A Fragile Blow

from What Should I Do With My Life?

I learned that the hardest things are the most liberating.

            Such as for Kurt Slauson.

            It’s very important in this story, when the point comes, not to get bogged down wondering why Todd Slauson, Kurt’s older brother by two years, committed suicide at 29. Nobody really knows. Kurt and his family were thrown into a state of impenetrable unknowing, of retroactive guessing, without any conclusions, even to this day. They couldn’t make sense of it. Todd wasn’t around to ask. So when I tell this story out loud, I’ve seen that listeners want to ask questions about Todd, not about Kurt. They want to figure out that which cannot be known. So you’ll know a tiny tiny bit of how confused and frustrated Kurt felt, but the answer is not there, and I won’t try to chase it or speculate. I promised the family that. This is a story about Kurt, not about Todd.

            I first heard a little of Kurt’s story from a guy in New Orleans. I’ll share exactly what I learned:

“My friend K. is thirty-one and married with a new daughter. He’s a chef in Seattle but is about to move to some remote resort town in eastern British Columbia, near where his wife’s from. When I first met K. (studying English at the University of Montana), he was solidly en route to becoming a scholar of contemporary avant garde poetry, the far-out stuff stemming from Pound, and had completed is coursework at the University of Victoria for his Ph.D. when his brother, a roommate of mine in Montana, trekked into the woods and shot himself with a deer rifle. The brother, T., was older by a few years, a solid ESPN-watching outdoorsman type who worked at a sporting goods store and fly-fished, hunted elk, et cetera. He was a great guy and lived the life people in cities with desk jobs dream about. Still, he committed suicide (bashing my own belief that dedication to fishing was some sort of mental salvation) because, among other unknown reasons, he didn’t seem to be ‘headed anywhere.’ And a few months after the suicide, K., seeing his brother in himself, dropped out of his Ph.D. program and went to culinary school in Seattle, a career swing that seemed and still seems out of the blue – he wasn’t a natural cook and had never pursued it even as a hobby. But he graduated at the head of his class and is happily employed, loves his work, and works hard to support his wife and new daughter, all thoughts of Ezra Pound forgot.”

He gave me Kurt’s email, and I sent off a missive. I didn’t try to insert myself or push. I simply offered to listen if he needed to talk. If he had unresolved issues, maybe it would help him to hear that other people have gone through a similar swing.

            I didn’t hear back.

            That was fine, but after a month I started to wonder – if Kurt was moving to Canada, maybe his email address had changed. Had he ever received mine?

            So I called information for Kelowna, British Columbia, which is a six hours’ drive east of Vancouver, in the middle of the Okanagon Wilderness. They had his phone number. I called and left a message.

            A week later, his wife Laura telephoned. Kurt had received my email and phone message, and they’d been talking about whether it was a good idea to contact me. She thought it was because, he still had a lot of unresolved issues, was holding a lot in. She thought he should talk to someone. She’d worked at a bookstore in Victoria and had sold my books. I described my research as plainly as I could, and she said they’d talk some more.

            Another month into the summer, Kurt left me a message. I could hear the reticence. We traded messages for awhile. I think we were both nervous. We got used to the timbre of each other’s voice, replaying the messages.

            Finally, in August, I reached him. His voice was deep and scratched; he peppered his words with a raw slang. A meat-and-potatoes guy’s guy. He may have been a poet, but he wasn’t used to showing his weakness. He asked how I was doing my research, how I was choosing people, and how did I see his story fitting in? I said I didn’t know. From the little I’d heard, his story spoke to me. It was that simple and straightforward. How was the book organized? I didn’t know that either. Did I have a message? He was snooping for a hidden agenda. He realized I didn’t have one. That seemed to pacify his edge. He paused … considered it … and said, “okay.”

            Five minutes into his story, he stopped and said he’d feel a lot better about this if we were talking over a couple of beers in person. “It’s a little too intense to talk about over the phone.”

            “What’s your schedule like?”

            He was sitting around, waiting for his landed immigrant application to come clean. Until then he couldn’t work. I was welcome any time.

            “I’ll be there in two weeks.”

            A few hours into our time together, after a few beers, Kurt felt he needed to tell me why he’d let me in to his life. “I thought your process would lead to something good,” he said. “I wanted to be part of it. Maybe my story will help someone else out there, who’s going through what I went through.”

            I hoped it would.

            He had been thinking about what he wanted to tell me. My imminent visit had pushed him to reflect. It had led him to track down his high school English teacher who, in his sophomore year, turned him on to poetry and lit a fire in him. She was now in South Carolina. He also called old friends to tell them how much they meant to him. “You hadn’t even got here yet, and yet you started some good things,” Kurt said.

