After a Death, a Discovery of the Man the Boy Became

I’d always assumed that death was something the other guy had to deal with--until the phone call came, and I became the other guy.

It was a voice mail message at work, left by my dad in Seattle. “It’s your brother, Conrad.” There was an awkward pause, as if he was reading off cue cards for the first time. “They found him in his apartment. He’s dead. We’re going down there now.”

I thought it was a joke. Or maybe a case of mistaken identity. Somebody else’s brother Conrad had just died, and I had been given the message by mistake.

The details came in slowly. Conrad had been last seen at an office party Thursday night. He hadn’t shown up for work Friday, and nobody had seen him over the weekend. When he didn’t show up for work on Monday, some co-workers let themselves into his condo and found him lying peacefully in his bed.

He had died of natural causes three weeks shy of his 30th birthday, leaving behind my parents, older brother Chris and his twin brother, Curtis.

*

I’d had pets die. My grandparents had passed away years earlier after living full lives. A sudden death like this isn’t supposed to happen.

I spent the next week at my parents’ house trying to sort out my sadness, as well as theirs. The most overwhelming feeling I had, though, wasn’t grief. It was emptiness. The initial numbness refused to wear off. Maybe I was just in denial, but the real source of this lack of emotion, perhaps, was that I wanted very much to keep Conrad’s memory alive. I had very few memories.

We had never been particularly close growing up. I was five years older, a substantial gap. More importantly, we never had much in common. Even before he could add and subtract, it seemed, he was studying the financial pages; I still can’t balance a checkbook.

My favorite book was “Catcher in the Rye.” He enjoyed Paul Harvey’s autobiography. I once voted for Jesse Jackson. He believed Richard Nixon got a raw deal.

*

I’d made feeble efforts to stay in touch after I moved off to college, sending the requisite Christmas and birthday cards, but I never received any in return. Since he landed a job at a Seattle accounting firm nearly a decade ago, he and I probably hadn’t talked more than a dozen times. And even those conversations weren’t exactly illuminating. He’d just stand there, arms crossed tightly over his chest, and utter a sarcastic “yes” or “no” to every question I asked.

As I sat at his memorial service, I heard friends of his--one after another--stand up and tell these wonderful stories about what he was like. They talked about his sensitivity, his generosity, even his ability to make an awesome blueberry coffee cake. Listening to these tales should have made me feel better. Instead, guilt overwhelmed me.

I felt that perhaps I’d never made enough effort to get to know him. My birthday cards should have been birthday calls. Now his life was gone, but I wanted another chance to be a part of it, now that he couldn’t resist. And the only way to do that was to listen to the friends who had become his surrogate family.

*

Six weeks after Conrad’s death, the back bedrooms in my parents’ house began to look like some sort of warehouse. They’d moved all his belongings out of his condo and into their place, but had yet to decide what to do with it all.

There were boxes piled everywhere, with an odd collection of stuff inside. One was filled with his CDs, another with books and papers he’d collected over the years, including the program from my college graduation with my name circled.

One closet was bursting with his Brooks Brothers suits, London Fog raincoats and camel’s hair overcoats. A stack of bills he’d never have to pay sat on one dresser. On another was the one box never to be unpacked. It held his ashes.

I tried picking up some clues about who Conrad was by sifting through his possessions, but the real truth had to come from his friends. At first I felt awkward. I’ve spent 17 years asking people questions for a living. This was the first time the answers affected me personally.

I learned that two of his favorite movies were “Metropolitan” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” His musical tastes ranged from the Pet Shop Boys to Frank Sinatra. Vodka was his liquor of choice, although he liked to experiment with beers from local microbreweries. Lately, he’d started looking for the perfect cigar. He liked African art and pickled vegetables. And there was a time when his favorite wallet was this ratty, promotional billfold with the Seattle Supersonics logo.

These are the sort of day-to-day details that really describe a person, and they gave me plenty of clues as to who Conrad had become. Because he was such a recluse as a kid, I’d never pictured him out in the world enjoying the same sorts of things I might enjoy.

These small pieces of the Conrad puzzle may seem trivial, but to me they were enlightening clues to a personality I couldn’t previously picture.

Everyone told me what a compassionate, thoughtful friend he made. One woman even told me how he made sure to place a red rose on her desk every time he sensed she was having a bad day.

“He was very in tune with what you liked, what you were about,” one friend told me. “He became a part of what you were doing.”

