, he was already getting deeper and deeper into the world of experimentation with various drugs. When I was in 6th grade and he was in 8th, he was expelled from our middle school for being caught with weed at school (on Drug Free day no less, when the whole school was lined up to make the word “D.A.R.E.” in the field with our bodies for someone in a helicopter to fly over and take a picture of). I knew something had happened that day because the air was thick with silent anger when I got home from school. I was told Mike had been expelled but no one would tell me why because it was none of my business. Mike wouldn’t even tell me. He was reluctant to allow me into this side of himself because he liked the untainted innocent perception I had of him until this point. He was not ready to show me a side of himself he knew I would be shocked to see and may severely affect the way I see him moving forward, especially when adding on the filters of our rigid and unrelenting Mormon belief system. This belief system added whole new layers to the shame and guilt each one of us kids felt as we grew, much of which I didn’t come to realize until adulthood was not how much shame and guilt other kids not growing up in a high demand religion were experiencing.
When we made “bad choices” we weren’t just a kid who made a mistake because we were still feeling out the boundaries and limits of the authority around us, trying to ease overstimulation, trying to demand the attention we each needed, or just plain making mistakes due to imperfection. When we made bad choices we were bad. We were following Satan, listening to him instead of listening to Jesus. We were sinners who needed to repent, and everyone was disappointed, especially Jesus. We were making Jesus cry when we sinned. We were taking his sacrifice for granted. If we didn’t live righteously we would be letting down our ancestors and we would be forfeiting our family because if we don’t live our lives the prescribed way we can’t be together with our families in the Celestial Kingdom for the rest of eternity (this is where you want to go when you die if you’re Mormon). The weight of our eternal family pressed heavy on all of our shoulders. The list of transgressions we must avoid in order to escape being shamed for our actions by authority figures was long. The consequences were not just mental, or physical, but spiritual. Every act was a declaration of allegiance to either God or Satan. Everything we did was judged at a spiritual level, determining our entire sense of worth as spiritual beings.
So as you can imagine, looking through the added lens of an unyielding belief system that demanded obedience and added the weight of eternity to every decision we made, it was hard for Mike to allow me in to knowing about the side of himself that would likely cause me to recoil and confirm what he was already fearing at his very depth: that he was unworthy of love.
And he was not wrong to try and protect himself from my judgements and the shift of my perspective towards him. I did judge and reject him. I did add my disappointment of him to the pile. I had learned a specific set of beliefs since I was born that made it clear that what he was doing was wrong. It was bad. He was making bad choices and following Satan. He was sinning in a major way, not just a little way. Breaking the Word of Wisdom was inconsistently a huge deal. I say inconsistently because if you ate too much sugar and meat and didn’t exercise enough you were fine and you could still attend the Temple. If you drank coffee, did any illegal drugs, or drank any alcohol, you were no longer worthy of attending the Temple. So some offenses have always been much heavier than others. Doing any illegal drugs was probably the worst one on that list to most people. It didn’t matter that addiction is actually just a symptom of mental health problems and an indication that a person is in deep and complicated pain. It didn’t matter that it was a choice made in childhood and then by adulthood less of an active choice and more a form of survival. If you were doing it, you were the bad one and you were the only one to blame for your actions.
I told him many times that he needed to stop the drugs and repent. I thought I was helping, that I was inspiring him. I even once wrote him a letter that expressed all the anger and disappointment I felt towards him due to his drug use. I told him he was selfish and harming everyone who loved him. That letter is one of the biggest regrets of my life. When he needed love and acceptance most, I responded with fear and shame and blame. I responded selfishly, focused on how he was hurting me and how his addiction negatively affected me. Now that is something to truly be ashamed of. The drug use was not. The drug use that started as a form of rebellion against the authority and systems that had let him down and couldn’t be trusted, had turned into a way to cope with the deep rooted feelings of worthlessness and abandonment that kept burrowing itself deeper and deeper into his psyche. I thought by making him realize how his actions harm others it might wake him up, not realizing all I was truly doing was confirming to him what he already believed about himself: that he needed to earn his love from others, that he deserved everything bad in his life, and that he was unworthy.