And what were his unresolved issues? I felt them right away. He had an emotional distance with the things he should have most dearly embraced. They’d bought a new house in a pretty subdivision at the base of a mountain. Kelowna is renown as the Napa Valley of the North; it has an exquisite charm, not quite rural, not suburban, the best of both, with a picturesque old town center on the lakefront. Kurt showed me his house with a stiff real-estate agent tour, and he copped to this stiffness. “Isn’t it great?,” he said, and then a moment later, hearing the hollowness in his voice, he covered with, “Maybe I’m just not used to being in a subdivision yet.”

            This was also true of his feelings for his daughter Maya. She’d turn one in a week. She brought Kurt joy, but when talking about her he fought awkwardly for words. It’s hard for a new parent to describe what it’s like, but I was a new parent too, and there’s a comfortable self-deprecating conversational ritual that centers on poopy diapers and feeding times and hours of lost sleep. Kurt was uncomfortable with such talk – it was like he was trying to sell me on how great his new life was. Again he caught his own false note. “Maybe I’m not yet acclimated from my old bachelor bohemian poet life,” he suggested, even though it had been two years since he’d read a word of poetry. Four times he made some version of this comment. He was clearly holding his emotions back. He had a great new life here in Kelowna, and yet he couldn’t seem to enjoy it, or wasn’t letting himself embrace it.

            He suggested a pint and a smoke might loosen him up, so we went down to the harbor and took a seat under the warm sun. Soon the amber ale blurred our sense of the moment, and we rode its daze back in time. Kurt is tall and slender, freckled – his most distinctive feature is a birth defect called Poland’s Anomaly; his left forearm is shorter and some of his fingers are only a couple knuckles long.

            Since he was sixteen, Kurt had always wanted to be a Professor of Poetry. He knew this going to college at the University of Oregon, where he wowed the T.A.s and hung out with grad students. He knew this at the University of Montana, where he received his Master’s. He wrote his own poetry but it was academia that called to him. This was esoteric analysis. His schtick was the history of shared influences, placing contemporary poets in a continuum from the 19^th century romantic tradition. He was highly focused on language, not artifice, nor craft or metric standard. Most of this terrain had been trammelled a thousand times by every graduate student in the country; it was hard to offer novel commentary. It was as if the deeper he got into it, the less air there was to breathe – a thousand scholars in the same room, suffocating on each other’s carbon dioxide. At the University of Victoria, this asphyxia started to wear him down. He passed his grueling second-year exams, for which he had to practically memorize every work from 50 novels, 40 poets, 20 playwrights, and 100 years of American Lit. He was a leading presence in the department, but at night he watched hockey games rather than read for pleasure. What could he do but grind it out and hope his spirit came back when he started teaching? For as long as he could remember, he’d told everyone he wanted to do this. His career choice had a momentum of its own. How could he tell his wife and family who supported him all these years that he no longer wanted to do it? On the cusp of success, there was no love of poetry left. He was unable to pen his thesis. He could find not a drop of inspiration. He could no longer sleep. He was filled with dread.

            One Monday in November of that year he got a phone call from his brother’s boss at the sporting goods store in Missoula. “Todd didn’t show up for work. Has he called you?”

            The next day, with still no word, Kurt flew to Montana. They found Todd’s car parked up near Schwartz Creek, on elk hunting grounds. Search parties began combing the mountain in grids. This was a heavily wooded area. For six days, Kurt and his father sat around the house, wondering if they’d ever find him. They were going to call off the search party that day. It started to snow, covering any tracks they might find. Two miles into these woods, they found Todd’s body with his brains blown out. Beside him was the deer rifle he’d used. In the stock of the rifle he’d carved a note. He’d carved it with a pen knife. The note read, “Sorry, can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

            Sorry, can’t hurt anyone anymore.

            Telling me this, Kurt cried frequently. Not with the sadness of Todd’s death, but with the sadness of his brother, sitting there on the north slope of their beloved hunting grounds, taking the time to slowly carve this note. How long might that note take to carve? What kind of grief was he in during that time? “I can hardly bear to think what he was going through. It breaks my heart even to imagine that time passing. A pen knife. A fucking pen knife. That took a long time. A rifle butt is hardwood. Plenty of time to get a grip on himself. Plenty of time to change his mind and hike back to the car.”

            Sorry.

            Cant.

            Hurt.

            Anyone.

            Anymore.

            S.

            O.

            R.

            R.

            Y.

“You want to know one of the weirdest things?”

            “What’s that?”

            “His best friend from high school had come out that week to go hunting together. So he wasn’t lonely at the time. Russ was sleeping on the couch. His favorite companion, his chocolate lab Angie, was sleeping on his bed. At 4 a.m. Russ heard the screen door slam; it woke him for a moment.” Kurt sobbed some more, lit another cigarette, rubbed at his eyes. “It’s terribly sad. He was the last person you’d ever suspect would do something like this.”

            After the funeral, Kurt went back to Victoria to write his thesis. He got nowhere. He was overwhelmed with grief. He’d wake up in a cold sweat. He was so depressed, he started to wonder why more people didn’t kill themselves. Why the hell not? Life is hard. Kurt drove around, screaming at the brother in the passenger seat who was no longer there. “I was so mad at him. I was so incredibly pissed off at him. In Catholicism, we’re taught that suicide is a selfish act, and that’s how I felt. I thought what he’d done was so selfish. I wanted to scream at him.  And I did. In my mind, that’s all I could think: ‘You could have called us!’ ‘If you were unhappy, you should have said something!’ ‘You had options! You had other choices!’ ‘You could have changed!’ ‘It might have been hard, but you could have started over!’ ‘If you felt guilty for something, we could have forgiven you!’ I couldn’t get past this anger. And then one day, I turned it on myself.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I realized yeah, I was yelling at him. But I might as well have been yelling at myself. Maybe I was yelling at myself: I can change. I can start over. I have other choices. I don’t have to stick it out with poetry. I can find something else to do. I can finally tell people how unhappy I am. I have to, or I’m going to end up like my brother.”

“And how’d you end up a chef?”

“That was all I could do in my grief. I could hardly read. I watched the Food Network and started reading cookbooks. Every day, Laura would come home, and it was all I’d done that day. So, once, she says, ‘why don’t you just become a chef?’ And I was defensive. ‘What? You don’t think I can finish my thesis?’ But it was planted in my head. She’d given me permission to consider it. And so at a Christmas party, after I’d had a few drinks, I just said it out loud. ‘I’m going to cooking school. What about that?’”

She told him it was a good idea.

“Fucking A, let’s do it then.”

A month later he called her at work to tell her they were moving to Seattle.

            A culinary academy is where a cook is turned into a chef. I’d talked to other people who, like Kurt, had turned to cooking after a mid-life crisis. There’s something about nourishment, and nourishing others, that helps people to heal. Half the student body of most culinary schools are people in emotional transition. This was true of Kurt’s class, too. Half were 20 year olds who didn’t want to go to college; the other half were former nurses, alcoholics, accountants, caterers, who needed a second lease on life.

Kurt said emphatically, “Changing my career saved my life. You tell people that. You put that in your book. Changing my career saved my life.”

            There’s a romantic notion of being a chef as creative person, an artist working in the food medium. Cooking school jolts that naivete. “Being a chef is fucking brutal,” Kurt warned, even as he said, “I knew at once it was for me.” The hours are terrible. You get no holidays or vacations. At school, if the master chef doesn’t like your soup, he might throw it on the floor and tell you to clean it up.

            Kurt didn’t say this outright, but it was clear from his comments that he loved the physical intensity of cooking in a restaurant, 120 steaks going on the grill, firing and plating, no time to be pensive or lost in space. Later, watching him whip up some Vietnamese pho, he grooved on the action of chopping vegetables, flashing his knife skills, talking about a good fish stock. It was the polar opposite mental state of being an academic, where the joy is in letting the mind wander, with few deadlines, and the product of one’s labor is intellectual – an obscure idea, or a few good lines of verse. Kurt no longer wanted to live in his mind. He needed the pressure, needed to be pushed, needed rules and standards that were enforced, needed to be part of a team, with a customer that would send it back if it wasn’t cooked right. He’d found that he was much happier with his mind squeezed down to a peanut, and he could take a break from the kind of terribly sad thoughts that preoccupied it.

            It was those thoughts that returned, time and again, as Kurt talked about his life. I could see these thoughts rock him, see them cloud his face, and his heavy voice would stop, could go no longer, and he’d be overtaken. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Were you close?”

            “Growing up, we played hockey and lacrosse together. We were always close. When I lived in Montana, we were chums. I lived in that house with him. He had a hard time when I left for Victoria. I’d been paying the house bills and ran the ship. When I left, it went to hell in a handbasket.”

            “Why?”

             “Todd always had champagne taste, but he lived on a beer budget. Dad bailed him out a lot. He was never a great student, and he didn’t aspire to a career. He’d been a bartender for awhile, and he really liked being the assistant manager at the sporting goods store. But he liked things, the things that making a little more money might afford. He had to have the newest sneakers, or the latest skis, or the coolest car. The gym membership, golfing at the country club. He liked that image of himself. They gave him a sense of power. He always wanted what other people had, but he never had any desire to put his nose down to work for those things.”

            “When was the last time you saw him?”

            “About a month before. He’d met a girl at our wedding that summer …” Kurt paused a second. Something flashed in his mind. A memory. He finished the sentence, but it was clear that thought was his preoccupation. It made him sob again.

            “Did something happen at your wedding?”

            “He, uh, gave a speech.” Kurt almost can’t say it.

            “What did he say?”

