He Had Materials and a Particular Date

Much commended: Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig’s Suffering and Suffering-With from Ethika Politika. It begins:

When I was 10 years old we lived in Connecticut for less than a year. One otherwise unremarkable day I trudged home though the snow and found boxes in the entryway of our house. I stood in a kind of stupor, with the bright winter whiteness behind me and my things stacked in the still dark of my house.

That night my mom told me that my 14-year-old brother and I were moving back to Texas. She and my father would stay to settle things up and sell the house. I didn’t really pry for coherent reasons why; I was at an age at which things could be explained to me very vaguely and strangely without causing me much pause.

Over the years our very sudden departure became a fact of history. It wasn’t worth investigating, it was just a certain turn of events. But in snatches and pieces I came to understand that my mother had discovered, in a way I am still unsure of, that my brother had developed very precise and serious plans to kill himself. He had materials and a particular date. He was being tortured at school in the time before those things were taken seriously, because he had learning difficulties and a thick Texan accent, and he could only see one way out.