And yet, no one was saving him. Our oldest brother was lost in the same world of misery and shame and escapism. At the very least, in all this Mike was not completely and totally alone. Our oldest brother was there with him suffering just as hard. No one saved them. Everyone felt the best way to help was by reminding them of how drugs were bad and a sin and how sad my brothers’ choices were making them and making Jesus. As if piling on more shame to two kids already swimming in it was the answer. As if that was going to pull them from the depths of their pain and out of their growing addictions.
I don’t believe in blame, I believe in looking at the flaws in whole systems and communities. When it comes to people, issues are not usually ever as simple as just within the individual or even within the one factor of their existence. There was a whole storm of madness that created Mike’s situation. But the fact of the matter is that no one saved him. No one saved our oldest brother either. Or if anyone has, to be honest, it’s his wife. But certainly no one in his life before her. No one extended the right help to either of them or ever stopped to consider if their approaches kept harming more than helping.
On the other hand, much of the shaming approach came from a belief system that had people desperately trying to avoid losing their family for all eternity by telling their kids they needed to take accountability for all their poor choices rather than ever taking a look at their own accountability as the adults, nor the accountability of the system that benefits from people feeling unworthy of attaining higher spirituality all on their own. This feeling of unworthiness keeps people beholden to the leaders of this system to tell them how to live their lives. These systems need people to question their worthiness while placing absolute faith in the worthiness of those that lead the organization/institution. The parents in this situation are less to blame than the system is. The parents are just conduits of the messages of the system, used by the system as the most effective way to create a devoted servant: feed the sense of duty to obedience and unworthiness into each member from the earliest moments of childhood, in the home. It’s mostly foolproof. The parents think they are doing the best thing for the child, all while feeding them poison daily. It is not completely their fault, they didn’t know any better.
To face the reality of the ways in which you as a parent may have spent every day feeding your child emotional and spiritual poison, is an unbearably painful hell I don’t even want to imagine. Yet, I am not completely unfamiliar either, as I started out the first several years of my kids’ lives using some of the same shame-induced phrasing as “when you make a choice like that, you are choosing to follow Satan” and “Your choice makes Jesus sad.” The biggest parenting regret I have so far, is not breaking free from the cycle of this harm sooner. I don’t think I could have broken free with only the resources, knowledge, and upbringing my parents had. Myself having multiple degrees in psychology , including lots of study on the psychology of healthy childhood psychological development, plus the advantage of watching what happened to Mike as someone who understood the emotions of it all from his side… It takes strength and courage to face and accept the truth of what kind of pains we inflict on our kids without meaning to, without letting that realization and admission destroy yourself. It has never been difficult for me to not only freely forgive my parents for the role they may have played, but also hold immense depth of sorrow and compassion for them in what role they were assigned to play in regards to Mike’s existence in this life. Me being honest about what occurred is a part of facing the pain in order to alchemize it. Pretending anyone’s contribution did not occur does no one any good and does not allow anyone to acknowledge the pain so they can allow it to transform them. I hope someday we all forgive ourselves.
When it comes to me, I reacted with the same mentality as my parents did, what I was taught. In my mind Mike was the problem, not the community in which he was existing. In my mind he was simply making bad choices and he wasn’t wanting sobriety bad enough. He wasn’t trying hard enough. He wasn’t being good enough. He was continuing to choose badly and it was completely his own fault. In this system, the fault and blame are always squarely on the shoulders of the sinner, the individual. So everyone just tells them to be better, to act better, and to repent. No one asks “What’s going on with this person that’s making them act out? Are we as a community failing to meet the needs of this individual? How can we work together to support them? How can we be a safe space for them to be fully themselves without feeling the need to hide bits of themselves to avoid the shame and fear they expect from us? How do we better address their emotional needs? How do we learn to love them in better ways that will build their confidence and resilience? How are we not showing up in the right ways to love this individual?”
I did try to help in my own ways. My parents and others in the community tried to help in their own ways too. Unfortunately, we failed to connect and help him in his way, in the way he needed us all to show up, which was to just love and accept him for who he already was, to make the space around him safe enough for him to put his shields down and just be. As I came to better understand his life purpose as well as my own, it became much easier to let the pain of what happened to him transform me for the better. But before I tell more about the positive transformation into the light, we need to fully explore the depths of the shadow.
To wrap up for today, below are the lyrics to Galapagos by The Smashing Pumpkins, as well as a YouTube video of the same song so you can read the lyrics while listening to the song. This is a nostalgic song, one Mike knew well by a band he listened to often, and it felt fitting for today’s descent into the shadows.
