For John Brannan, 2/10/1949 – 1/19/2023
I have a memory of my brother that circles back to me more often than others. Really, it’s one of my clearest memories from that time. Jack must have been twenty years old, as I think I was about five, and he was playing guitar in the living room of our house in Orinda. I remember the fabric of the chairs, the fireplace, and my big brother sitting on some kind of footrest thing we had. I wanted him to go back to a part earlier in the song, and I was asking him to “Make that sound again.” He kept trying, playing a few different things, but, “No! Not that part. Play the squeak sound!” I don’t think he ever got what I was asking, as the guitar player is not always aware of the sound their fingers make as they release one chord and slide quickly to another fret for the next; the zippery-squeak of calloused fingertips on bronze-wound strings of the acoustic guitar.
That’s it. That was the whole memory, and really the only one I have of that version of my brother. Soon after, the dark fog of schizophrenia rose, filling our entire house, and my big brother became lost in it. Eventually, slowly, the fog thinned out, but my brother Jack was gone.
I’ve never been entirely clear about what happened to him over the next few years. I learned from later conversations with my dad that Jack had spent some time at Napa State Hospital, and I know from letters found in my mother’s things that Jack had spent some time in Indiana – both with family and at a mental hospital there. He may have lived with us some of the time, but I’m sure that my parents kept me shielded from contact with him (the traditional parenting practice of attempting to spare the child one kind of trauma while inadvertently inflicting another.)
I’ve never been very clear about where my parents were for the next few years, either. I mean, I do have memories of them from that period, but I mostly recall being with my sisters. They were in their mid-teens, and in retrospect I can surmise that they spent a great deal of time baby-sitting me while mom and dad were devoting all available hours in the futile search for any effective treatment for their broken son.
My next memory of my brother was perhaps five years after that first one. There was yelling, my sister was running from him, slammed the door of her room in his face. Next, she climbed out of the window as he broke the door. That’s the way I remember it, anyway. Whatever actually happened, I don’t think Jack was allowed to stay with us after that. I would only see him on rare occasions, and in all cases my parents were present.
Flash forward to November of 1977. I’m thirteen, my sisters are twenty and twenty-one, brother is twenty-eight. It’s Thanksgiving, and Jack is visiting. He’d been mostly away for a couple of years, with occasional collect calls for money. But he’s home for the holiday, there’s family around, and he’s showing us his recently-acquired tattoos. There was a scarab beetle on his chest, and a two digit number on his wrist, in bold, one-inch-tall numerals. Somebody asked him, “What is 78, Jack?”
If you’ve never been around a crazy person, this will not make sense to you. Schizophrenia carries with it many things beyond a simple inability to reason well. For the observer, there are odd tones of voice, hand movements, and moments of staring that last just a bit too long. There can be a distinct smell that seems to come from the specific chemical imbalance in the schizophrenic’s body. For the afflicted there are moments that are funny for no reason and sounds that are suddenly terrifying, but nobody else notices them at all. The victim might be drowning in the inescapable din of a ticking clock, but at the same time he may not be able to distinguish between the flavors of straight mustard and cookie dough. And then there’s the hard-to-interpret facial expressions.
“What is 78, Jack?” His face somehow managed to express the notion of surprise that this was not obvious to everybody, while at the same time showing that he had no idea. He gave a barely perceptible shrug, saying simply, “Next year.” And that was that.
Really, I mean that was that. Jack walked out of our house that day and didn’t come back. At all. For nine years. No calls, no letters, and nobody saw him. Mom wondered, then worried. As years piled up, I’m sure she began to assume the worst. After half a decade, I heard her tell a relative that Jack must have died. I doubt she believed it herself, mind you, but I think she wanted people to stop asking about him. I admit, by the time I was twenty, I had mostly forgotten about him. He never came up in conversations, I don’t recall seeing any prominent pictures of him in the house, and the few relics of his youth were stored away in the attic. In a sense, he no longer existed. That was until 1986.
