Dale's Story

My brother is my inspiration. Would you like to meet him?

Shhh... he said. They can HEAR you.

Who?

THEM.

Huh?

SSSHHH!!!

My seventeen-year old brother, Dale, was hiding from beings I could not see and I was confused.

I was four when I had already recognized that perhaps something was not quite right. These sudden shifts in behavior were unsettling, at best, and at worst, he may have been seeing demons for all I know. There were plenty of good times like playing guitar and getting root beer floats. I loved my big brother and I was often confused by him.

Dale never had a diagnosis except addiction, to my knowledge, and that definitely was not his whole story. I prefer to think of him as a Self-Medicater. Whatever demons he was trying to conquer in his brain, he seemed to find that a little easier to live with day to day by self-medicating. It was the 70's and much more an era of experimentation than self-reflection. My brother was hardly the exception. It was over 40 years later that I would learn there was generational Schizophrenia in our bloodline, going back to my great, great, great grandfather and suggested to my family, that perhaps, Dale was the undiagnosed Schizophrenic in our generation.

“Dale’s story is only one example of an endemic problem, given about four out of every five completed suicides is a guy.* ”

It's amazing how young children will assume roles with no real understanding of why they are doing so. I became my brother's Secret Keeper and many of his secrets remained buried for years... even from my own memory. When I became a young adult, it took therapy to understand myself and as a result, my brother. Those secrets eventually bubbled to the surface and I was beginning to feel crazy myself. In therapy, I encountered a term... Codependency...which brought my entire childhood into focus. I started to untangle my brother's mental health issues from my own and while my healing journey has been long, it has been well worth the time and energy.

After the age of five, I would only see Dale a handful of times in my life. He lived with us a couple more times, briefly, but could never quite establish himself in a way that was productive; whether it was because of the drugs or the mental illness, we'll never know. After months of doing very little around the house, he was given an ultimatum... get a job or leave. He chose to leave and go back to California. I was both sad and relieved. By now it was the 1980’s and we entered the War on Drugs and the Tough Love approach to addiction.

A few years went by with not much communication from my brother. I think it concerned my parents but they were still raising me and he was an adult, so they assumed he was just busy living his life. One day, we received a letter from a friend of his, concerned that he was suicidal and requesting that we send our support and love. He was in California and we were over 2,000 miles away in Michigan. We had no idea that this letter was a foreboding of his future. We sent letters and photos hoping that reminding him of his family would somehow bring comfort. I believe he did finally call my Mom trying to reassure her that he would be okay and he was, off and on. He’d move jobs, move apartments, move states, always further and further from the cities until he found himself in Beaverton, OR which would be his final destination.

The last time I saw Dale was around 1986. My Dad never forgot the letter that Dale’s friend had written to us a few years before. Having done some therapy work by now (a HUGE step for a Polish-American man born in 1927; we can all thank my Social Worker sister for that one), my Dad felt compelled to let my brother know that he loved him (perhaps for the first time ever) and Dale cried but it was too little too late. I remember waving and crying as his plane took off for California and thinking “this could be the last time I see him”. That gut feeling would turn out to be accurate.

My Mom had a “vision” just a year before my brother committed suicide. Perhaps it was a premonition? She saw him standing at the end of her driveway. He seemed to be deciding which direction to turn. Dale stood for a long time, staring down the driveway, turned the other direction, and disappeared. We never heard from him again. The next call was from the police, telling us he was gone.

My brother succeeded in killing himself in 1992. The letter that his friend had written to us years before was our family’s only warning. He left a rather nonsensical suicide note about the environment and mean people but nothing very personal. Many people think suicides are sudden and not premeditated. It was not the case with Dale. Credit card receipts indicated he took himself to an expensive steak dinner and even bought a suit for the occasion. He must have researched death by lethal injection of cyanide. The needle was still in his arm when the cops busted into his apartment. He was alone. No one had seen him for a week and the stench of decay was beginning to set in. The detail that reverberates through my brain is that one solitary word... ALONE!

How does a man in his early 30's with 4 siblings and a huge extended family die alone? This is the disgrace of how we treat the mentally ill (coincidentally, often also the addicted). We tell them they are "lazy" and "to get a job". We ridicule them for their not-so-mainstream world view. We push them out because they are exhausting, draining and we have so many other responsibilities (such as younger children to protect). Or we think Tough Love is their Saving Grace. We push, demand, refuse, deny until they retreat from the shame and THAT is how we leave them irrevocably alone. Then, we are surprised when they choose to leave this earth. They already feel so completely alone...why is it a surprise when they simply choose to disappear from the despair and shame? Perhaps they think it will finally bring some much-needed release from the emotional pain.

I'm recounting these events from many years ago because for better or worse, my brother’s life and suicide had a profound impact on me. How did we lose him? What did we miss as we went about our lives consumed with our own feelings and fears and personal priorities? Why was he okay sharing his mental illness with a four year old and no one else? These questions plagued me for so many years until it just didn’t matter anymore. He was gone. Knowing WHY wasn’t going to bring him back. There was some peace in knowing his suffering on this earth was over.

This project is for you, Dale. We owe you that much. We want you to know we learned from your decision to leave us. We discovered how we left you alone and how not to make that mistake again...no other sibling left behind and I hope you know that's your legacy. We recognize that had we remained more compassionate and more frequently connected to you, then maybe like all of us, you too would have found a way to THRIVE. We cannot bring you back; we can, however, honor your life lessons in truth & love.

By: Peg Chritz

Dedicated to by brother, Dale Chritz, 1959 - 1992

*Statistic is from NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) & CDC