Something Happened

When I started this blog I chose not to discuss the way my brother died. I chose instead to write about my memories of him and how I was handling the loss. It was a deliberate choice. The manner of his death is something that I can't spend a lot of time thinking about without feeling my brain start to crinkle like a wad of paper. To discuss it in a public forum, among potential strangers - or, perhaps more pertinently, among people who knew Joey and for whom this is also a difficult topic - seemed too risky. But as time passes (it's now been two and a half years) and the earth begins to regain a little of its old solidity, I'm beginning to think this is something we should at least begin to talk about, if only because talking about it might be a good way to think about it, and I haven't really found a good way to think about it yet.

Here, briefly, is what we know. On July 3, 2010, Joey and a friend spent the afternoon and evening drinking and watching the World Cup at a Washington, DC, bar. Late that night they parted, the friend to his home and Joey on the way to his girlfriend's place near Dupont Circle. The friend says Joey didn't seem that drunk, although he has since had second thoughts about this. Sometime around 3am a subway driver pulling into the Minnesota Avenue Metro station saw Joey lying on the track. It was the last train of the night, running on a special holiday schedule, and I don't believe there was anybody else on the train. The train didn't stop in time. He was still alive when rescue crews arrived, but he died shortly thereafter in a Maryland hospital.

That's all I know. I don't know why he was at the Minnesota Ave. stop, which is nowhere near Dupont Circle, but it's likely that he fell asleep on the train and got out at that stop (which is not in a great neighborhood) intending to catch another train back into town. I don't know how he ended up on the tracks. Either he fell or he was pushed; a deliberate jump is out of the question. The friend with whom he had spent the evening told me, quite eloquently, that he prefers to think that he fell, since that's the option that leaves more good people in the world. It almost certainly wasn't a robbery, since nothing of value was missing (although I believe they never did find his phone). I haven't seen the medical examiner's report - it might contain some more information, but it can't answer any of the important questions.

Immediately after his death I didn't much care how it had happened. The old cliche from a hundred movies and TV shows seemed perfectly adequate: "What does it matter how he died? Knowing what happened won't bring him back, will it?" While I accepted the wisdom of that cliche, I also felt determined to avoid falling into another, that is, searching for the "closure" that would supposedly help me "move on" once all my questions had been answered. This was the sort of thinking that justified people calling for the death penalty for the murderers of their loved ones. It was the sort of thinking that furrowed the brows of my classmates who didn't understand Samuel Beckett, that sent people into hysterics over the last episode of the Sopranos. I didn't want to be the sort of person who needed all of life's question's answered, everything tied up with a nice little bow and ready to be placed on a shelf. It wasn't that I was enjoying the mystery of it; I just didn't want the mystery to matter to me. The important fact was clear - he was dead - so what did it matter how he got that way?

That's what I told myself. But here's why I was wrong: we live our lives as stories, we make sense of our own existence through a sort of ongoing private narration, and where there's a great big gap in the plot - a gap, in this case, created by the absence of security cameras in the Minnesota Ave. Metro station - the mind will keep trying to fill that gap, whether we want it to or not, forever. So rather than becoming a mere blip in the story of your life - a missing page, a sentence redacted - it becomes a stumbling block. A scratch so deep in the record that the needle keeps skipping backward, over and over, so that you keep hearing the same few seconds of the song but never, ever, hear that next note. That's why it matters how he died. It's not because knowing what happened that night would bring closure, but because it would give me a story I could tell, about my life and his, that I would know to be true.

For the first year or so the story I told myself was that he must have just slipped somehow. He was a big, clumsy guy. He'd been drinking all day, and, drunk or not, he was sleepy, possibly confused, certainly not in top mental and physical form. It makes sense, but I don't know that it's true, and so my mind keeps returning to it and offering other possible explanations.

About a year ago I awoke from a dream convinced that he'd been murdered. In the dream someone had said to me, "It's as if a professional swimmer had drowned in his own swimming pool." Joey had spent much of his adult life riding the Washington Metro. He'd also spent much of it drinking. And he'd spent a fair amount of time doing both. How likely was it that, even sleepy or slightly intoxicated, he would have been so incapacitated as to fall on a subway track? Didn't it make more sense to think that he'd been pushed? Maybe they'd stolen his phone. Maybe he'd refused to hand over his wallet. Maybe there'd been a fight in the station and he'd gotten caught up in it.

This is what I'm talking about. Not knowing what's true means that I have to keep returning to this moment and trying out different scenarios. It means I have to keep thinking about it, even if I don't want to. And I usually don't want to.

But let's stick with this possibility for a minute. If he was murdered, then there's someone out there who killed him. If that person's out there, shouldn't they be punished? How? What if they do it again? If he was murdered, should I feel some affinity with the families of other murder victims? Should I recoil at the way movies, TV, and books casually traffic in murder as a compelling plot device? I certainly recoil from the (suddenly amazingly common) use of train and subway accidents as storytelling devices. Am I the brother of a murder victim?

I had been giving this line of thinking a rest recently, until the the story of the subway death in New York - the one that appears to have been perpetrated as a hate crime by a mentally disturbed person - began popping up all over the internet. I still haven't read much about it, but it led me to take seriously a possibility that I hadn't really considered before: that someone may have pushed Joey just for the hell of it.

So what am I supposed to do with that?

The New York tragedy did generate one news story that I felt compelled to read, about the horrific experience this can be for the drivers of the subway trains. Here it is, if you're interested, but be careful: it's not easy reading. The article says that there were 55 subway deaths in New York City last year, which seems to me neither high nor low - just sad. I have thought about the woman who hit Joey and what she must have gone through, though I confess it hasn't been foremost in my mind. This article makes me wonder if there's maybe some way to contact her. It also makes me wonder if she'd even want to hear from us.

I don't want to give the impression that I spend all of my time dwelling on the early morning of July 4, 2010, rehearsing scenarios and trying to find someone to blame. I don't. But it is an itch I can't scratch, and if I'm not paying attention to something else, it often claims my attention. I'm dredging all this up now because I'd like to hear how others have dealt with this. I'm not searching for hypotheses, necessarily, although anything that helps us get closer to the truth is certainly welcome. I'm mostly curious to know whether anyone's shared my experience, or if you've found ways to make sense of it in ways that have eluded me so far. Please post as many comments as you'd like below.