1 / It’s the thump of his body hitting the floor. The boards beneath him thud, jostle briefly, and echo. The fading away stills. I’m listening, as I always do, wondering whether his twenty-month-old daughter hears the shaky thud of her father gone down, whether she wakes and feels frightened or soothed by his form nearby and sleeps on. By early afternoon, she should be in deep slumber, following a lunch of brown-sugared oatmeal. I’ve lived in their shadow too long, and the dark speaks to my irresolute nature, namely, that I’ve not fully listened, not fully heard the story of my loss my brother’s been telling me for years, lying there.

That April 1989, Steve, my older brother, was a high-school shop teacher in northern Wisconsin, recently married with two stepsons and a new daughter. That year he was 42; our father predeceased him, as they say, fourteen years earlier, at 61. My dad’s second heart attack (massive is the go-to word) did him in while on a sales junket with Mom in their hotel room.

His flagflapping bulk collapsed on the bed, then rolled onto the floor. Mom panicked, ran into the hotel’s hallway, screaming. The EMTs gave up quickly. Five years prior, he’d suffered attack #1: A winter day, he checked into a Denver hospital, lay down, and had it—or it had him. I’d have a similar event decades later.

*

Dad and his firstborn, Steve, were obese. My father, after three years of boredom serving on supply ships during the War in the Pacific, his operational fatigue hobbled his stride. There was a slap in his anger when my brothers and I tracked boot slush onto the living room carpet. His depression might quiet his rage but not until he’d fumed and exploded.

Steve was the target of Dad’s scorn; the worst epithets I heard in the house were buckets and the odious lard ass. (I figured these were collected during my father’s youth when he was the fatty.) To cope with name-calling in grade school, to soothe his failure at pool laps and football, falling on the ice rink, dropping Scouts, Steve ate twice as much as I did until, as Mother put it, “He ate us out of house and home.” A senior in high school, he topped the scale at 300 pounds. 

Incredibly, for five years, living in Wisconsin, Steve suffered bouts of angina and denied his heart was the cause. He said they weren’t chest pains because they throbbed in his neck, shoulders, and arms. One doctor said it was likely slow-forming gallstones, easily excised, nothing to worry about.

To manage the pain, Steve would drive his Ford pickup through the wood-bordered two-lanes, snow dark and summer humming, until the aching eased. He’d chug Pepto-Bismol to waylay what he thought was indigestion from his A & W diet. Eventually, the driving ploy no longer worked. Climbing stairwells or chopping kindling for a woodfire had him bent over, catching his breath. I wish he knew then about the cross between heartburn and angina, which Dad, too, had gambled with, and lost.

He blamed others as a means of escape, his ill-temper stamped on his wife, Mary, and her sons. It was their fault for not giving him the space he needed, which, crammed into a small farmhouse, was not theirs to give. So, he retreated, nights anchored in motel rooms, cheeseburgers and Cokes in tow. He had a checklist of symptoms and a lineup of excuses. Morning alarms shaped his despair, enough to say: Get moving man, though, if you lie still awhile, a last dreg of opiate sleep may be great comfort. He soon disregarded shaving, regular baths, laundered shirts. Bags ballooned under his eyes. Any weight he lost to worry he gained right back.

He said his best friend exclaimed, “Why all the huffing and puffing, man? Get yourself checked out.” And then when he stopped a kid zigzagging an electric saw through plywood, shouting, “Stop it, you fool!”, and the boy’s tears trailed down his cheeks, he dropped his defenses. He knew. He ran into the principal’s office: “I’m off to the hospital,” he said. “Get someone to cover for me!” Idling his truck at Emergency, he fell out of the cab, stumbled through the doorway. The team chest-compressed him back to life, doped him, and removed an artery from his leg to use for a triple bypass. After that, the cardio men said to Mary that half of the muscle in his heart was dead. The good news: the arteries were pumping plenty of blood; he should feel better soon.

“We’re glad,” they continued, “that he’s survived. But we must tell you there’s a clutch of necrotic cells in his heart.”

“Necrotic?” she said. “Dead,” they answered. “Those cells have been there, probably multiplying, we’re not sure how long. A while, at least. We think they’re responsible for the anginal strain your husband over the last five years has—astonishingly—sustained.”

“Please, can you tell us?” the surgeon asked, “did he ever complain?”