I was twenty-two years old, and living in my van. My girlfriend and I decided to drop into the bar at the old Auburn Hotel for cheap happy-hour food and a couple of beers. After a little while, I turned to her and said, “That guy halfway down the bar?” she looked, nodded, “I’m not sure, but I think that’s my brother.”
“You have a brother?”
With my faded memory and his weathered appearance, I didn’t actually recognize him. But each time he would raise his glass, the tattoo on his right wrist would be visible. It was the enigmatic “78.” There was no doubt it was him. But how do you talk to someone that no longer exists? Do you? Well, apparently I don’t because when I left the bar I hadn’t said a word. In fact, I didn’t say anything to anyone for a couple of days, then I told mom and dad.
They somehow managed to track him down. He was living on the streets in Sacramento, in doorways and along the levy. He had found some way to get his disability check, but it turns out he’d get robbed by other street people right away so he spent most of the time eating found food and handouts, burning garbage to stay warm at night. He was feral. He didn’t feel comfortable indoors and would not accept anything that could make him a target on the streets – like new shoes, or a coat. Our parents spent the next few years slowly acclimating him to civilization, and getting him connected to mental health services again.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. I can assure you, it takes one to look after an adult who has not the power of reason, as well. Mom, dad, my sisters and myself have been helped by dedicated people. The Office of the Public Guardian, for example, was instrumental in keeping a roof over my brother’s head for a long time. Placer County Mental Health was great about getting Jack the help he needed. Turning Point got involved, and for more than two decades managed his living situation as well as medication.
After mom and dad passed away, the village was a little smaller. Then Placer County faded out of the picture as well. Eventually, the Public Guardian absurdly declared that Jack was stable and dropped him from their books. I’m sure that saved a few bucks from an over extended budget, and it happened to coincide with his eligibility for medi-care. (Happy 65th birthday, Jack!) Eventually the circle of support was only Turning Point, my sisters, and myself. By this time, though, my brother had gotten used to living indoors again. He wasn’t prone to wandering off anymore, such a relief that was.
Over the last 37 years, he would occasionally talk about places he had apparently been. Mainly in Oregon, Chico, and Sacramento, and a few others. He has not been good at answering direct questions about these places, and it is not even clear if he had lived in any of them during the nine-year blackout period, but his occasional remarks make it sound as though he must have had some help from someone along the way. Whoever you are, I thank you.
A few years ago I learned the secret of talking with a schizophrenic, and I’d like to share that with you now. My brother’s mind was a small piece of driftwood, constantly being tossed upon a swirling and sometimes violent sea of sensations and experience. To venture into that sea was generally futile, and I would find that I could only make it a few feet from shore before I would have to turn back. At other times I would be swept along for a few moments by a seemingly benevolent wave, only to be deposited roughly onto the shore again as Jack would drift further into the eddies and currents that surrounded the jagged coast of his thoughts.
Sometimes I could find a point of focus, and use it to orient his flotsam thinking. Asking, for example, about his cousins, aunts, and uncles would often become a lighthouse to guide him for a few minutes. At these times, I would get to see my brother again – the young man who lived and breathed, captain of his own ship, at a time before my earliest memories. But inevitably the tide would take him away again, and I would be left on the beach waiting for the next turn of the currents to sweep him up to my side again.
And that’s the secret: waiting. I found that I needed to listen to the ramblings of my crazy brother for a certain amount of time before his driftwood brain would roll passed and reveal the important bits of information. I recall a day when we sat together in the yard of his board-and-care home, me listening to him talk about random topics. He listed everything on his plate at today’s breakfast, and how many cups of coffee he had, including the partial ones. He told me how many minutes it had taken him to walk to the convenience store down the street yesterday, but then corrected the number several times. I got to hear a longish (but barely coherent) account of his social life at the care home, which mainly revolved around the choice of stations on the TV, and trading cigarettes for candy. Then, thirty minutes into the visit, he mentioned going to the emergency room.
