14 Years
14 years ago tonight my brother Jim headed out for a drive he would never come home from. Every year I tell myself, “it’s not going to happen again, it’s just a date, it’s OK, Jim wouldn’t want you to hurt.” And he wouldn’t, he was many things but he was mostly kind and deeply haunted. All I know is that right now I have tears streaming down my face and I can barely see the fucking keyboard and all I want is a chance to give him a hug and tell him how much I love him. Fuck. Just fuck.
Jim in the Tetons.
I wonder who he was praying to when the State Police found him in the interstate near Clifton Forge. I wonder what he was asking for. Poring through his writings, and he wrote a lot and he wrote on everything, there were hints of what was calling him. The diagnosis was some sort of schizophreniform disorder with schizoid traits and a sleep disorder. Which is just a bunch of words trying to wrap themselves around the mystery of how we process this thing we call ‘reality’ as if there is some solid, absolute truth we can anchor ourselves to like Jim did when he was climbing Denali.
He was a climber, and a seeker, and a lost soul with a heart as big as he was tall. He was a genius and he walked from Nepal to Uzbekistan to see a girl he knew and I found pictures in his storage unit in Salt Lake of him standing with guys laden down by bandoliers and kalashnikovs. I’m guessing it was from that trip, it’s hard to say. He went everywhere. He was on the bow of a boat in the Adriatic leaving Bosnia as the cruise missiles came raining down. When he got back to Utah he organized a relief effort for the children he had seen victimized by the war. He chased apparitions of the Virgin Mary from Indiana to Spain to Mexico. He looked for Buddha in Nepal and he threw dynamite to clear the ski slopes above Park City.
He died on a highway, Interstate 81. Later I would discover that he was near where our ancestors settled after leaving the Isle of Man. Maybe he was going home. Maybe he kicked a hole between the worlds like the police say he did to the partition in the police car. That part doesn’t sound like him, not even a little bit. And the bit about going for the officer’s gun doesn’t sound like him either. Maybe he had already left.
I keep starting to write his story but then my heart starts to break again and it takes everything I have to crawl out of the Jim sized hole in my soul. How can I put in words how big he was? The autopsy report says 6’5” but I think that may be a little off, that the truck did that when it hit him. The news reports said that they were transporting a mental patient for a psych evaluation and he escaped and ran into the interstate. That he killed himself. But there’s more to the story. So much more.