“Ain't it funny how we pretend we're still a child? Softly stolen under blanket skies
And rescue me from me And all that I believe
I won't deny the pain I won't deny the change And should I fall from grace Here with you Will you leave me too?
Carve out your heart for keeps in an old oak tree And hold me for goodbyes and whispered lullabies
And tell me I am still the man I'm supposed to be
I won't deny the pain I won't deny the change And should I fall from grace Here with you Will you leave me too? Will you leave me too?
Too late to turn back now I'm running out of sound And I am changing, changing And if we died right now This fool you love somehow, is here with you
I won't deny the pain I won't deny the change And should I fall from grace Here with you Would you leave me too? Would you leave me too?”
I know, I know, I left everyone hanging for 3 years while I went into my little hidey hole. Opening up your heart to the world is a scary endeavor after all, and I was still deeply in the trenches of my healing when I started this blog. A lot of life has happened for me in 3 years, but can we stop for a moment and just appreciate the synchronicity of the number 3 in this tale of tragedy and transformation (including the name of this here blog)??? Whether you believe numbers have significance or not, historically and spiritually there’s a lot associated with the number 3, many considering it to be a divine number. In Christianity it is associated with the Holy Trinity, it’s the number of days Christ was in the tomb before he was resurrected, and he also was crucified at the age of 33. In Hinduism, the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) represent the 3 aspects of the divine in creation, preservation, and destruction. In Buddhism, the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha) represent the main facets of the Buddhist path. It can represent Beginning, Middle, and End, the 3 major components of a story, or Birth, Life, and Death, the cycle of life. In Astrology each sign has a modality and there are 3 types of modalities: Cardinal signs that initiate a new season and are action-oriented, Fixed signs that stabilize the existing season and represent what is sturdy and enduring, and Mutable signs that conclude the seasons and focus on letting go of one thing in preparation of another. In breathing exercises used to calm our nervous systems there are always 3 parts: intake, holding, and exhaling. In Numerology, the number 3 is associated with creativity, optimism, and spiritual guidance, encouraging one to tap into their talents and embrace their unique path, expressing themselves authentically. (Can I just say that even now as I went to google the numerology of the number 3 to remind myself and verify, I was met with my phone showing me that the time is 3:33pm Ha!). 3 is a reminder to maintain a positive outlook and embrace the beauty and joy in life, a symbol of communication and the importance of expressing oneself, and also associated with growth and expansion. The angel number 33 can be tied to spiritual awakening and transformation. When Mike died at the age of 33, it started something in me. Within a year I began a spiritual transformation that began when I was about 33 years old myself where I found myself veering from the religion I had been brought up in. Now, 2 years later, I finally feel truly shifted into the realest version of me and it has been such a journey in getting here.
In my mind, Mike’s life was divided into 3 main parts: his early childhood, his teenage years, and his adult life. We have discussed the early childhood part and a touch of the teenage years too. I’d like to deep dive more into his life but I also want to take a pause to acknowledge my absence and to let you know that for the past 3 years I have been undergoing a major transformation in my life, mostly at the spiritual level, and invite you to join me on a ride as I explain how everything happened and how it all ties back to Mike. He was and is my catalyst for change, the biggest lesson of my life and the one who ties everything together. His role and my role are interconnected, completely intertwined. And now I understand the why of his life and his death, and subsequently the why of my own life as well.
I am eager to get this whole story out of me but there’s a lot to it and I know people’s attention spans are only so long so I will refrain from trying to tell the whole thing at once as I know that would come out feeling like a book rather than a blog. I will continue to write as much as I can whenever I can, until we get through it to the point of regained hope and empowerment and a stronger sense of purpose (or in other words, present day).
In the backyard of the blue house in southern Idaho. Summer time.
Mike always had something to prove.
I remember an early childhood in southern Idaho with all the layers upon layers upon more layers of clothes and snow gear heading off to school in the winters. I remember going out to shovel the driveway with dad —mostly the two older boys and dad shoveled while I just messed around “helping” here and there— and then coming inside for hot chocolate and a fire going in the fireplace. I remember summers filled with yellow dandelions and making wishes on their white seeds as we blew them into the wind. I remember my room downstairs in the blue house, with the red and white polka-dotted bedding. I remember the play room just off the backyard door and our swing set and slide in the backyard (areas where I spent the majority of my time in that house). I remember chocolate chip cookies that were hot and ready for when kids got home from school.