“Wait, what?” I managed to get a little more information from him, about a bronchial infection, and an overnight stay at the hospital. He could not clearly articulate any more detail than that, so I had to ask the staff, and his worker at Turning Point. It turns out he had previously been diagnosed with COPD, and this was just the latest installment of what was to be a battle over several years of deteriorating lung condition.
So, I learned to listen, and to let him talk, regardless of any lack of interest on my part. As the tides shifted, he would occasionally stop short to ask how my daughter was doing in school, or how my mother-in-law was, or if I’d spoken to my sisters recently. His memory was quite good, you see, even though his ability to make rational decisions was not. He knew people’s birthdays, remembered what I told him of the family news and the life events. It would just take time before the currents would bring him within reach again, and my brother would show up for a moment, stand on the sunny beach with me, then go away again.
And recently the village grew, one more time. It was about two weeks ago now that we got a whole new team engaged, like a life-raft in the waning storm of Jack’s life. He’d been in the hospital again, this time for several weeks. The flu had landed him in ICU, but as he was recovering from that he became sick again. He’d lost quite a bit of weight, and it had been decided that he would need to receive oxygen indefinitely. He was not going back to board-and-care, but skilled nursing. The emphysema was winning, and the new team was hospice.
The day my brother left us was January 19, 2023. When I say this, or write it, or even think these words, an odd picture forms in my mind. Yes, I saw my brother on the hospital bed, breathing slowly and (for once) not speaking very much. I saw his beard, his skinny arms, and heard the wheeze of his breath. But I don’t feel like this is the man that recently left. Jack left every time the waves took his mind away from shore again during our conversations. Back in the 1980’s he left us each time he would go back to the streets of Sacramento, as our parents worked to get him to stay. He left when he walked away for nine years after that day in 1977. He had left us after the fight with my sister.
None of these copies of my brother are the one that come to mind, as I work to make his final arrangements. Instead, the man that I put to rest now is the one that sat playing guitar in the living room when I was five. It’s the last memory I have of my whole, complete brother, and the only one that really matters now.
Jan 20 2023
The Day My Brother Left
For John Brannan, 2/10/1949 – 1/19/2023
I have a memory of my brother that circles back to me more often than others. Really, it’s one of my clearest memories from that time. Jack must have been twenty years old, as I think I was about five, and he was playing guitar in the living room of our house in Orinda. I remember the fabric of the chairs, the fireplace, and my big brother sitting on some kind of footrest thing we had. I wanted him to go back to a part earlier in the song, and I was asking him to “Make that sound again.” He kept trying, playing a few different things, but, “No! Not that part. Play the squeak sound!” I don’t think he ever got what I was asking, as the guitar player is not always aware of the sound their fingers make as they release one chord and slide quickly to another fret for the next; the zippery-squeak of calloused fingertips on bronze-wound strings of the acoustic guitar.
That’s it. That was the whole memory, and really the only one I have of that version of my brother. Soon after, the dark fog of schizophrenia rose, filling our entire house, and my big brother became lost in it. Eventually, slowly, the fog thinned out, but my brother Jack was gone.
I’ve never been entirely clear about what happened to him over the next few years. I learned from later conversations with my dad that Jack had spent some time at Napa State Hospital, and I know from letters found in my mother’s things that Jack had spent some time in Indiana – both with family and at a mental hospital there. He may have lived with us some of the time, but I’m sure that my parents kept me shielded from contact with him (the traditional parenting practice of attempting to spare the child one kind of trauma while inadvertently inflicting another.)
I’ve never been very clear about where my parents were for the next few years, either. I mean, I do have memories of them from that period, but I mostly recall being with my sisters. They were in their mid-teens, and in retrospect I can surmise that they spent a great deal of time baby-sitting me while mom and dad were devoting all available hours in the futile search for any effective treatment for their broken son.
My next memory of my brother was perhaps five years after that first one. There was yelling, my sister was running from him, slammed the door of her room in his face. Next, she climbed out of the window as he broke the door. That’s the way I remember it, anyway. Whatever actually happened, I don’t think Jack was allowed to stay with us after that. I would only see him on rare occasions, and in all cases my parents were present.
