I have this picture of Kurt sitting on my bookcase. In the 16 months since his death, I have been able neither to frame it more permanently and hang it on my wall nor to put it away. In perhaps the same way, I have been hesitant to write anything about Kurt. For it felt as if to write something about Kurt was to conclude Kurt. Although Kurt might no longer be living, I did not want him to be concluded.
Kurt has been present to me in some way every day since April 10, 2008. A reflection of this is that he served as the framing, the beginning and end of the thesis I wrote for my MA in Education, “And Who Is My Neighbor? Conceptions of Community in Community Service Learning in U.S. Higher Education.” My thesis was all about the tensions between knowing good and doing good, tensions Kurt wrestled with too. I share the Kurt portions of the thesis here not as any final word but to pay homage to the community around Kurt and to keep the conversation of Kurt going.
From my thesis:
April 10, 2008: My younger brother Kurt took his own life, stepping in front of a Chicago-bound passenger train a mile from our childhood home. In his 34 years, he had received a myriad of diagnoses: Attention Deficit Disorder, allergies, Sensory Integration Disorder, just plain lazy, anxiety, antisocial behavior, manic depression, inconsiderate towards the feelings of others, Asperger’s syndrome. He had been given drugs by doctors, specialists, and friends to help his condition: Ritalin, Adderall, Klonopin, Oxycotin, alcohol, Vicodin, Lyrica, heroin, methodone, and heroin again. But nothing and no one seemed able to long comfort his unease. Even before the train hit him, he was in great emotional and physical pain.
April 11, 2008: I was on my way to the DC-area K-8 private school where I taught Language Arts to 7th and 8th graders to tell them I would be taking off some time. While I drove, I heard a National Public Radio (NPR) story about Washington, DC schools. According to the radio broadcast, DC public school children had recently taken a “character education” test. According to the test, Whites and Asians had high character, Blacks, Hispanics and special education students had low character. I experienced an almost overwhelming desire to find any human connected to the creation, implementation, or disinterested analysis of this test and beat their heads against a solid surface until I could see the consciousness slowly drain from their eyes.
Clearly, I was not in a state to drive, or at least not in a state to drive while listening to NPR. But I continued my ill-advised pattern, and a week later outside Chicago, I heard public radio station WBEZ 91.5 reporting personal stories from the Chicago public high school most touched by deadly violence. Three students had recently been shot at one Chicago school. And again, it was all I could do to keep from driving straight to that school, sleeping in the parking lot overnight so that the next morning I could go to the principal’s office and offer to help however I could.
I am not a “good” person. I neglect all sorts of activities that might improve this world. I do all the insensitive, unthinking, and occasionally cruel things to my fellow humans that my fellow humans typically do in turn. But with my brother’s death I felt this intense urge to do good. I was emotionally ready to commit my life to lepers, to go on a hunger strike for the poor or the poorly treated. I was ready to stop a war or start a war; to convert to a new religion or stomp out all religion; to fall in love or to execute wrongdoers. I was all revved up to do good, but I had no idea what good was….
[Then, 130 pages later, my conclusion…]
“The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.” –John Dewey
Following my brother’s death, family and friends of Kurt started asking “what if?”. What if we had reached out to him more in the last 6 hours of his life, the last 6 months, the last 6 years? What if he had been given better medical attention? What if he received more attention in school? What if the social service system was better? What if medical research was better? What if authority figures in his life had been harder on him? What if they had been kinder? What if he had stayed away from heroin, from Vicodin, from alcohol, from Ritalin? What if he found the right drug to more sustainably ease his condition?
We were not just trying impossibly to reverse time, to come up with a way that Kurt would no longer be dead. We were trying to learn something. Almost worse than Kurt’s death itself was the notion that Kurt’s life might have been in vain. We must, it felt, come up with the lesson of Kurt’s life and come up with it right away.
In time, I became aware of all those who were together wrestling with meaning of Kurt’s life and death: there were professors of philosophy and heroin addicts, church choir directors and rock band drummers, social workers and bankers, Evangelicals and Theosophists, parents and children, Quakers and Buddhists, young and old, those who had experienced similar losses and those who had experienced nothing like this before. In our openly asking together the utterly important, but utterly answerable question of Kurt, I experienced community: the community of Kurt’s family and friends, of my family and friends.
Back at the beginning of this thesis I quoted the parable of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, a priest and a Levite—the professional do-gooders of the day, those who had codified in law exactly what good was—passed the man in need by. The Samaritan, sworn enemy to the Israelites, stopped to help. When Jesus asked his expert-in-the-law interlocutor who the man’s neighbor was the expert replied, “the one who showed mercy on him.” The parable pushes us toward the realization that neighbors, communities are created not by ethnicity, nor by proximity, nor by the goodness of any particular member, but by those we choose to show care to.
Wrestling with my brother’s suicide brought no final conclusions, no stable truths. But it did bring to me an awareness of those whose care supports me and who I try to support in turn. The community is the only lesson to learn.