“Oh, he complained,” his wife said. “But not about his heart.”

2 / On the phone, post-surgery, Steve told me he’d be back teaching by May first.

I believed him because I thought his will was stronger than the trauma to his heart. That same will to survive was part of our inheritance, I thought as well. With a family systems therapist, I described how Steve and Dad battled, and the counselor told me what she believed may have caused the struggle. “It sounds,” she said, “as though from your father thought Steve mirrored his own, your dad’s, failures.” That got me going.

Before the war, Dad who’d grown up Catholic and poor had enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago for a semester of classes. He excelled there as an illustrator, a talent for comics and caricature. But, during the latter part of the Great Depression, he realized there was no money in drawing. He went to Northwestern for a degree in commerce; today, we call it business. He sold tires, a job that waylaid his creativity and tapped only his social skills. He was still friendly to a fault, often feigning interest in a sales target’s person better than anyone I’ve known.

The radio told him the war was coming, so he joined the Naval Reserve, a noncommissioned officer assigned to the Pacific theater. In 1943, he flew home to marry Mom. Back at sea and years aboard the U.S.S. Arkab, a cargo ship, took its toll. How did I know? He never mused about the romance of the Navy, though he was tickled by the film Mister Roberts.

He dismissed war movies. Westerns were okay, but nothing about Guadalcanal or Okinawa. Colicky Steve was born in 1946, and as he grew, Mom and Dad seemed unable to see the boy behind the fits, the breakage, the refusals, the sullenness. Steve’s antics for attention gave my mother a year or more of postpartum depression. Dad stayed away, conveniently, working fifty weeks a year. I got the feeling, much later, my parents never had a set of best years.

As an adult, Steve told me he felt unwanted and erased. I don’t know when the erasure started but by the time Dad ragged him about his appetite, I was keenly watching. I saw him “sneak” into the kitchen, after eleven o’clock, slice ham for a sandwich with pickles and mayo, food Mom was saving for our lunch. Of course, they noted the theft the next morning, and a fresh shock rattled the house. Steve would sulk and pout or, weirdly, join in on the fun with the twerps on the school bus who razzed him.

He took aim at me, Dad’s favorite, the little blonde angel. Once our much younger brother, Jeff, the sensitive one, came of age, Steve teased him constantly; he told me, also years later, how he felt unheard. The most galling thing for Dad? Steve disobeyed orders. Those orders to sweep the garage or scrub out the tub before dinnertime came in phone calls and were relayed by Mom. Steve could care less. He would lie on his bed like the King of England, reading paperbacks and sniggering at any command. He said once, “Why should I cooperate? He’s only going to blame me for doing a crappy job.”

To survive, Steve self-soothed, ate more, gorged, absurdly, to get bigger, to be seen by his father, to withstand Dad’s assault. I think they mirrored each other’s disappointment in themselves—that neither was seen nor heard for their unique value—so my family therapist had told me. Addicted to donuts after breakfast, Steve nursed an ogrish identity into being, or else that identity, bolted in like Frankenstein, was foisted onto him, more or less the same thing. Who can tell? Trying to make sense of so many unloving acts is exhausting. (Mom’s role? She withdrew into her melancholy, wiped her hands on her apron, polished the silver or parked near the stove. My brothers and I never washed a dish; kitchen duty kept her away from the fray, a brief release.)

*

At six-thirty, my father got home from the sales and marketing job he loathed in downtown St. Louis. I could tell he was happy when golfing with his buddies or on poker night. But, coming in the door, jowly, bent, I remember no one was glad to see him. Usually, my frazzled mother went on about Steve’s lack of control. One night, dinner on the table, she went to the oven for the warmed biscuits, and in place of ten, only a handful were left. She cried out Steve’s name. Dad rose from his chair, his fists pulled above him like a puppet. He shouted some Indian-like war cry as if, like Geronimo, he knew he had to kill someone. His rage terrified Jeff who exploded with squalls and tears. I ran away, too; Mom cried. And then the saddest fact: She called us back to the table. We hadn’t eaten. We hadn’t put fork to plate. We were hungry, my brother and father especially, dinner a fuel to sustain the faceoff. That night feverishly gobbling down the roast beef and mashed potatoes—Dad got all the biscuits—was our crime and our punishment.

