I didn’t know him well; we weren’t friends. He was born when I was a teenager and while I knew his parental units, they were a decade older than I was, still are; he was a baby bump I saw, a toddler who ran around dinners, poolside parties, and picnics much more than he was ever, to me, a living, breathing adult human. Whenever I ran into him as an adult, which was rarely, we inevitably spent time catching up, but he would rarely meet my eyes. He died in November, too young, only 50, and while it was not a surprise, it surprised me, it angered me, it gave me another chance to remember those days and wonder what could have saved him. Certainly not I.
We cannot save people, we can only love them. I didn’t know him well enough to love him, but I once knew his father and mother very well, and I knew a lot about this man, their son, because of those relationships; they shared with me – his dad especially – details of their lives and the life of their now dead son, and I want to get it out of me, out of my head, and out of my heart which aches for him because I know these specific, heart-punching facts.
The marriage was already over, but – why not have another child, maybe that’ll patch things up, make us make it work. This was a bad idea, he knew it at the time, the dad, but he wanted to be a good Catholic. This decision was one that Brendan suffered for; how could anyone unwanted, used as glue, not suffer for it? His brother, several years older, was a wanted child, born into a new marriage and more hopeful relationship; timing is everything. His older brother was smart, athletic, popular, slim and charismatic; he looked like, even sounded like, a much more attractive version of his dad.
Brendan, however, was born into the last gasps of the marriage, even if no one would say it aloud; he was born into chaos and mess. His dad already knew he’d made a terrible mistake, marrying the first girlfriend he’d ever had. He was a virgin, so was she. So what, but he’d come to realize that he was trapped, for, she, Brendan’s mother, would never give him a divorce. She was a devout and committed Catholic, stubborn, and a shopaholic. She only ever read magazines. She was clumsy. Her habits had come to disgust him. He took to drink; it was the 70s.
Brendan was smart, and sensitive. He was a good student, but lacked the easy charm and wit of his sibling; he even looked like his mother’s side of the family, was a lumpy, chunky kid, feeling the disdain of his father sharply, an extension of his dad’s ever growing dislike of and animus toward the boy’s mother, his very clunky, clumsy Catholic wife. Brendan was her child, her baby. The older boy was his dad’s. Fine.
Sometime in the early 1980s Brendan was molested numerous times by an older boy, a teenager. His father told me this a decade or more later in the timeline. Brendan’s dad, my former friend for this and many other reasons, was drinking heavily during this period, before getting sober and moving out, finally asking for the divorce he’d long wanted. He spoke sharply to the teenager who had abused his younger son, but did not insist on therapy, or any other form of intervention for his child. He was, had been for years, fcuking everything that moved, traveling into PA for his Master’s and an eventual PHD., determinedly skirt chasing even after he finally got sober, living out the teenaged fun years he’d never had, adventures galore! If his youngest child was suffering, well, aren’t we all? He’ll be fine.
Only he wasn’t. Brendan was an intelligent, empathetic guy, obtaining a Bachelors at a SUNY college not far from our mutual hometown, but he was also a depressive, as are many men and women who are sexually abused as children. His marriage, such a hopeful sign, broke up not too long after it started; he struggled to see his young daughter, struggled too to find work that would accommodate his increasing number of illnesses, mood swings, and bouts of depression. A serious case of the blues landed him in a psych unit in his early 30s where lithium was prescribed. It helped him somewhat, but it also blew out his kidneys.
His life for the last 15+ years was a struggle, his health precarious; he threatened to skip his dialysis appointments, a choice that would kill him, creating constant anxiety and drama for everyone who cared about him. He experienced more depression, more failures, went on permanent disability, found a girlfriend whose background, life, and appearance horrified his father, received lots of interventions by and help from his enabling mother and exhausted and resentful dad (buying him a used car, giving him security deposit money, driving him to appointments 90 miles away, paying for healthcare and psychiatrists and more), who perhaps could have saved himself (saved themselves) a lot of trouble and pain and possibly even his son’s life if he had simply taken care of his kid at the time he was abused or in the years that followed, during Brendan’s middle and high school years.
But what do I know? It’s easy to judge someone, anyone, from the vantage point of a very different life and set of experiences. I didn’t attend the funeral. I sent a note to his mom, who has moved away to live near her surviving child, her eldest. His dad and I are not in relationship. He looked the other way while his peers were abusing my peers and many others at my alma mater over three decades. He sexualized me for years in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable, including in front of my parents, whose frozen faces in light of his being completely inappropriate instructed me, a female child, on how valueless I really was, or might be, if I stood for it, as they stood for it, frozen in the conventions of their day during the rapidly changing social mores of 1972 and 1973 and beyond. I let it go, of course I did, because that’s what children do in the face of adults behaving badly, right? Not any more.
Brendan was one of the saddest men I ever knew. His body finally failed him, gave up the ghost, and he is finally, finally at peace.