The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence

Reflections on Suicide and Absence

A.W. Barnes

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781684480425
• eBook ISBN: 9781684480449
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes' relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. In addition, the narrative traces the brothers' difficult relationship with their father, a man who once studied to be a Trappist monk before marrying and fathering eight children. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author's relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

Prospero’s Books

When I was living in Washington, D.C., and Mike lived in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he came to visit me only once. I knew that he’d been to D.C. many times before then for work—he often lobbied Congress as a tax lawyer for Morgan Stanley. But every other time he’d been to D.C., he just rushed into town and then rushed out when he was finished without calling me.

That weekend, however, he called and said he wanted to see me. I didn’t know why. I thought that maybe he missed me and finally had time in his busy schedule for a visit.

Once, when I was in my early twenties and still living in Indianapolis, he came home for a weekend visit. (After he left Indianapolis, he rarely came home.) I hoped that he would want to spend some real time with me. I suggested that the two of us go downtown for a fancy lunch at the Rathskeller—one of the oldest restaurants in town—or maybe catch a matinee at the Indianapolis Repertoire Theater. They were my ideas of what kind of life Mike lived in New York—good restaurants and Broadway shows. But he said he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to hang around the house and catch up on his sleep.

“It’s no big deal,” I said offhandedly.

When Mike said he wanted to see me in D.C., I told him that there wasn’t any need to spend money on a hotel. There was enough space in my apartment, even though it was a studio apartment. I thought that it would be nice to stay up late talking, and to wake up early and have coffee at the small foldaway table that I kept pushed up against the wall next to the micro-kitchen.

He said that he preferred to stay in a hotel.

“Besides,” he said, “money isn’t really an issue.”

In preparation for Mike’s visit to D.C., I made elaborate plans without consulting him. I would meet Mike at his hotel in the morning, and we’d have the continental breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant—I convinced myself that this would be much better than having breakfast in my small apartment. I had an image of Mike and me strolling up the Mall—beginning at the Lincoln Memorial, ambling past the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian, and up to the Capitol—as if we were brothers used to spending time together. As if we were intellectual equals discussing democratic politics and contemporary literature and the AIDS epidemic.

I thought it would be nice if we ate lunch at one of the restaurants congressmen and senators dined, like Charlie Palmers or the Bombay Club.

I thought I’d take him to my local gay bar, JR’s, for a drink. I imagined us talking openly about men that we saw at the bar that we’d like to have sex with. I imagined us staying out late and drinking too much, stumbling home early in the morning and making too much noise so that the neighbors would yell out their windows for us to be quiet.

When Mike checked into the Park Hyatt, however, he called and said that he only had enough time to spend a few hours with me that Friday night.

“What do you want to do?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice normal.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. I heard the sound of ice cubes tapping against glass. I thought that he was having a cocktail in his room, looking out of the window at the White House in the distance. Perhaps, he was just having a glass of ice water, parched from a long day at the office and a crowded flight down to D.C.

I suggested we go to a movie and then out to dinner, which, he said, was fine with him.

“Is there anything you want to see in particular?” I asked him. I was standing in the kitchen while we talked on the phone.

“You choose,” he said.

The kitchen countertop in my apartment was made of white Formica that bubbled up at the seam where one piece of Formica butted up against another. I ran my fingers over the rough seam.

I didn’t know how to choose a movie. Mike would judge me on my choice, of course. Even if he wouldn’t say anything, I’d know in the way he’d react. If I suggested we see Terminator 2, he’d grunt the way our father—our own Archie Bunker—grunted when, as kids, we watched All in the Family, and his grunt was meant to say, “What kind of crap is this?” Or, if I suggested we see Thelma and Louise, Mike might say, “Huh,” in the way our mother used to do when one of us suggested that we have pancakes for dinner and she meant, “That’s not a very good idea, is it?”

While I was trying to think of an appropriate movie for Mike and me to see, I took a butter knife out of a drawer and ran it along the seam in the countertop to clean out the food scraps that collected there.

I’d spent most of my life trying to impress Mike, thinking that if he gave me his blessing, I’d do okay. When I was a sophomore in high school, I told Mike that I wanted to be a doctor—I had no real desire to be a doctor, but thought he would see my choice as noble. Instead, he said, “Is that right?” He meant that I didn’t have the intellect or the discipline to make it through medical school. He was right, of course.

Mike’s dismissal of me wasn’t just about me. He had dismissed the entire family the moment he moved away from Indianapolis. He was embarrassed to have been born in the Midwest into such a parochial family. He felt cheated that we weren’t privileged or at least upper-middle class.

“How about Prospero’s Books?” I suggested to Mike over the phone.

“Sure,” he said. I heard him rattling the ice in his glass, shaking loose the last of his cocktail.

My parents were very proud of their children. They thought of us as smart and talented and handsome—even if we weren’t rich or sophisticated, as Mike had wanted. When we walked into church on Sunday—my father leading the way, our mother bringing up the rear, and the eight of us children filing in between them more or less in birth order—other parishioners poked their children, wishing they were more like us, or so our parents taught us to believe. In our neighborhood, according to my mother, housewives swapped stories about our successes—the sports trophies we’d won, the colleges we attended, the career paths we were set on.

