Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio

the heaven and the hell of it are woven into one fabric, which is love. It’s a mindblower to think like that but that is what Danny has done to me.
    Call or write please.
    I don’t own a cat or dog—but I do the same by looking at squirrels and crows. I plan to buy some peanuts to feed the squirrels and bread for the birds. It is so much cheaper and I enjoy it the same as having my own animal.
    When I pray I can see my life flash before my eyes. It is very beautiful. My life flashes before my eyes about twenty times a year. Other stuff like that happens to me also.
    I’ve been through so much since becoming mentally ill—most of it, believe it or not, was good. Because of that I became sort of an indestructible man.
    Love, Mike
    Letter from youngest brother (November 26, 1986)
    My brother Danny wrote his suicide note in my bedroom, and then, after a caesura that I know exists because he had to put down the pen in order to pick up the gun, he shot himself. For some reason, I’ve always been concerned about the length of the lapse, whether he reread what he’d written or stared dumbly at his signature, his name the final piece in a puzzling life he was about to end, before he pressed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Most suicides go about the last phase of their business in silence and don’t leave notes. Death itself is the summary statement, and they step into its embrace hours or days before the barrel is finally raised to the roof of the mouth or the fingertipslast feel the rough metal of the bridge rail. They are dead and then they die. But Danny wrote a note, or not so much a note as an essay, a long document full of self-hatred and sorrow, love and despair, and now I’m glad that I have it, because, this way, we’re still engaged in a dialogue. His words are there and so is his hand, a hand I’d held, but, more important, one that left words, like an artifact, that are as real and physical to me as the boy who, at twenty-one, in a November long ago, wrote them.
    I read the pages he wrote two or three times a month, often enough so that the words ring like the lines of poems I know well. All the struggle is still there in the headlong sentences that tumble toward his signature, in the misspelled words and syntactical errors, in the self-conscious language of a boy starved for love and trying, instead, to live a moment more off pride. The note has the back-and-forth of a debate, of words equally weighed and in balance, of a slightly agonized civility. He says, “I stopped making dreams.” He says, “I don’t know why I am doing this. I don’t want to. I have dreams.” He says that there is no God and that God is looking over his shoulder as he writes, making editorial remarks. He says, “I am glorifying myself now. I am afraid to stop writing though. I want to keep talking.” He says, “I don’t know what to say except Iam sorry and I love. I love the whole family quite a bit and the terrible—” He clearly wants to find a way back, but he can’t. He asks that we keep “the way” he died a secret and, as though he were done, signs his name. But on the next page, the last, he again asks that we keep “the way” he died secret, and again he signs his name. Much of the note is printed and those letters stand upright, but in the end Danny slips permanently into a sloping cursive as despair and self-hatred accelerate beyond return, as if he were being pulled down by the dark undercurrent of his life, his last words looping quickly across the page, continuous as breath.
    Letter from eldest brother (2001)
    Two years ago, I moved to Philipsburg, Montana. In the fall, I went for walks and brought home bones. The best bones weren’t on trails—deer and moose don’t die conveniently—and soon I was wandering so far into the woods that I needed a map and compass to find my way home. When winter came and snow blew into the mountains, burying the bones, I continued to spend my days and often my