Dear Reader,

Please indulge me through the following cathartic journey of realization, acknowledgment and ultimately, partial healing, via an open letter to a significant wound in my heart.  You may find some connection to your own experiences and unrequited feelings.

Dear Douglas,

I love you!  How could you do this to me?  After years of searching for you, trying to find a way for us to re-connect, I finally found you…in an obituary.  Not yours, but that of your brother, the firefighter.  I am very sorry to learn of his untimely and unexpected death at the age of 49.  I am sorry for his wife, his son, your mother and your sister.  I am so, so sorry at the perverse unfairness and bitter tragedy of this incomprehensible situation.

But as I read through the significant events and accomplishments of his life and past the ‘survived by’ paragraph, I am suddenly, utterly paralyzed in mid-thought…”he was predeceased by his father and his brother, Douglas.”  What???  My Douglas?  When?  Where?  How?  The paralysis of my brain is instantaneous; and then blindingly flooded with the unanswered questions prompted by this newfound information and further overwhelmed with the tsunami of unanswered questions from years of searching and wondering.  As the brain swims and swirls and grasps for some semblance of reason, the heart takes over.  Cardio Central pushes the ‘hurt’ and ‘confused’ and ‘grief’ and ‘agony’ buttons simultaneously.  The only reaction the brain can muster is to flood the orbital sockets with salt water and twist the abdominal region into a convulsing spasm of ache and nausea.  I feel on the verge of entering the world of non-existence myself.

I fancy myself to be quite adept at surfing the Internet.  I am known to be able to pinpoint supposedly-factual information in less time and with less effort than most in my social and professional circles.  For the past 10 years, since you and I lost connection, my fingers have roamed the laptop keyboard many times and my eyes have scoured the thousands of ‘hits,’ but to no avail.  Your trail seemed to have gone cold and dry…no readily-accessible footprint, no identifiable presence in the great electronic world where we all showcase our existence in the present day.  I even resorted to the tools of yesterday and used an actual telephone to call former mutual friends, but they too had no insight into your whereabouts, your activities, or your ongoing existence.

Armed with the new information of your passing, I return to the Internet.  Even with the added knowledge of your fate, I find no useful hits.  The trail went cold long ago.  More questions, new questions, flood my brain and soon I feel obsession taking hold.  I must, absolutely must, have answers so I reluctantly, skeptically, but determinedly reach for the credit card which will open my search up to the world of secret-but-available-for-a-price information.

For just $20, I am soon reading about the six different residences you called home since we were last in touch.  I now have not only your former addresses, but those of your former neighbors along with helpful suggestions of who to contact that is most likely to remember you.  I assume there is a straightforward formula that cross-references current neighboring residents with the timeframe of when you lived there, because the suggestions are not always the closest apartment.  I am next provided with likely family connections, but this provides no additional useful information as I already have firsthand, unimpeachable, non-speculative knowledge in this area via the years of knowing you and as refreshed via your brother’s obituary.

What is most revealing is the insight into your arrest and court records.  I am dumbstruck at the unfortunate turns your life must have taken since we were last in touch.  How did your career get derailed?  What lead to the non-satiated financial liens and judgments?  What prompted the arrest for criminal trespass and resultant fine and imprisonment?  Why did your arrest record indicate that you were homeless?  And, most puzzling, why does my $20 personal record search indicate there is no available death record information?  Were you so reclusive and stubborn at the end of your life that there was no one close enough to you to claim your remains or create a proper death notice?

For an additional fee, of course, the search can be expanded, but I decide a more prudent approach for my continued search is to push the laptop aside and connect directly with your sister, your sole surviving sibling.  I just want the basic answers:  How did you die?  When did you die?  Where did you die?  These are the questions that I think she will be most able to answer.

What I dare not ask, and what haunts me the most, is the mystery and bafflement of what circumstances prompted the end of your life to be so sad, so lonely, so desperate.  The evidence indicates you were destitute, homeless, friendless and full of despair.  I feel myself drowning in your despair as I struggle to cope with this visual and heartfelt impression of your final days without any ability to understand how you got there.

Soon however, perhaps as a psychological coping mechanism, I begin to feel anger and hurt.  You were my best friend for the decade of your 20’s and my 30’s.  You were an important part of my wedding to the man I still call husband a quarter of a century later.  I was the one whose shoulder you sought as you struggled through one relationship and on to the next.  We shared our feelings, dreams, concerns and hopes on a daily basis.  And then, you were just gone.

How could you do this to me?  The end of your life shows that you needed me more than ever, yet you did not reach out.  You did not let me know what you were going through, what your problems were, or even where you were.  After all we meant to one another and all we shared, there is no way you didn’t know that I would have helped you with all the resources I could muster and in any way I could, if you would have just let me know.