Me in the playroom, with the door to the backyard seen right behind me
We were fortunate to have a lot of things many other people in this world do not. We had two parents in the picture who cared and tried their best, and we always had a decent house to live in with enough space for our family’s needs. Our dad was college-educated with a good, stable job. Our mom was a stay-at-home mom. Although our mom very obviously and admittedly did not enjoy cooking and was no gourmet chef, we never wondered when we would next eat or where our next meal would come from. We didn’t qualify for any government aid nor ever needed reduced lunches at school. We ate dinner together as a family in the evenings the majority of the time. We weren’t in a war-torn country nor feared for our lives daily. Our parents were good people who genuinely wanted to do good in this world and teach their children to do good too. We were a church-going people. Every single Sunday. In fact, our entire Sundays were dedicated to the Sabbath, The Lord’s Day. Our home was much more religious than the average. We had what was labeled as “a good home” and a very “nuclear family.” My parents checked all the boxes they had been taught to check. They followed all the rules and did everything right, according to society and our white middle-class conservative community standards. All of this is pertinent because it is not the type of home life most people envision when they think of someone who spent the majority of his adult life in and out of jail cells, and who had spent time living on the streets, homeless, more than once.
However, as lucky as we were to have so many privileges in our life and advantages over others, no one and nothing is ever perfect. Mike was blamed for a lot. He was a rowdy child. He definitely had the hyper-active type of ADHD (I think he may have been the only one of us kids who did, or at least his was the most extreme) and had an especially difficult time with being told to sit still, be reverent, be calm, and not be extremely impulsive. He liked to make people laugh and would rather be the funny guy doing whatever it took to get a few laughs than ever be serious or reverent or sit still anywhere. He also was really and truly not physically capable of staying still for very long. Being as impulsive and hyper as he was, he often was treated as a “bad kid” by adults in his life. He got more punishments, scowled/disappointed faces, talking-tos, spankings, lectures, threats, and raised voices than anyone else in the family, without question. Consequently, he developed a defensiveness to protect himself from feelings of shame; a defensiveness that often got him into even more trouble. The moment he was pointed at and blamed as a child, his defense was deny deny deny. He never admitted to anything, even if everyone literally watched him do it right before their eyes. If he got a spanking he would stubbornly say “that didn’t even hurt.” When it came down to being cornered and desperate (freeze, fight, or flight): he was a fighter. This is how he learned from a young age to protect himself from a world that felt like it was set against him from the beginning. He grew to distrust authority figures very early in his life. Try as he might, the rest of the world seemed to be on a different sheet of music than he was, and he learned early on that trying to play their tune was impossible for him to do. So, he better be ready to put up a fight whenever he was confronted for playing the wrong notes.
On April 20, 2012 Mike posted lyrics to the song “The Unforgiven” by Metallica on his Facebook page. It expresses his experience and perspective.
“New blood joins this Earth And quickly he’s subdued Through constant pained disgrace The young boy learns their rules
With time the child draws in This whipping boy done wrong Deprived of all his thoughts The young man struggles on and on, he’s known Ooh, a vow unto his own That never from this day His will they’ll take away…
…They dedicate their lives To running all of his He tries to please them all This bitter man he is
Throughout his life the same He’s battled constantly This fight he cannot win A tired man they see no longer cares The old man then prepares To die regretfully That old man here is me
What I’ve felt What I’ve known Never shined through in what I’ve shown Never be Never see Won’t see what might have been
What I’ve felt What I’ve known Never shined through in what I’ve shown Never free Never me So I dub thee unforgiven…
…You labeled me I’ll label you So I dub thee unforgiven
…Never free Never me So I dub thee unforgiven”
Climbing on all the furniture, not at all an uncommon occurrence for a boy who could not sit still
I contributed to some of the blame aimed in his direction. For a long stretch of time (5 years) I was both the only girl and the youngest. Our parents could be relied on to favor me in any conflict or altercation between Mike and I, which was a frequent occurrence, because Mike was “older and knew better.” I knew this clause and I relied on it. I very quickly figured out how to use it to my advantage whenever I was really fed up with him. He may have barely touched me, but I’d quickly and dramatically call on the authorities to come to my defense: “mooooooooooommmmmm! Mike hit meeeeeee!” Even if I had started it and even if I had egged him on… I knew it didn’t really matter, I would win and he would lose. Every time. I distinctly remember a couple of times pausing in my “distress” to stick out my tongue and smile from behind the protection of mom’s legs while he was getting into trouble. I knew to wait until she wasn’t looking and immediately put my sad face back on when she was. I didn’t understand what it felt like to be on the other side of that until I was no longer the youngest (and boy was that time a wake up call for me when it arrived). For that reason, and many others, I am incredibly grateful that my parents didn’t stop with me. Being the only girl and the youngest would have absolutely turned me into a monster.