Flash forward to November of 1977. I’m thirteen, my sisters are twenty and twenty-one, brother is twenty-eight. It’s Thanksgiving, and Jack is visiting. He’d been mostly away for a couple of years, with occasional collect calls for money. But he’s home for the holiday, there’s family around, and he’s showing us his recently-acquired tattoos. There was a scarab beetle on his chest, and a two digit number on his wrist, in bold, one-inch-tall numerals. Somebody asked him, “What is 78, Jack?”
If you’ve never been around a crazy person, this will not make sense to you. Schizophrenia carries with it many things beyond a simple inability to reason well. For the observer, there are odd tones of voice, hand movements, and moments of staring that last just a bit too long. There can be a distinct smell that seems to come from the specific chemical imbalance in the schizophrenic’s body. For the afflicted there are moments that are funny for no reason and sounds that are suddenly terrifying, but nobody else notices them at all. The victim might be drowning in the inescapable din of a ticking clock, but at the same time he may not be able to distinguish between the flavors of straight mustard and cookie dough. And then there’s the hard-to-interpret facial expressions.
“What is 78, Jack?” His face somehow managed to express the notion of surprise that this was not obvious to everybody, while at the same time showing that he had no idea. He gave a barely perceptible shrug, saying simply, “Next year.” And that was that.
Really, I mean that was that. Jack walked out of our house that day and didn’t come back. At all. For nine years. No calls, no letters, and nobody saw him. Mom wondered, then worried. As years piled up, I’m sure she began to assume the worst. After half a decade, I heard her tell a relative that Jack must have died. I doubt she believed it herself, mind you, but I think she wanted people to stop asking about him. I admit, by the time I was twenty, I had mostly forgotten about him. He never came up in conversations, I don’t recall seeing any prominent pictures of him in the house, and the few relics of his youth were stored away in the attic. In a sense, he no longer existed. That was until 1986.
I was twenty-two years old, and living in my van. My girlfriend and I decided to drop into the bar at the old Auburn Hotel for cheap happy-hour food and a couple of beers. After a little while, I turned to her and said, “That guy halfway down the bar?” she looked, nodded, “I’m not sure, but I think that’s my brother.”
“You have a brother?”
With my faded memory and his weathered appearance, I didn’t actually recognize him. But each time he would raise his glass, the tattoo on his right wrist would be visible. It was the enigmatic “78.” There was no doubt it was him. But how do you talk to someone that no longer exists? Do you? Well, apparently I don’t because when I left the bar I hadn’t said a word. In fact, I didn’t say anything to anyone for a couple of days, then I told mom and dad.
They somehow managed to track him down. He was living on the streets in Sacramento, in doorways and along the levy. He had found some way to get his disability check, but it turns out he’d get robbed by other street people right away so he spent most of the time eating found food and handouts, burning garbage to stay warm at night. He was feral. He didn’t feel comfortable indoors and would not accept anything that could make him a target on the streets – like new shoes, or a coat. Our parents spent the next few years slowly acclimating him to civilization, and getting him connected to mental health services again.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. I can assure you, it takes one to look after an adult who has not the power of reason, as well. Mom, dad, my sisters and myself have been helped by dedicated people. The Office of the Public Guardian, for example, was instrumental in keeping a roof over my brother’s head for a long time. Placer County Mental Health was great about getting Jack the help he needed. Turning Point got involved, and for more than two decades managed his living situation as well as medication.
After mom and dad passed away, the village was a little smaller. Then Placer County faded out of the picture as well. Eventually, the Public Guardian absurdly declared that Jack was stable and dropped him from their books. I’m sure that saved a few bucks from an over extended budget, and it happened to coincide with his eligibility for medi-care. (Happy 65th birthday, Jack!) Eventually the circle of support was only Turning Point, my sisters, and myself. By this time, though, my brother had gotten used to living indoors again. He wasn’t prone to wandering off anymore, such a relief that was.
