“Go wait outside.” This was the first thing I heard from my dad–a man who didn’t even live with us anymore–after a long day of school in sixth grade. I sat outside in the sun for what felt like hours, playing with the grass and looking at the sky until my dad came and gave me a kiss before heading back to his house in Brockton. It was weird because he didn’t come down to our house that often, especially without letting me know–or at least telling my mom first. But I shrugged it off, at least until I went into the house and found my mom looking quite unhappy. She told me something like, “Your role model of a brother just got suspended for a whole week of school.”
My brother Ryan was never a saint, but based on what my mom told me he would never get in trouble to this degree. To make matters worse, I didn’t find out for a long time that the whole reason for the suspension was due to his being caught by drug dogs at his school. They found weed in his locker, which would come to signify the first of many bad decisions and mishaps in his life in the years that followed.
Every day during the week of the suspension I would come home to a mother who seemed more stressed than she had been in a long time, and a brother attached to a video game console, the one I always played, which left me with seemingly nothing to do. He had so much time he took over my hobby. My mom would go up to my brother, saying things like, “Shouldn’t you be doing homework?” or “Don’t you have something from school to be doing?” and my brother would always give the same lies, saying he didn’t, or they didn’t give him any. This week began to drag, hearing the same complaints and the same response over and over again. But after that week was over, it felt like it never happened in the first place. We all went on our merry ways and everything was fine, except for a few small things that led to an outburst in the summer leading up to my senior year of high school.
This outburst was like nothing we had seen or heard him do before. I have never been more confused in my life. I got a call from my mom and answered right away. She said, “Brandon, don’t get upset, but your brother had a bad outburst at work and was taken by ambulance to a mental hospital on the Cape.” I didn’t get upset at the call, I was just beyond baffled that something like this just happened. I came home right away, and got home just as my mom was just heading out to go see him. She planned to meet my dad there, and that was all I heard about it for a while.
My mom came back at night saying, “Ryan is going to be okay. He just needs some time. The doctors said that he was probably under a lot of stress and he finally burst.” I thought, what could have brought this upon him? He never seemed like the type to ever get stressed by anything, kind of like me, which is a blessing and curse at the same time. I could tell from looking at my mom that she had been crying. She was overwhelmed with stress and concern for him, and I couldn’t imagine what my dad was thinking at the time, but I would soon find out.
My mom, dad, and my family went on repeated visits for my brother, and they would always tell me that he would get better with time. But I wanted to see for myself. When I got the chance, I went to visit with my grammy, papa, and my mom and dad. When we got there I could tell that, for the first time in my life, my dad had been crying. I could see tears in his eyes, and it was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen; the man in my life that I had always known to be strong was finally broken. I would have never thought this would be the thing to push him to the edge. I would have thought he would say what he always does, which is usually just to “suck it up” or “get over it.” But I got the complete opposite. He admitted to me that he was over crying, over this whole experience, and that he wanted my brother to just return to his normal goofy self.
Through all the years of my life, I have never seen my family so gloomy. When I saw my brother finally, he looked visibly off, like something was wrong with him mentally, like he actually belonged there. I knew he didn’t. I knew he was just having a hard time, that the stress had built up to a point that became too much to bear. When we all sat there on that table, he would keep saying things like, “they’re watching me” and “they’re keeping me here and wont let me go.” We would all tell him he wasn’t making sense, and that he needed to calm down so he could get out of that place and back home where he belonged. We didn’t stay long, and he wasn’t there that long, but the experience lasted in all of our heads. The troubled child couldn’t take all the stress that had accumulated inside him. It scared all of us to see him in such a state, the brother I never thought could exist.