Although Mike built up a tough exterior of acting like nothing ever got to him and he didn’t care, he was quite desperate for love and approval, like any other kid. This caused him to seek out approval and validation any way he could. He never set out nor wanted to be a “bad kid.” Expectations that were especially unattainable for him (such as sit still, stop being impulsive, don’t be obnoxious, and listen/focus) set him up to fail over and over again. Each failure brought him shame and self-loathing as well as loathing for whomever he came to see as his enemy (those who were setting the expectations and rules). This resulted in more acting out and fighting as hard as he could… to win, to gain power, to prove himself, to protect himself from feelings of shame, to feel accepted as he was.
This is in no way a claim that our parents are to blame for Mike’s difficulties with substance abuse that landed him in prison multiple times (and consequently cost him his life). It wasn’t just on our parents and they weren’t the only adults in his life that struggled to know how to effectively teach and help him. There is a whole educational and societal system that dictates expectations on how kids should be behaving and acting, as well as how to respond accordingly. Parenting methods of the past focused much more on punishment, and using authority over children to force submission (remember how school teachers used to hit kids with rulers or put them in the “dunce” corner?) rather than teaching, understanding, and helping them. Teachers, adult leaders at church, relatives, everyone… What this does is set adult against child and starts a war, rather than solves a problem. I don’t say any of this because I am some perfect parent, because I am not. When my own children misbehave, my instinct is to react angrily and “lay down the law,” to force their will to bend to mine, too. It is really difficult to break out of old habits and ways of thinking, even if you actually have the knowledge and education to know there are better ways. I imagine it’s pretty impossible when you don’t even have that.
Besides all of that, I do not believe this issue of adults not knowing how to deal with kids like Mike to be the sole reason or source of his problems anyway. I am not as narrow-sighted as that. This was but one piece of the complicated and many-pieced puzzle that helped shape his life. Had this been the only piece present, I don’t think he would have had the issues he did. Plenty of other kids have had similar difficulties with ADHD to varying degrees and also with adults in their life that didn’t know how to handle it. Many don’t end up with substance abuse problems (although it does increase the likelihood, as studies have found a distinct correlation), so this alone could not be the sole cause of anything. All this part of the puzzle really did was create in him a feeling that anyone in a position of authority was against him and a need to prove himself to anyone and everyone, including peers.
Peers. To explain Mike’s circle of friends, we must first discuss our oldest brother. Anyone who has an older sibling can understand the hold they can have over all of those who come after. Some oldest siblings have more influence over their younger siblings than others. Our oldest brother was everything. He had much more power than I think he has ever really realized or understood. He was almost sacred to us all in those younger years. He was not only the oldest child in the family, but the oldest grandchild as well. Stories of the delight over his arrival as a baby, and how he never got put down because everyone wanted to take turns holding him, circled around most family get-togethers. He didn’t get in nearly as much trouble as Mike because he was a mild-mannered kid rather than explosive, and always apologetic. He was wise and calm, rather than emotional and reactive like both Mike and I were. He was loved and favored in many ways, for his good-naturedness and humility. I grew up knowing him to be the wisest, smartest, calmest, and absolutely the coolest kid in our family. I always wished to be more like him in those ways. I didn’t know until later in life the extent and causes of some of his own demons and struggles going on under the surface. He hid his feelings and struggles well. From my view, he was nothing but the ideal. I never could have dreamed of disagreeing with him or thinking he was wrong about anything. What he said was fact of life, it was law. If he said Nirvana was a cool band, there was no question that it was. If he said a TV show was dumb, well then it just simply was. When he said anything that seemed different than what I had witnessed or believed myself, I changed what I believed because my truth couldn’t possibly be as true as his. I saw the same admiration for him in the eyes of each of my other brothers as well. In some ways, this level of admiration and worship really damaged me, because I wasn’t like him and that made me feel not good enough and rejected for years. I knew he didn’t take much notice of my existence while we were growing up, but as he was 5 years older I didn’t expect him to. He did, however, notice Mike. He let Mike, and only Mike, into his inner circle. He regarded him as his friend, peer, and complete equal, despite the 3 years between them.
