On the Cruelty of Kind Memories
With my identical twin brother’s memorial service fast-approaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about the occasion of celebrating someone’s life, especially after they die under especially tragic circumstances.
There’s an inherent and overwhelming contradiction to funerals and memorial services. The upcoming event is supposed to be, on its face at least, about my brother Kevin. It is about celebrating his life, remembering what he meant to each person who chooses to attend the service, and trying to find some long overdue closure after an inexplicable tragedy. But Kevin’s not going going to be there.
Whatever your views are on the afterlife, Kevin didn’t believe in life everlasting, at least not in the metaphysical sense. He was an atheist. He didn’t believe that he would be at his memorial service, hovering somewhere with a subtle glow like he was watching a bunch of Ewoks dance around bonfires after helping blow up the Death Star.
For Kevin, the only life after death he believed in was the way your legacy affected other people. The only way you can continue living after your body expires is to be present in people’s memories and influence their actions. In that way, the impression you left on the universe gets just a little deeper, even after your corporal demise. In that way, his memorial service isn’t as much about Kevin as it is about us. In that way, his memorial service is about how we are going to remember my brother. It is about how we are going to give him ongoing life by taking something — some example, some lesson, some memory — and turning it into some small, world-changing act of kindness or compassion.
Doing that isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it is usually even more difficult because a completely understandable and logical instinct. In the wake of loss, people usually prefer to focus on the sanitized version of the dearly departed, conjuring a carefully scrubbed and selectively remembered impression of someone who has passed. Especially given the traumatic circumstances of my brother’s suicide, I certainly understand this instinct — this desire to push aside the trauma he suffered, the struggles he went through, or the anger he felt at the world and instead only remember the moments of joy we felt in his presence. But he was more than those moments, and omitting so much of who Kevin was from our memories is what I would consider “mindless good taste” — a reflexive default to the polite and cordial and comfortable thing to do. And I hate the idea of it because that wasn’t who Kevin was. He didn’t get along to go along. He didn’t excuse injustice or awkward truths for the sake of privileged people’s comfort. And remembering a fantasy version of Kevin, a partial representation of who he truly was, threatens to consign my brother — the real and complete and complex person my brother really was — to oblivion. I can’t tolerate that. He was too important to me to let anyone’s comfort kill the memory of who he truly was forever.
I am frankly terrified of isolated happy memories drowning out the truth about Kevin because if it does, it means that I alone have the enormous burden of remembering who Kevin really was. It means that if I don’t hold present his legacy, if I don’t carry on in his memory, if I don’t ensure he has continued presence in the world, then the true Kevin is gone forever. Who he really was is lost. But in sharing with the world the perspective that only I could ever have on Kevin, as I plan to at his memorial service, I’m hoping that he will live on with and in anyone who listens. I’m hoping that people who are there will take some small piece of who my brother truly was, so that Kevin — the real Kevin — might continue to live. That means understanding and acknowledging his faults and his trauma, because it is the only way we can also understand and acknowledge his truth.
Kevin’s truth is important because it has the potential to help make the world a better place.
Kevin’s truth is important because it has the potential to help make the world a better place. That potential would be squandered, however, if we sanitize and pretend that Kevin’s life was all sunshine and rainbows and ignore the important lessons that Kevin has learned for us, if we are only willing to listen. Kevin was abused by both his boss in 2008 as well as his wife in his final years. Pretending either of these traumatic events didn’t happen neglects the opportunity to help make sure they don’t happen again to someone else.
People like Scott Rudin, the famous bully movie and stage producer who abused Kevin when he worked for him in New York in 2008, have been allowed to treat employees horrifically for decades, causing intense trauma and widespread grief. His abuse of Kevin was so intense, it created post traumatic stress and I believe played a significant role in my brother’s suicide. It was considered an “open secret” for years that Rudin was an abusive bully, but it wasn’t until a brave reporter from The Hollywood Reporter named Tatiana Siegel was willing to publish detailed accounts from people who suffered Rudin’s abuse that the producer faced even a modicum of public accountability. If Kevin’s story can help make some future producer think twice before bullying an employee, then Kevin is still making an impact on the world — he is still having some affect on us all. If we stay silent and pretend it didn’t happen, Kevin’s chance to continue helping people after his death will be lost forever.
The same is true about the abuse Kevin suffered from his wife, [UPDATE: Months after posting this story, I was contacted my Medium Support, threatening to suspend my account if I did not redact the names of the person who abused my brother into suicide. I believe that accountability is important, which is why I included her names in the initial post, but in the interest of preserving this post, I have redacted my brother’s abuser’s names in the updated draft)]. My brother’s abusive wife’s abuse was textbook. She isolated Kevin from his family and friends, driving wedges between him and his support network. She controlled their finances, creating dependency. She belittled him and attacked his self worth frequently. She physically abused him at times, hitting, scratching, pushing and one time even choking him. The isolation my brother’s abusive wife was able to inflict on Kevin allowed the rest of her abuse to succeed, and the shame and stigma of being a male abused by your wife only helped her continue to abuse him unabated.
Retrospect is torture and as much as I realize how unhelpful this thought is, I can’t help but wonder if Kevin still would had killed himself if we had better been able to identify the abuse and help remove him from the toxic relationship. What I am confident of, however, is that it is important that people learn from what happened to Kevin, so someone might one day speak up when they see a friend or loved one suffering in a similar relationship. Nothing can be learned, no one can be better off because Kevin’s tragic example, if we hide the truth about his life and what he went through. That would be the ultimate disservice to Kevin’s memory — it would make the pain he went though meaningless. It would doom future people to the same fate. I don’t think that is what Kevin would want, and it is not how I intend to remember him.
The pain and trauma my brother went through isn’t just part of his truth, part of who he really was — it also give perpetual meaning to his life, if we allow it to. I understand the instinct to focus on only the positive and happy moments of Kevin’s life, but frankly, I’m not interested in that sort of mindless good taste.