Excused, I went to my room to commune with my models, my books, my music. At eleven, already I’d been molded: I was the good son—mannered, quiet, pliant, detached, Little Mr. Independent. My door shut, I taught myself to play the clarinet and the guitar via folk-music records and Mel Bay instruction books. I know that staying put with my projects brought about my interior life, in part, because my refuge from the family squabbles let me hear songs on the radio, the music a background to my thoughts and dreams. My interests, mostly in things artsy, were an escape, an exile from home.

But the going away had to wait as Steve staged one fuck-up after another. The night he crashed his VW bus. The weekend he took a train to Madison and didn’t call for three days. The Sunday evening he came home drunk and puked on the front porch stoop. 

Six weeks after his first heart attack and the triple bypass, a renewed river of blood squeezed into what was left of his heart muscle. But the flow wasn’t enough. Steve had a second massive heart attack. It struck him as he was putting his daughter on her back in her crib, an act, a finality for us, she doesn’t remember.

Boom! He went down, an unheard bullet to the chest. Sometimes I like to imagine there was a sound that accompanied him going down. First a whoosh, then a crumbling, a pile and a piling on, a ramp to silence. I imagine landing assuaged him in some small part. It would have been instantaneous, someone later told me, merciful in its brevity.

It took a moment or two for the electrical pulse of life to try passing through the muscle’s dead cells and, when nothing fired, the pulse zigged and zagged to either side and made no contact. The circuit broke, the lights went out. His heart stopped, his brain, too, for want of air. I also imagine in that final lapse a voice burst out, as if on loudspeaker. It’s Dad telling Steve to get off the floor, be a man, shape up or ship out, or else, you know, son, you’ll only have yourself to blame. Which, clear to me now, he wasn’t. 

3 / So, in the years from April to April, from the 1990s until the 2010s till now, I have missed Steve. Not exactly for what I’ve said so far. But something else, another side to the story.

When he wasn’t transferring his persecution onto my younger brother and me with pink bellies and knuckle sandwiches, when, as our babysitter, he’d lock us in a cedar closet and laugh fiendishly like Boris Karloff—Jeff says I participated in this torture, but I don’t remember it as he does—after a resigned dinner, Steve would invite me into his room, his refuge, to talk, to show me things, especially the summer before he left for college. He shared passages in the books he read, in the records he bought, in the ideas he discussed as though he had thought them himself. Like hearing Orpheus and his lyre, I was spellbound in our clandestine privacy. I see now that these things, secretive and entrusted to me, were helping him break free from home. What’s more, they comprise many of the sensual truths of life I have come to treasure.

He liked my companionship. A respite from family tension, I didn’t judge him. In fact, I was awed how his intelligence eased into his tastes. Late evenings, parents in bed, he’d play tracks from his many albums. Two I particularly loved: Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. He’d start the Dylan; elbows on his knees, his head drooped, listening intently. I followed his lead. Eventually, he asked, “What’d you think he means when says, ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more’?” And I’d have to answer.

“A metaphor for, I don’t know, advertising?”

“I think that’s right,” he said.

This camaraderie grew when he went to college, and I visited on select weekends. He and a new set of buddies (the bullies were gone) let me sit in—deft dorm-room discussions about Dostoyevsky and Camus, campus antiwar politics, women graduate students we all desired for their minds and their beauty. When I hitchhiked from Wisconsin across Canada to Vancouver, then down the coast to San Francisco where Steve was living near Haight-Asbury, he cozied up beside me for my all-night tales of the road, taking LSD with a clan of hippies, riding boxcars through the Canadian Rockies, and a serendipitous night when a woman in her thirties pitched a tent in a rest area and asked me to share her sleeping bag. He said “help yourself to anything in the fridge,” then asked me question after question, as if I were giving sworn testimony on the stand: “What was LSD like? When you rode those trains boxcars through the mountains, did you see any elk, meet any hoboes, outfox the Mounties? So, who was this woman, my wormy little brother, boasting like a man?”

And then something more telling, grander yet quiet, whispery in its elegance, the featheriest thing that Steve gave me came one early spring day. He and I were walking to class; I was now enrolled, three years younger than him, at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Among the houses, I saw patches of greasy-topped snow sheet-like under shadows cast by each home’s eave. I stopped, drawn to the sound of dripping snowmelt, a rainy patter on the ground.

