I didn’t want his death to merely be a senseless loss, and I hoped that by telling about it, that people in my family’s shoes might feel less alone, might feel less shame. I don’t think our society will do the work it needs to do to understand addiction as an illness until we remove shame from the equation. Addicts perform behaviors that are so frustrating and harmful, but they do so because they have a disease. Among all my regrets is how long it took me to understand that-very much too late. The funny thing is that I did not set out to write a collection of poems centered on my brother-and I remember, after he died, and after I had written the balance of the poems about him, feeling that head-shaking, half-laughing sibling moment where I thought, he wrecked my shit again. Just like when we were kids and he was my little brother trashing something I had done. It was squarely about home, and about trying to recapture ideas of home I knew I had lost, generationally and through divorce.
And when we lost him, I recognized that his life was part and parcel of that quest for home-for family-and another way families break. I hadn’t wanted to include my nuclear family in this way-partially because those of us who lose people to addiction are habituated to keeping quiet about it. What you say, though, about reckoning, about whether someone’s time on earth mattered, that’s what drove me to include his story.