Over the last 37 years, he would occasionally talk about places he had apparently been. Mainly in Oregon, Chico, and Sacramento, and a few others. He has not been good at answering direct questions about these places, and it is not even clear if he had lived in any of them during the nine-year blackout period, but his occasional remarks make it sound as though he must have had some help from someone along the way. Whoever you are, I thank you.
A few years ago I learned the secret of talking with a schizophrenic, and I’d like to share that with you now. My brother’s mind was a small piece of driftwood, constantly being tossed upon a swirling and sometimes violent sea of sensations and experience. To venture into that sea was generally futile, and I would find that I could only make it a few feet from shore before I would have to turn back. At other times I would be swept along for a few moments by a seemingly benevolent wave, only to be deposited roughly onto the shore again as Jack would drift further into the eddies and currents that surrounded the jagged coast of his thoughts.
Sometimes I could find a point of focus, and use it to orient his flotsam thinking. Asking, for example, about his cousins, aunts, and uncles would often become a lighthouse to guide him for a few minutes. At these times, I would get to see my brother again – the young man who lived and breathed, captain of his own ship, at a time before my earliest memories. But inevitably the tide would take him away again, and I would be left on the beach waiting for the next turn of the currents to sweep him up to my side again.
And that’s the secret: waiting. I found that I needed to listen to the ramblings of my crazy brother for a certain amount of time before his driftwood brain would roll passed and reveal the important bits of information. I recall a day when we sat together in the yard of his board-and-care home, me listening to him talk about random topics. He listed everything on his plate at today’s breakfast, and how many cups of coffee he had, including the partial ones. He told me how many minutes it had taken him to walk to the convenience store down the street yesterday, but then corrected the number several times. I got to hear a longish (but barely coherent) account of his social life at the care home, which mainly revolved around the choice of stations on the TV, and trading cigarettes for candy. Then, thirty minutes into the visit, he mentioned going to the emergency room.
“Wait, what?” I managed to get a little more information from him, about a bronchial infection, and an overnight stay at the hospital. He could not clearly articulate any more detail than that, so I had to ask the staff, and his worker at Turning Point. It turns out he had previously been diagnosed with COPD, and this was just the latest installment of what was to be a battle over several years of deteriorating lung condition.
So, I learned to listen, and to let him talk, regardless of any lack of interest on my part. As the tides shifted, he would occasionally stop short to ask how my daughter was doing in school, or how my mother-in-law was, or if I’d spoken to my sisters recently. His memory was quite good, you see, even though his ability to make rational decisions was not. He knew people’s birthdays, remembered what I told him of the family news and the life events. It would just take time before the currents would bring him within reach again, and my brother would show up for a moment, stand on the sunny beach with me, then go away again.
And recently the village grew, one more time. It was about two weeks ago now that we got a whole new team engaged, like a life-raft in the waning storm of Jack’s life. He’d been in the hospital again, this time for several weeks. The flu had landed him in ICU, but as he was recovering from that he became sick again. He’d lost quite a bit of weight, and it had been decided that he would need to receive oxygen indefinitely. He was not going back to board-and-care, but skilled nursing. The emphysema was winning, and the new team was hospice.
The day my brother left us was January 19, 2023. When I say this, or write it, or even think these words, an odd picture forms in my mind. Yes, I saw my brother on the hospital bed, breathing slowly and (for once) not speaking very much. I saw his beard, his skinny arms, and heard the wheeze of his breath. But I don’t feel like this is the man that recently left. Jack left every time the waves took his mind away from shore again during our conversations. Back in the 1980’s he left us each time he would go back to the streets of Sacramento, as our parents worked to get him to stay. He left when he walked away for nine years after that day in 1977. He had left us after the fight with my sister.
None of these copies of my brother are the one that come to mind, as I work to make his final arrangements. Instead, the man that I put to rest now is the one that sat playing guitar in the living room when I was five. It’s the last memory I have of my whole, complete brother, and the only one that really matters now.
By andybrannan • Essays 0