daron aric hagen

I remember my older brother now not as he saw himself or as he sought to be perceived by his brothers or friends but as our mother saw him: nine years old, tender-hearted, small fists stubbornly balled at some injustice, fearsomely witty, intelligent, profoundly able to give love and even more hungry to receive it, back turned to the dark and for some unknown reason already the proud owner of a bruised heart. He was a willowy boy with long beautiful eyelashes and a smile that began tentative and blossomed almost with relief. When contemplating mischief, that smile was an invitation to disaster. God he could be funny.

Mother loved him best because he needed it the most. Britt, our Father's image, worshipped her. Father loved Britt as much as he loved himself; he hated him the same way. The violent fights between Britt and Father were hair-raising.  Britt was little; Father was big. The rest was, while not inevitable I suppose, classic. Mother understood her son as completely as she understood her husband. But she couldn't come between them, and she couldn't be there all the time, or for the rest of his life. And then she was gone.

The lovely young woman who taught Art at Linfield Grade School told Britt when he was ten that he had pretty eyelashes. He came home that day and cut them off. Why? Sometimes, when my son, less than two years old, is testing boundaries, he'll look up at me with an exact replica of Britt's smile and I feel as though my heart could break with love and fear and all the rest.

We had a beagle who during the coldest winter days preferred to relieve herself in the basement next to the furnace where it was warm rather than outside in the snow. During the week, while Father was in Chicago, these little accomplishments accumulated, since nobody went down there anyway and they were easier to clean up once they had dried. Friday afternoon after school and before Father's arrival, Britt was charged with the cleanup. He forgot. Came the Three Taps of Death (father's pipe against his metal ashtray) and the Summons. We were lined up next to the furnace and quizzed. My God he was furious, his pipe fairly vibrating between his small, yellowed, clenched teeth: 'What do you think the neighbors think when they look in the windows and they see the floor covered with shit?' he hissed. The terrified silence was broken by Britt's tiny voice, sincerely looking for the bright side: 'Well, at least they know we didn't do it!' Britt's relationship with Father—and Life—can be summed up in the emotions that filled the ensuing seconds, as Father first raised his hand to strike Britt and then let it fall back to his side as he was compelled to acknowledge the painful absurdity of the situation.

During my first years in New York he wired me hundreds of dollars to help me get by. So did Father. His letters were gorgeous and sad, and his voice in them echoed his favorite authors—Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. He never got past them. There are good people in the world I have never met who loved him and understood him, yet he lived in the same city as Kevin for three years before meeting him for dinner. I loved him so.

He reached out for help in various directions—to the Masons, to the Mormons, to unworthy associates. After awhile he stopped writing, but we spoke occasionally on the phone. The last few conversations he rambled incoherently. And then he was gone.

By the age of forty, when the coroner examined him, he had what she described as 'the largest liver she had ever seen,' that he had cirrhosis, of course, but also all three strains of hepatitis, was morbidly obese, and that the insides of his lungs—he was, like mother, a chain smoker—were in some places black. 'This was slow suicide, and it took him years,' she said.

According to his diary, most of which he destroyed, he spent his last hours doing his laundry so that he would leave a good impression.