There, in one front yard, the first flowering bush of the season, the forsythia, banana-colored yellow petals, soft, vulnerable, twisting a bit in a wind and making a sad little quiet flapping noise of their own. I felt Steve regarding me.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said and paused. “You know why we’re tuning into this, don’t you?”

“No,” I said, feeling a kind of Buddha insight about to descend.

“We’re out from under our parents’ thumb. Dad’s not coming home. He won’t be there. It’s simple. We used to see and hear the world through what he says. Not anymore. We have to go out and get it on our lonesome.”

That assertion, perfectly tuned, warm-chilled me to the bone. Of course, out on our own meant being alone—and lonely until we made friends with people we could trust. But any loneliness beat the soullessness of our parents’ home. And loneliness with my brother, a pair of surviving companions, was far and away preferable. His comment touched a latent sensibility in me: I realized I could wrap the threads of the family scar around a skein, turn after turn, and from it acquire the time and space my instincts needed to mature. But the thread wouldn’t just wind and wind on itself endlessly; at some point, it had to break, I understand now. And it did, later, slowly, with the barbed and wasting isolation my wife and I practiced against each other during our ten-year marriage in which we couldn’t balance the regret for our mismatch against the adventure of raising twin boys. (I’ve learned via years of therapy how the marriage fell apart, but I will never understand why in the first place I married her. To fall asleep and give my life its inexplicable mystery: Is that why?)

The week after Steve died, a later day in April, I thought about that moment with the forsythia and how I awakened, triggered because my brother acknowledged, if not created, that moment for me. In my journal, I wrote: It was the magnanimous way in which he listened to me that I remember. How he heard me, I think came because he could hear himself, too, because he wanted to free himself, and he did. For as long as his heart allowed. 

4 / And yet, not so fast—any desire to make a grand lesson of all this.

While the deaths of my father and brother haunted my memories, they had less effect on my body.

During a decade of deadline journalism, I had sporadic chest pains. Like father, like brother, I felt those pains and discounted them. Or, if they intensified, I attributed the cause to tiredness, avoiding the gym, aging, the dailiness of sitting-writing. Still, I wasn’t sound asleep. On occasion, I could hear Steve and his weakening heart, so to speak, within me. This was affirmed when one doctor told me my cholesterol was scarily high, and I was a candidate for cardiovascular disease.

“No question,” he said.

I didn’t yet have it but considering the odds. While he didn’t press the issue, I remember a scrunched-up mouth, a shake of the head, as I detailed the story of my lineage. It would be convenient to write that he was adamant, a savior of sorts, a way to heighten the drama of what I should have listened to and didn’t. 

Then, in 2006, seventeen years after Steve’s death, I had my own massive heart attack. Had the hospital not been five minutes away—I drove myself—I would have died. Again, like Steve, a small chunk of the heart muscle was rendered useless, necrotic, dead, not quite a sixth, the interventionist said. That attack was followed, in two-and-a-half-year intervals, by two less crippling infarctions. Today I have ten stents in my coronary arteries, plus take a statin-based regime of seven drugs—hardware and meds my dad and brother never had. I go on without any ailment, my organ support, exercise and veganism. 

(If I might quickly underscore this: I think of that time of my illness, a while ago and never over, when there was a parallel life that I missed out on, to borrow Adam Phillips’s phrase, a healthier way that could have been mine had I minded—had I listened to—my family’s legacy and the sense of shutting down my arterial occlusions produced. But, double negative, I didn’t know I wasn’t living that life. I was living the life I thought was mine; indeed, what else could it have been than what it was? That far-off siren of my auditory ignorance is no longer present. Today, I hear the death static pulsing within, keeping me upright and up late. I’m listening as I write to what I’m saying as well as another voice or two I have designed that are also keeping me from hearing what I’m saying. Thus, this essay; thus, a book.)

Too often when men creep up on their hereditary intimacies, health or otherwise, they tend to ignore it. What I’m dealing with has nothing to do with what made my father so unhappy is a common pop of the suspenders. Such an attitude helps a man rationalize his indulgence: wash down the Whopper with a Bud, call the chesty clamping after walking inclines heartburn—these and other forms of self-sabotage the American male cannot see he applies to himself, another reason he falls for ideologies and tyrants. 

