Brotherly Love

Oct 29

You are 40 today. If, in fact, you are still alive. We don’t know. You’ve been out of touch with Mom and Dad since the spring. Several months, longer than ever before.

You and I have been out of touch for years, even on the rare occasions we’ve seen each other. Last December when I last saw you in Texas, we were not able to connect. I’m sorry about that. Please forgive me. I love you. I wish I could have helped you somehow, long ago, when help was still a possibility. But I couldn’t. Or didn’t.

You were a shadow, lurking, silent, not menacing or threatening, just blank, barely there. The substances had long since stolen you, stolen your consciousness, your intelligence, stolen your life away. The high. The search for the high. The high being all that ultimately matters. And yet so empty, so unfulfilling.

I don’t blame you. I don’t understand it but I know it’s a disease as real as cancer, as real as pneumonia, as real as the bipolar disorder you were diagnosed with at age 14. It’s clear that addiction overtook you, gradually, menacingly, until you couldn’t hold down a job, had worn out your welcome to couch surf, couldn’t be responsible for the used car Dad gave you.

How did you never hit the rock bottom that all the recovery programs talk about? Your first homeless stint in Austin was something like 15 years ago. You’ve been hospitalized more than once with a life-threatening, drug-related infections. You were intubated in the ICU in the post-Covid era—that is, put into a coma—because you were coming down off a high and were aggressive with the hospital staff. You overdosed in our parents’ home in the summer of 2022 after injecting too much heroin and had to be taken to the ER. Yet none of this was your rock bottom.

Dad took you for an evaluation with a psychologist and to meet with a caseworker to set goals and look at options. He got you into a safe house in New Braunfels. How long did you even stay there? Last I heard, Dad dropped you off at a homeless tent city in southeast Austin last March. Maybe you are still alive, just resentful and unwilling or unable to reach out. Maybe you died, accidentally or on purpose.

Matthew Perry died yesterday, drowned in his backyard after having a heart attack, apparently. His death made the international news within minutes. I just read his memoir (Friends, