My Brother’s Life, Unraveled
The writer loses his brother to suicide—and the family is left to wonder how they could have prevented it:
“According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, at least 90 percent of people who kill themselves suffer from a treatable and diagnosable mental illness. Anthony didn’t see a psychiatrist and was never diagnosed, but he displayed symptoms of any number of them. These diseases can be triggered by genetic makeup, by experience, by a life situation, by family dynamics dating back to early childhood.
“Not long after his death my mother asked me why Anthony couldn’t just muddle through like the rest of us, why he was so fragile. It’s the question all of us who loved Anthony have to live with, how such a capable person could be so wrong about the biggest question there is and so many smaller ones. His death is hard to understand and harder to forgive. It goes against the human instinct to make what use of our talents we can, to breed, to survive.”