            “It was not very articulate. It was rambling, and not just for the delivery did it come off a little odd. He talked about how he felt, seeing his little bro get married. It was clear he felt awkward. ‘Here’s my little bro, getting married before me!’ And about how he’d watched me get my master’s before him. When I got that degree, he really thought of it as an achievement, a sign of true success. It was just an English degree, which you and I know at best can bring you not much coin, maybe thirty grand a year. But to Todd it was the thing he could never get. He was so proud of me when I graduated. But in that speech, it was those words he kept using, ‘before me,’ like it was a competition. All these milestones I’d reached before him. I haven’t been able to watch our wedding video.”

I said, “In your mind, do you think that your getting married, and your imminent Ph.D., were making Todd feel inadequate, like he was a failure? Do you feel like that was one of the causes?”

            Kurt couldn’t speak. He held his lips tight. He nodded. I don’t think he’d admitted this to anyone. He gathered himself, and added, “Some times he thought of me as the privileged one. Some times I think if he were still alive, and if he were to come here, to Kelowna? With the life I have now? If he saw my daughter? He’d be a great uncle for Maya. I know that. But I also think that my daughter would be a fragile blow to him.”

            That was one of the saddest things I’d ever heard. Kurt was blocked from letting his love out for his daughter, because he felt that his successes had made his brother be unhappy.

            “Kurt, can I say something?”

            “Please.”

“You have to give yourself permission to enjoy your daughter and your wife and your home.”

“I know!” he sobbed, having no idea how to do such a thing.

“You’ve earned this life you have. It wasn’t a privilege. It wasn’t handed to you on a silver platter. My god, you’ve had to fight for every bit of it. You weren’t lucky. You paid for it with sweat and tears.”

“You think so?”

“God Kurt, listen to your own story. It’s a heroic story.”

“Thank you.”

“Listen, my friend. You have to give yourself permission. You cannot do this to Maya. You cannot let her grow up in a house where you associate the birth of you daughter with the death of your brother. You have to uncouple those events. You have to free yourself to love her completely. You can’t let this go for unresolved for years. You have a responsibility to her!” By now I felt an incredible urgency in my voice. I wasn’t yelling, but I was saying this with a ferocity.

Kurt said, “Have you ever done anything like that?”

I had.

“Will you tell me about it?”

“My baby was going to be born last March. I’d bought a new house with Michele, and we’d gotten married in October. My life was filling with these joyous things, but I couldn’t let myself enjoy them, because I felt guilty. Terribly guilty for how I’d left my ex-wife, and how badly I’d hurt her. I’d needed to move on, but I’d never quite let myself move on, carrying this guilt for four years. Some of this guilt descended from my parents’ divorce, and from how they’d fought for decades afterwards. I projected some of my Mom’s pain onto my ex-wife. She and I had become civil, and we talked on the phone every six months or so. But I could never tell her about Michele, or about our house, because that always hurt her more. It was twisting the knife. She’d hang up the phone, or tell me never to mention Michele’s name. So last February, I was taking stock, and trying to prepare for being a Dad. And I realized I had this unfinished business. I had to tell my ex-wife, even if it meant hurting her. I had to do it, because I didn’t want to run into her at the grocery store a year later, with my son in my arms. Or pull up at a stop light and see her in the next lane, with my son in his car seat behind me.” Now I found myself crying into my beer, tears running down my cheeks as I imagined those moments.

“Why not?”

“Because that wouldn’t be fair to my son. My love for my son shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t be dragging a parachute of guilt behind it. I owed that to him. He wasn’t born yet, but I owed it to him. So I called my ex-wife up, and I asked her to have tea one morning.”

“And you told her?”

“Yeah.”

“Did it hurt her?”

“The thing was, no. She was happy for me, proud for me. She’d come so far, healed herself, that she had no resentment. That was the greatest gift, I think, that anyone has ever given me – the permission to love my son without any regrets. I was so much more ready for him to be born.”

I’d never told this story to anyone. I’d never put it into words. But here I was, telling it to Kurt, and I think it was helping him, but it was also really helping me. I had no guilt left, but I had memories of guilt, and sometimes I didn’t know what to do with those memories.

After some time, Kurt said, “Todd’s not around to give me that gift.”

“Well, maybe you can have that conversation in your head. You need to tell him, “I earned this life. I have a right to love my daughter.’”

“Like how I used to yell at him, even though he was gone.”

            Nobody could say why Todd Slauson killed himself. But in the absence of knowledge, we try to craft theories. Kurt’s mind had stitched together a theory, which he had harbored in secret, which was saddling him with guilt.

            Two men, drinking, sitting in the sun, letting time pass, letting their pasts drift away, giving themselves permission to come back to the present, and seize it like the way, when you’ve swam underwater the entire pool length, you break the surface and inhale.