Our oldest brother and Mike
Mike once revealed to me that as a child he had tried hard to prove himself and be accepted into our oldest brother’s inner circle and group of friends. As a little kid, he felt lucky to get to tag along with our oldest brother everywhere and be included. Chuckling, he told me that he knew he had to prove himself to be hard enough to hang with a group of cool older kids like them. He had to make sure he wasn’t the annoying little brother who just got in the way. So he made efforts to be the hardest and the angriest, to make up for being the youngest and smallest. He wanted to be taken seriously. I do remember when we were growing up he often reminded me, with great satisfaction, of the fact that all of his friends were several years older than he was. It was a status thing for him. He loved the success of having proven himself worthy of such a cool crowd. With them he was accepted, applauded, included, and validated. What’s more, they understood his pain and anger towards authority figures. He found a place with the disenfranchised misfit youth of the 90s that were fed up with the establishment, and they welcomed him with open arms. They recognized his pain and anger, and he recognized theirs.
Although there were ways Mike often sought my approval and validation as adults, he never seemed to need it as kids. While he spent his time with our oldest brother stealing cigarettes from the local grocery store a few blocks away and smoking them in secret at the park with their friends (and then moving on to weed and other things not too long after), with me he dropped all pretenses of being hard and acting older than he was. With me, he could just be. He had nothing to prove to me as kids. He was already the older, bigger, smarter, cooler sibling. The fact of the matter was, as much as our oldest brother regarded Mike as his peer and his equal (and I know as they grew older and the age gap was not quite as wide, this definitely became true), he wasn’t really. Not at this point at least. At the end of the day, an 8 year old who goes out and steals cigarettes and smokes them at the park with 11 year olds is still just an 8 year old. He still had the maturity level and mentality of a kid who wanted to sometimes just play make-believe and do kid stuff.
We played with Barbies and G.I. Joes or sold lemonade in front of the church building by the busier street, hatched plans to secretly adopt a puppy and then somehow successfully keep it hidden from our parents, or rode bikes to Arctic Circle with enough change in our pockets for ice cream. At one point we planned an escape. We were very serious about our plans to run away, as we packed a couple of suitcases and set up our meeting time and place. We dramatically talked of leaving our mean parents behind and going off to travel and explore the world together. He told me we would be just like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I wonder if the fantasy of leaving everything he had going on felt like a relief to him. No more pressure to try and be accepted and validated by parents and teachers, prove himself to his peers, or anything else. Just have a grand adventure out in the world without anyone telling us what to do anymore. Without any pressure.
He kept me separate. He didn’t like the thought of me being roped into the darker side of life he experienced with our oldest brother. The first time I knew anything about his drug use at all was the time he got expelled from our middle school for having been caught with weed at school on Drug Free/D.A.R.E. Day when I was in 6th grade and he was in 8th. And even then, he refused to tell me why for months and months. I begged to know but he didn’t want me knowing, and mom and dad certainly weren’t going to talk about it. I remember my head reeling when he finally told me. I was shocked (I was innocent). I didn’t even know just how young he was when he started to smoke cigarettes and then weed —and then get into more serious drugs— until we were both much older. I never knew any of that was going on in those earlier years.
I was in high school, and our oldest brother was off in Brazil, when Mike finally let me in a lot more to the realities of that side of his life. By that time I knew he had a drug problem, but I didn’t know much more than that. I remember the conversation as we sat in the car together, parked by the side of the road in a neighborhood he was going to drop me off at. I know he didn’t tell me everything, but he told me a lot more than I had previously known about his experiences. With our oldest brother gone, it felt like he needed to let someone else in and be truly seen by someone in his life. He needed to unburden himself. He told me things about our oldest brother that he made me promise not to tell anyone, which I never did. He told me things about their experiences and his feelings about it all. Before this conversation, I only knew the very bare minimum. I know that a part of this separation of his two worlds was in effort to protect me from it, but I also think another part was to preserve the innocence of our relationship, to keep an area of his life untainted. Mike seemed to house his innocence and vulnerability in me.
Thirty-Three 