“He was accepting, not a brick wall. He could listen,” said another. “If I needed anything, he was there.”

*

As amazing as it was to hear this, there were other details about Conrad’s adult life that were pretty much what I’d expected. He’d held on to plenty of the personality traits that were so different from mine, the ones that kept us apart.

He loved being a Suit, “building his reputation and his wealth,” I was told. He was a guy who read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover every morning, and the frugal sort who would save a dollar-off coupon for Polident toothpaste even though his need for it was decades away. He liked to bring cans of soup to the office for his lunch, and if a co-worker forgot to bring food, he’d offer to sell one of his extra cans. He was the quintessential yuppie a few years too late, driven by the need for status and possessions.

“He definitely wanted a certain lifestyle, to be in the right place with the right people and the right drinks,” a friend and co-worker explained. “I remember one night we were at a party on the 56th floor of our building and Conrad sighed and said, ‘It’s so nice to be away from all that down there.’ He liked to think of himself as better than others sometimes. I used to joke with him about that and he’d say, ‘You’re right. One should not be so serious. Yes, I am pretentious. What am I trying to prove?’ ”

He was trying so hard to live his life like a character from some old Cary Grant movie, where manners and sophistication were valued commodities. Opening doors for women was a required habit. Everyone he worked with told the same stories of his politeness, his all-consuming need to make sure everything was OK for everybody else. No expense was too great if he found the perfect gift for a friend. “He was my genie,” I was told.

He also yearned to be as cultured as possible. To that end, the few hours he wasn’t at work were spent volunteering for such organizations as the Navy League, the Seattle Art Museum, the Young Republicans.

“He did all that to be a part of everything,” a friend said. “He got involved to make connections. He liked to know people, and things about people.”

His was a very old-fashioned notion of success. He wanted everyone to know his name, to be somebody who mattered. What’s sad is that this tight, conservative attitude was slowly starting to change in the months before his death.

Maybe he wasn’t exactly ready to run off in a VW microbus to follow the Grateful Dead, but nearly all his friends told me that they had sensed something different about him. He danced at a Four Tops concert. Going to the theater had become his greatest passion. He went sky diving. He even bought a pair of jeans, a motorcycle jacket and boots.

Life was going well. He had plenty of things to look forward to--remodeling the kitchen of his new condominium and starting a T-shirt business with a few of his friends. There was even talk of a trip to Greece or a bike ride through France.

Still, one of his closest friends told me that pressures in his life--his finances, his job--were starting to weigh heavily on him. And he had developed what he thought was a painful pulled muscle near his left shoulder. The ache wouldn’t go away.

The pain was most likely the precursor to his cause of death, which was coldly, clinically written off in the autopsy report as “probable acute cardiac dysrhythmia associated with left hypoplastic left circumflex artery.”

It was ironic. I’d always pictured Conrad as someone who operated more from his head than from his heart, and it was the latter that finally killed him.

*

I had two dreams during the couple of days I spent in Seattle learning about Conrad.

I’d been told by a friend of his that Conrad had a bad habit of piling his laundry in a single huge heap by his bed, and in the first dream, I discovered him in his room trapped under the mound. He asked for help, and I yanked him out. He thanked me and suddenly I was in my parents’ kitchen, telling my mom what I’d just done. She looked concerned and told me he hadn’t checked in with her in days.

The second dream came on my last night in Seattle. I was talking to Conrad on the phone about an unspecified death in the family. He was assuring me that he was OK with it, that it was tough for a while but he was feeling much better now. I felt good hearing that, and I called my mom in the dream. She told me how strange that was, since Conrad had died weeks earlier.

I’d worried about whether I was doing the appropriate thing, digging around in Conrad’s life and then telling the world about him. The dreams left me feeling that this was indeed the right thing to do, for him and for me. When I think of him now, I don’t see some quiet kid. I see a brother I can finally relate to.

Five months after his passing, it’s almost too easy to just forget about it all. Even the memories I uncovered by talking to his friends start to fade, and I have to force myself to remember what I’ve learned.

That’s why I’ve vowed to continue down the path Conrad started on, loosening up and appreciating life more--although I think sky diving is still out of the question. Carrying on is all the living can do for the dead.

I wish it hadn’t taken his death for me to appreciate his life, but there’s nothing I can do about any of this now. Except help him accomplish the one goal he was never able to achieve. He wanted to be somebody. He wanted to leave something behind so everyone would know his name.

That’s what you’re holding in your hand.