Jay in Charleston

My brother's name was Jay. He died last week, April 1, 2011, of a drug overdose. He was 24 years old. I wrote the following for his funeral.

My brother and I have not always been on good terms. Though we were very close as children, in the past few years we’ve had some knock-down, drag-out, hit-below-the-belt fights, some over things that don’t seem so important now.

I moved back to Charleston, SC in August, shortly after graduating from law school in Tuscaloosa, AL. At that point, Jay and I didn’t have much of a relationship. While I was falling back in love with Charleston, Jay was stumbling into situations he knew he shouldn’t have been.  Finally, in January he realized he needed a new start in a new town, so he asked me if he could move to Charleston. Because of our troubled past, because I didn't trust him based on his past behavior, and because I felt protective of my life in Charleston, I almost said no.

At my best moments, when I'm thinking clearly and long-term and am able to separate anger from fact, I have a life philosophy that goes something like this. When I’m old and frail and I look back on the times when I made the wrong decision – everyone is wrong once in a while – I hope that I’ll have been wrong on the side of being too open-minded, too generous, or too forgiving. With that in mind, how could I refuse to help give my brother a new start, no matter what had happened in the past?

True to form, Jay made friends more quickly than anybody I’ve ever met. Within a week, I had to call Jay to find out what my friends were up to.

Jay & Cinnamon, clearly in love.

A waitress named Cinnamon at the Waffle House was convinced that Jay was going to ask for her hand in marriage. We took walks to the water, through the beautiful wealthy neighborhoods in downtown Charleston, and made a game of guessing how much each mansion cost. My neighbor, who we nicknamed “Cousin Curtis,” is an eccentric old man with several dozen birdhouses strung from the tree in his front yard. We spent hours making up Cousin Curtis’ totally fictitious background story.  In our wild imaginations, Cousin Curtis' alarmed storage shed in his back yard was obviously a meth lab.  That is, until we saw The Onion "Justice Shed" segment.  From that point on, Cousin Curtis was a patriot hero; he obviously owned a Justice Shed.

Jay started a running joke.  When employing it, he would get everyone’s attention and say “Hey guys, remember that time when I…” and fill in the rest with something completely, but endearingly, ridiculous. “Hey guys, remember that time when I invented windshield wipers?” “Hey guys, see that huge fish mounted on the wall? Remember that time when I killed it with a spear? Or was it with my bare hands?”  "You guys, when I invented basketball I had NO IDEA it'd get this big!" 

In one of our favorite restaurants in Charleston there’s a painting of a nondescript blonde woman in a black evening gown looking over her shoulder. Jay decided she looked like his crush, the celebrity Tara Reid, and had us laughing for ten minutes when he announced “Hey guys, you’ll never believe what I had to do to get Tara Reid to pose for that painting.”

Although Jay’s life did not play out like we all wished it had, I’ll always be tremendously grateful for the two months that he lived with me in the beautiful, healing city of Charleston.  I experienced incredibly fun, revealing, restorative times with Jay, my brother who I'd grown up with.  Until he moved to Charleston, I hadn't seen my brother -- with his true, untouched-by-drugs personality, in 4 or 5 years.

 For a short time, free from the things that dragged him down during most of his recent years, I got my brother back.


 ______________________________________________________________________
*Added at a later date: If this had to happen -- and I don't believe it did, I don't believe it should have happened -- but since it did, my time with Jay in the few months before he died has saved me from spiraling into a depression I'd never get out of.  Jay, in a way you saved your older sister. Just like I tried, and wish I could have succeeded in, saving you.