The pain of losing you coupled with the mystery of your isolation and stubbornness is stifling me and apparently prompting concerns from my husband.  He has been supportive of my years-long quest and is understanding of my past and current feelings, but frustrated and confused by the current depth of my angst. Finally, he bluntly asks, “Were you and Douglas sexually intimate?”  I am shocked.  I cry.  I cry some more.  But then I realize that the tears are brought on by the answer, not the question.  The answer is simple, yet complicated.  No, we were not sexual, but yes, we were quite intimate.  We talked.  We touched.  We shared.  We enjoyed a bond beyond brothers but just short of lovers.

With surreal vividness and clarity I recall the richness of your laughter and I can see all your teeth, front and rear, in my mind’s eye, as your mouth opens wide with an initial guffaw at something no doubt witty and profound that I have said, and then you cover your mouth quickly with your left hand, always your left hand, in an attempt to appear more cool than you feel at the moment.  And I don’t know why my mind keeps dwelling on your lower, left side molars and premolars, but it does, over and over again. 

I can clearly feel a drop of sweat off your brow and smell the masculinity of your underarm perspiration as we play racquetball, until you notice me noticing and you wipe your face dry with a towel.  And as with the repetitive flash of your left-side molars, my mind pummels me with that single sweat drop, over and over again.  I sense the soft, pleasant feel of your long, thick, dark chest hairs against my face, and vice versa, as we wrestle in the sand at the beach until we both laugh, and again I see your molars briefly before the left hand arrives and restores decorum.  I taste the slightly-salty and slightly-dry texture of your lips as we kiss good-bye—no tongues, no sex, just unrestrained friendship, joy and comfort with one another—until you break the embrace and turn away.  As with the teeth and the sweat drop, my mind replays the brief kiss and uncoupling, over and over again.

And now, at this moment, I can see the commonality of your actions over the years.  There was always an underlying discomfort at fully letting your guard down and an intense sense of pride and propriety that perhaps contributed to your inability to ask for help when you truly, truly needed it and you knew I would respond.  That has resulted in an immeasurable loss for both of us.  I missed the opportunity to be the friend you knew I would be and you endured the final days and years of your life in solitude and loneliness.

And I am still left with the unanswered questions of what ultimately happened in your life.  Were you unable to recover from an intense, toxic relationship?  Did you suffer through a period of extended unemployment?  Did drugs or alcohol find their way into your life and drain it from you?  Was your life perhaps taken at the hands of another?  Did you suffer from some sort of mental illness?  Or maybe it was something more benign, but just as tragic, such as an automobile accident or an all-too-typical, life-threatening disease like cancer or AIDS?

Lacking a current or suitable email address, I have opted for snail mail to contact your sister.  I thought about the telephone, but was concerned it would most likely be too awkward for each of us to confront the questions and answers head-on, real-time and with her having no warning or preparation time.  Snail mail will provide Susan with an opportunity to review my request and process her emotions in a logical way in order to provide the most appropriate response.  In the meantime, as my request travels over state lines and awaits a return trip, my brain has plenty of time to fall victim to the twin manipulative forces of desire and denial.

The first of my dreams was to be expected, and is just as likely to be repeated many times over the remainder of my life.  In a dream world I recall all of our wonderful times together, including convenient embellishments to always keep the memories fresh and joyful.  This is a happy fantasy retreat where I can enjoy you, and us, in all the ways that I wanted and not have to face the reality that I will never again be able to make the direct connection through and behind your intense and mysterious cocoa brown eyes.

The second dream was not only unrealistic, but a tumultuous, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking and anxiety-inducing roller coaster ride.  I imagined that I received a response from your sister and it was a response that threw me into a state of total despair, utter confusion and limitless hope.  The imagined response said, “Dearest David.  Thank you so much for your condolences in the recent loss of my brother.  He was a good man and we all miss him greatly.  As for your inquiry regarding my other brother, let me be direct.  The reason you are unable to find any death record information is because he may very well not be technically or legally dead.  But he is quite dead to me and my family and that is why my brother’s obituary is worded that way.  Please do not contact me or anyone in my family again.”

Even in my dream world I recognize that this is merely a form of escapism; the ultimate denial.  But I revel in the fanciful journey that ensues in my subconsciousness.  I quickly recover from the shock of her bluntness, the coldness of her message, and absorb the fantastic promise of her bitter words.  I do not know why you are dead in her eyes, but my heart literally leaps with the prospect that all the pain and emptiness I feel can be erased.  My husband and I leave New York and head for Dallas—the last of your known addresses of ‘homelessness.’

