I’m a summer person. I stay huddled inside, swathed in layers of wool, all winter, just waiting for the sun to come out and burn this city up. Maybe it’s the tropical island blood in me. Maybe it’s the memory of summers off from school. It might even be the all the women in their summer dresses. Who knows? But I come alive in the summer. I’m in my element. Sure, I sweat buckets all the time, but I never complain about the heat. I’ve never owned an air conditioner and don’t plan on getting one. I don’t want to miss a second of summer, because I know that too soon, it’s going to be winter again. Cultural stereotypes and “letting down the race” be damned, I’d go around in a loincloth all summer, soaking it in. (Also, body image issues be damned. I’d let the belly swing free.) I want to hold that heat inside of me for as long as I can.
But I find myself…unhappy. With the sun shining and the green grass of the park outside my building beckoning, I’ve got a dark cloud following me. I get snappish, short-tempered, moody. It always creeps up on me as we come into August. It happens slowly and always takes me off-guard. I should be happy, I tell myself, I should be enjoying this. But my spirit darkens and darkens as the days feel like they last forever.
At first, I think I don’t know why. I attribute it to the summer doldrums or whatever. I tell myself that I had a busy spring and it’s just caught up with me. There’s a disconnect. The world is telling to enjoy myself, but something inside of me is lashing out with anger and pain, like a wounded animal. I try to ignore it, but sooner or later, it starts to dawn on me what’s going on. Then I try to ignore it even more, try to pretend that that’s not it, that I don’t need to acknowledge it. But then I realize I do, or I’m going to do something stupid and truly self-destructive.
August 18th is coming up. And then August 25th. With my birthday in between.
My brother drowned in an inlet from Jamaica Bay near his house on August 18th, 2001. His body was found on August 25th. This year makes it eight years.
Eight years is actually a long time. Someone who was in middle school in 2001 has now graduated from, not just from high school, but from college. Someone born in 2001 is now in third grade and already a little person. This country has gone to war in two countries, had a recovery and a crash, and finally a new president. Amazingly, New York’s only had one mayor. Outside of Law & Order and The Simpsons, I don’t think a single TV show that was on in 2001 is still on.
In the last eight years, I’ve had four jobs. I’ve lived in seven places. I’ve met a lot of people. Most of them never knew my brother. Most don’t even know I had a younger brother.
When this time of year hits and I finally put it together with my low, black mood, I’m hit with a flood of memories, good and bad. Memories of my brother, my beautiful, passionate brother. Imitating Jim Carrey’s “I’m smoking!” from The Mask. Yelling at me, in the middle of some dumb argument, about how much he knew about the Marshall Plan (don’t even ask me what that was about). The way he would talk about acting, his love for it, his struggles with it. How disappointed he was at playing Waffles in a school workshop of Uncle Vanya, but how hard he worked at it. How my older brother and I had to go and get him out of jail so he could make his orientation at Juilliard (another long story…my family is full of long stories).
The first real play I wrote is dedicated to him, long before he died. Oddly, that play is about someone losing a sibling. In it, I put in it the way my younger brother would cry as baby, the way it would well up inside of him, but when he opened his mouth, nothing would come out. He’d sit, mouth wide, for a second before the sound kicked in.
There was one time my older brother, my younger brother and sister and I went to play pool. This was rare, having the four of us together like that. I remember sitting there, watching my older brother and my younger brother, sixteen years of difference between them, teamed up, both smoking and totally beating the snot out of my sister and I, and thinking, “Wow, we’re on such different tracks.” But they weren’t that different. One long train ride, my older brother, a sculptor, talked to me and my younger brother about art and how to approach it, as educated black men in the world. My younger brother and I were far more assimilated, far more integration-minded than he was, and he was trying to convince us that the world wouldn’t want what we had. He didn’t, neither of us. But I know we both struggled with it.
I remember the spring before, the spring I graduated from grad school and my mom threw a graduation party for me at her place in Brooklyn. It was the first time in a very long time all five of my siblings were in one place. We took a lot of pictures of that day. It would be the last time we would all be in the same place again.
And I remember the summer he died. A wave of guilt, anger, sorrow and regret washes over me. My brother auditioned for a play I did that summer, walking into the audition room unannounced. I never found out if he knew before he walked in what he was auditioning for. I didn’t know he was coming. He was so nervous, and so was I. He was also so good. We called him back. But, in the end, we didn’t cast him. If I’d known he was coming, if I’d thought about it more, maybe I could have written something for him, changed something. But it was my first full-length show and I didn’t. I didn’t know how to tell him. I held off until my older brother called me and, uh, gently nudged me to make the call. I did and he took it well and professionally. I left that phone call feeling okay.
But then, later in the summer…with my large, contentious family, there’s always someone fighting with someone. And that summer, I was stuck in one in a long line of fights with my mom. In the midst of it, my younger brother called me. I was angry, having just gotten off the phone with my mom, and told him to call me back later. It was a fifteen second phone call. The last thing my younger brother heard from me was “I don’t have time for you.” I carry that with me, always.
Losing someone you love is a terrible thing and, being a writer, it’s incomprehensible for me. Because there are no words for it. No words can convey what it feels like. Saying “you have a pit inside of you” is 1) an awful cliché and 2) just doesn’t do any justice to what it feels like. Because you can imagine a pit, a deep, dark, yawning pit. But you can’t imagine this. This is a place no words can go.
Even eight years later, whenever I see a tall, skinny young black man of a certain color, certain shape, I think, “Is that him? Maybe there’s been a terrible, terrible mistake.” It’s non-sensical. But I do. My brain still knows him, still has him imprinted in there and is still looking for the right thing to fit into the imprint.
Eight years. It will be eight years on Tuesday. It will be a hot, bright summer day. The kind of day in June or July that I love. The kind of day I should be spending, blowing off work and laying in a field, or walking around the city. And I might be doing those things. But inside…inside will be a different story.
Because eight years ago on August 18th, Edward Craig Scriven died. And I still miss him.
Especially at this time of year.
