Heston

5 years ago, my brother killed himself.

He took a rifle from under his bed, chambered a round, and pointed the barrel at his head.

5 years ago, was the first time I was ever forced to see that image in my head.

Since then, it’s become routine.

Laying in bed, with my wife at my side.

Sitting on a surfboard, surrounded by my friends.

Alone in my truck, on some distant interstate.

It doesn’t really matter where I am when those thoughts come racing across my mind.

5 years in, I’m as vulnerable to them as ever.

But nowadays I see the world a little bit different.

Life does go on, as they say.

I have a business, I’m building a family of my own, I have friends — 

5 years ago though …

I had my brother.

Yet the moments that should separate me from the day my brother last breathed don’t do much in the way of separation, at all.

Anything good, I wish he could’ve been here for.

And, well…

Anything bad, I only wish I had him around to listen to me.

5 years ago, my brother killed himself.

But today, his body might as well be warm.

I was 17 years old when my phone began to ring.

My mother’s name — unusual. This far from home, in rural Idaho, I was typically the one to initiate a call.

But I reached for my phone — then, for the last time in my entire life, without hesitation.

“Heston did it. Find your way home.”

Soon, as tears fell from my cheeks yet brought no relief, and as words flew from my lips but only berated God, I scrambled onto the interstate.

Vision blurred, I sped —

110mph for mile after mile across i90 Eastbound, in some deluded state imagining driving 36 hours straight to South Carolina.

But I was never trying to get home faster.

I was attempting to do the only thing I knew to do —

outrun the present.

And until that June afternoon, stomping the gas and hearing 8 cylinders — the only thing I ever really had control over — submit to my dominion as we ventured onto an open road had always done the job.

My brother suffered most of his life. 

Suicide was, to an extent, a possibility we were always aware of.

But the thought of meeting death, and the meeting of death … they are radically different things.

5 years ago today, I sat up in the Spokane Airport parking lot.

I attempted to sleep in the front seat, under a sheet I bought the evening before to cover all my belongings. 

But I never nodded too far off. 

With an itinerary destined for Charleston, I was leaving behind everything that had given me comfort throughout my early years.

And upon landing, I was face to face with a reality that somehow felt more distant and more surreal than it ever did across a hurried string of text messages organizing the crime scene cleanup company’s arrival.

Overwhelmed by a new reality, I was entirely numb.

Yet faced with my mothers tears, my fathers shaking hands …

No feelings of my own, only ones observed.

Your 18th birthday — 

were you an adult?

Were you surrounded by family, were you alone?

Was it a party, or was it somber?

My 18th birthday, all of the above.

One and a half weeks after my brother took his life, I spent mine at a dinner table in a rental home with my parents and surviving siblings.

There was a grocery store cake with my name on it, and 4 candles lit.

I wished for nothing, and blew them out.

3 weeks after my brothers death, I watched from Charleston as a heat wave descended across eastern Washington.

Temperatures began to rise well above 105º in the summer of 2021.

I was worried about my truck and everything inside, but I was more terrified to venture back into the unknown.

The road, last I recalled, had done me quite dirty.

But life at home … well, it was terrible and sad but I at least knew what to expect.

And yet for the first time in my life, it seemed more enticing to stay than to go.

But for my father, the road was a job I had left unfinished.

And my father, like any good man, has a well defined standard: 

no job is left undone.

So guided by my own fear and then pushed by the first man to see my brothers cold body, I packed my single bag.

We rolled into Departures at Charleston International Airport, and I briefly exchanged both hugs and tears with my family.

But my flight was departing, and I left work undone in Spokane.

So I did for the first time then, what I have practiced so many times since — and what I did a few weeks ago when I married Grace:

With a place to be, and a fear to go, I summoned only the five minutes of courage that I could,

and I went.

The day before my brother died, I was a boy.

I was depressed, surely — but I was innocent.

Yet halfway through the greatest adventure of my young life, the phone began to ring.

I was a boy when I reached for it.

Yet by the time I set it down,

I had been asked to become a man.