My fast-forward dream sequence covers many weeks of desperately searching the seedy aspects of the Dallas streets.  Just as in a TV movie, we hand out flyers with your picture and we talk earnestly to people we normally wouldn’t even notice or acknowledge.  And, just as in a TV movie, when despair seems at its lowest point, I spot the strangest character in a narrow alleyway not far from NorthPark Center in the Five Points neighborhood.  Something compels me to enter this foreboding chasm of brick and garbage and stench.  I grab the scruff of your unshaven face, peer past the layers of grime and into your yellowed and hazy, yet beautiful cocoa brown eyes.  I know those eyes and I know them well.  As the dramatic TV movie music drones on, we drag your reluctant and debilitated body from the alley and into the light of the passing traffic.  I am sort of expecting a Robin Williams-Jeff Bridges Fisher King moment, but inexplicably, a jogging Melissa McCarthy comes by and helps us take you to our hotel suite, bathe you, shave you, feed you.  You have yet to speak and always quickly avert your eyes when you see me or my husband looking at you.  You will only look at Melissa and she does not speak, she only nods.  After awhile, she just leaves, walks right out the hotel room door without uttering a single word to any of us.  My husband retires to the bedroom.  It is just you and me at the small dining table and finally you look up from your plate, look me directly in the eye, and simply ask, “What took you so long?”

My eyes fill with the tears and my heart aches like hot charcoal briquettes are being compressed in my chest cavity.  We embrace inseparably, the credits roll and Melissa McCarthy and my husband are visible in the sidebar laughing and dancing through a field of daisies with a Golden Retriever puppy chasing after them.  It is all so perfectly-contrived and nonsensical, yet it feels so good and I don’t want to let go.

But now the real response from your sister has arrived and in my mind the dream embrace of our reunion literally begins to dissolve and drift away.  The envelope appears quite normal, yet I can sense the heavy burden of travel and the foreboding message inside.  After only a brief hesitation I feverishly tear open the envelope, but then I softly and carefully place the card on the table in front of me.  I’m not afraid of it.  I’m not drawn to it.  And I’m not hesitating due to apprehension.  I am simply savoring the most recent hotel dining table showdown in my brain—the one in my dream sequence where our eyes locked after Melissa McCarthy walked out of our scene without explanation; the one where my husband waited patiently and lovingly in the next room; the one where you calmly asked, “What took you so long?”

And I know that what is taking me so long at this moment is that abject reality awaits inside that card.  Once the card is opened, the joy, the magic, the promise, the warmth of our dream world connection and embrace will be irretrievably lost forever.  I want, I need, to savor that feeling just a bit longer so it can last for the rest of my life.  But I know the revelation must come and it needs to be now.  For one thing, we don’t know if, or when, Melissa McCarthy may reappear as inexplicably as she disappeared in our dream world.

I dry my eyes, open the card, and fold it flat.  The truth is now flagrantly disclosed and it is far worse than I had imagined.  First, as the readers undoubtedly knew many paragraphs ago, my pathetic denial of your death was just that—denial of the inevitable.  Susan confirms that you died two years ago, and that you were indeed alone, broke and broken.  But the circumstances leading up to your demise is not any one of the factors that I had imagined and feared.  It is several of them, and more.  Three months into a new relationship with an older man, he died under extremely mysterious foul-play circumstances following, or during, a long evening of public drinking and arguing with you and another couple.  You were, naturally, a prime suspect, but you staunchly defended yourself and the charges could never be proven.  In fact, you were never indicted, just questioned and questioned and questioned.  Ultimately, one of the partners of the other couple was arrested and convicted, but the suspicion alone was enough to cause your employer to lose faith and want some distance from you.  Finding a replacement job proved equally elusive.  Your local friends abandoned you.  Your pride, as suspected, prevented you from reaching out to family or your real friends—any one of whom would have surely rescued you from your problems.

Constrained by your pride and stubbornness, and failing to visualize other options, you did what many other handsome and desirable young men do in desperation—you put your body out on the street for rent or sale.  This new world exposed you to untold risks—disease, robbery, assault, deception—and you experienced all of them; many repeatedly.  Whatever money you were able to obtain, you squandered on drugs, alcohol or gambling.  More often than not, you would end the night robbed and beaten.  Who knows what ailment found you first, but the AIDS virus surely weakened your body’s defenses and allowed the throat cancer and pneumonia that ultimately claimed your life, to run their course rapidly and unchecked.  Your partially-clothed and sore-riddled body was found in a shopping mall restroom by a night janitor.  I’m sure the nightmares that will haunt that custodian the rest of his life will rival mine.

There is now nothing left for me to do.  I close the card and feel the weight of the knowledge of your final days actually weigh me down.  I plod into the TV room, where oddly enough, my husband is watching a showing of Bridesmaids.  I sit and silently watch the hilarity ensue with tears filling my eyes and the ache subsiding in my beating heart.  My husband pulls me close and strokes my bald head.  At this moment it is enough to assure me that life will go on.  It is enough to remind me that I have the love and strength to be a friend, a true friend, to someone in need, someone I love.