That we seldom heed such blooded warnings, within the manosphere and without, is not proof that the Zeitgeist isn’t in flux. These days such warnings knit families together via trauma—father and son cokeheads in rehab together, for example. To listen for and to hear the likely outcomes of our genetic makeups, which might wise us up, is drowned out by men’s self-aggrandizing habits—masturbation, TV sports, video-game violence, gun-polishing, doom scrolling, driving in the woods with angina. Things that we believe our gender must embrace, which diminish the time and the responsibility to know ourselves.

Just now, I wonder how effective I’ve been with my sons, giving them the “talk” about their hearts eventually under extreme duress. I fear—no, I’ve been fearful all their lives—that their names have been notched by the Great Recorder in His Ledger already. I sense, even if each son is listening, he has to endure what I and the long stumbling gene-bent march of men before us have.

To listen to one’s body means to wake up and to wake up means to register an awareness that pain and its cause are real, which, for some reason, should be glaringly apparent but is not, not until the first infarction breaks the spell. Moreover, there’s a powerful variance that controls waking up. Listening to others and ourselves, which I’m advocating, doesn’t happen by Q-Tipping our ears and letting in a new wavelength and its message. What I’m suggesting is that my experience shows how the incessant rattle of our inbred habits and their repetition, creating alternate realities like dream states and codependency manufacture our “not listening”—not because we’re asleep but because we believe that whatever commands our attention possesses a greater degree of truth than our inner reality does. What else is my family but the daily drama of my father’s assault on Steve, ever ongoing, a kind of Eugene O’Neill play that we inhabited as scene and singularity, enough for us to think that if we put it “behind us,” we’d be free of it, a play within a play, whose last act reveals that we can never be free of it? How do we know which reality we are living in is the consequential one? My money’s on the one that’s barely heard, its music unechoed, nearly silenced yet buzzing in the distance like a Russian drone.

I think I can convey some sense of an ending to this benevolence for Steve with a story about him and a brief prayer I’ve offered him, on many occasions, he who I imagine is listening to me still. (I recall reading Augustine who says, the dead are not gone; they’re invisible. I would add that the concierge of those invisible entities, the ghosts, are listening as well.)

To be heard someone—here, there, yesterday, an eon from now—must listen for you, who wants to hear what you’ve got to say, and who will affirm the lasting present value of your experience because you’ve been heard.

I’ll make it another April day. I see my brother and me coming into view as the mist lifts. I’m on the floor, studying the liner notes of a Tim Buckley record, and he is on the couch of his Columbia Terrace apartment, sucking in a joint, deep breath and calming exhale, an ashtray at his feet filled with Pall Mall butts. I’m listening for the link between the printed lyrics and Buckley’s sung melodies when Steve offers the pot to me.

I decline. I recently quit smoking dope; drugs are like earwax clogging my mind. I don’t like myself stoned; I’m overly self-conscious with weed in my veins. The buzz saddens me, then and now—befogged, I dwell on the divorce, the children grown into love and estrangement, the years I built a musical life, composition and performance, and abruptly replaced it by a literary one, the seven-days-a-week writing and revising I’ve been doing for decades (my own “relentless need to produce”) with hundreds of publications, with four books, with head-pounding rejections by Big Five editors in NYC for a novel, the traveling circus of heart failure, and now, close friends falling, forgetting, decentered, dying.

(Wouldn’t we in any of our Cassandra moments run from a prophesied future, despite the futility, had we but known?)

The prayer, then.

A friend of Steve’s, a loudmouth, enters the bedroom where we idle. The intruder pinches the stub of the joint, tokes up, holds the puff, and sticks the punk at me. I wave him away, though I hear his smirk crackle in a suppressed laugh. My brother blinks, stiffens, and stares at him with nail-head eyes.

I have been reading the poems of James Agee, the one, “Sure on This Shining Night,” where he says, “Of stars made shadows round / Kindness must watch over me / This side the ground.” In this dissolve, I’m with Steve who’s saying he, us, have no chance of bypassing Dad, who, also, on the other side of the ground, with Agee (himself dead at forty-five of a heart attack in the back of a cab) is expecting my collapse, though my floor and my cushion will be Steve, I’m certain.

I tell him, with weakening breath: Don’t wait up, no, you need not, not yet, except I ask that you leave the light on, so I can find the way, the night shining a light that helps me and the millions of other sons and brothers who need today or next week or next year, your kindness to watch over us, we who need to listen for what’s getting closer and coming sooner than we can know.