Eventually, my oldest brother Tony would become a chief financial officer and my younger brothers Eddy and Rob would become an engineer and a computer programmer, respectively. Mike, of course, became a lawyer working for Morgan Stanley, one of the leading financial companies in the world. (My other older brother Joe had a learning disability, so we didn’t expect much from him. My youngest brother Pat settled on a respectable career as a grade school principal. My sister Marie became a housewife, as was expected. When her kids were old enough to go to school, she received her master’s in accounting, like my father had when I was a teenager.)

I was nothing like my brothers. While they played on the best Little League teams and won MVP awards, I was placed on the team sponsored by our local waste company—Mr. Removal. I tried as hard as I could to catch fly balls in the outfield and earn a decent batting average. But I did neither. My father watched one or two of my games, but he was more interested in the baseball games that Tony and Eddy and Rob (and even Mike) played in. Occasionally, my father would give me advice, the same advice my coaches gave me: “Keep your eye on the ball,” “Squeeze your mitt to catch the ball,” “Don’t close your eyes.” The advice didn’t do any good. I lasted one season in Little League before quitting.

Instead, I was a boy who read alone in my room and sat by myself at the dining room table, carefully filling in the spaces of a Paint-by-Number set. I spent most of my childhood alone, listening to Mozart in my father’s den, or teaching myself to knit in my mother’s sewing room.

From their successes in summer sport’s leagues, Tony went on to become an All-American athlete, while Eddy and Rob, and even Mike, played on varsity squads. Their circle of friends expanded from the kids in our neighborhood to teammates who lived in gated communities in the wealthier suburbs to the north of the city, to college roommates from across the country and around the world. At the same time, I was withdrawing into myself, resisting my mother’s call for me to go outside and play with my brothers. I avoided making eye contact with kids at school. I refused to take the advice of my teachers that I join the debate club or the student government association. When given a choice, I always chose solitude.

I felt as if I was a boy who had nothing in common with other boys, especially my brothers. This was true even of my relationship with Mike, who shared the same athletic enthusiasm and level of social engagement as my other brothers.

Looking back, I want to say that the difference I felt came from being gay; although, I also felt different from boys even before I knew that I was gay. Even though Mike was also gay, I never had the sense that he felt as different and as lonely as I had growing up. There was something else that separated me from other boys. I thought I was far more sensitive than they were, certainly more so than Mike was. I cried too easily when my brothers teased me, even though they teased each other—including Mike—just as harshly. I felt rejection more sharply, when my brothers were asked over to friends’ houses for sleepovers and I was not.

Mike set the standard by which the teachers in our school judged me. Mike was popular—he was prom king and senior class president. He was a straight-A student. By the time I was a freshman in high school, he’d gone off to Notre Dame on a scholarship. I was not popular or smart—at least not in the way that counted. I disappointed my teachers, who thought that I’d perform as well as Mike. I was a B student.

Perhaps Mike’s achievements were his way of overcompensating for feeling as abnormal as I felt—if, that is, he felt abnormal. If he did, I never saw it in him. Mike was cocky and self-assured. He seemed to be unfaltering in his belief that he could achieve anything. I never felt that way.

Instead, I learned to live in the shadows. In school, I slunk down in my desk when roll was called, and sat in the back of the auditorium during assembly. I kept my head down when I walked through the halls. I tried to make myself invisible, the unseen boy who’d never be missed if I simply disappeared.

I wanted to disappear. I wanted to opt out of life.

The first time I thought about dying was as a freshman in high school. I had a vague sense that I would never see my twenty-first birthday. I hadn’t yet thought about killing myself, only that I couldn’t go on year after year feeling as lonely as I felt. If someone was capable of dying of loneliness, I thought, I was a prime candidate, as if loneliness were a fatal disease that I was susceptible to.

Each year, my thoughts of dying became more concrete. I thought about what it would take to drown myself—how does one take in a breath of water?—or if the clothes bar in my closet were strong enough to hang myself from. I tried to imagine falling to my death from one of the tall buildings downtown, wondering what last thoughts I might have or if in such circumstances the mind is in too much shock to process thoughts.

I did try to make friends in high school, but I was so socially inept that these attempts always ended in disaster. When I was a junior, a guy in my class—Trevor—invited me to a party at his house when his parents had gone on vacation. I was excited to have been invited. I got blind drunk at that party and threw up first in the kitchen, and then in the living room, and finally in his parents’ bedroom. I was so filled with shame that I jumped out of his parents’ bedroom window and ran to my car rather than have to face Trevor and my classmates—or help clean up my mess. For the rest of junior year, I was known as the loser who’d gotten Trevor in serious trouble when his parents returned from vacation and knew what had happened from the smell the minute they walked into the house.

In the last semester of my senior year, my suicidal thoughts turned more serious. Over spring break—when my classmates were in Florida—I decided to kill myself.

After school on that Friday before spring break, I drove to a 7–11 and bought a pack of sleeping pills. I brought them home. The house was quiet. My mother and father were at work. My younger brothers—Eddy, Rob, and Pat—were at their after-school activities. My sister Marie and my older brothers Mike and Tony were off at college, while my other older brother Joe was at his vocational training classes. I took a glass of water fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• A Complaint
• The Letter
• Salient Facts
• Familial Bodies
• Prospero’s Books
• Holiday Inn
• Morta Sicura
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author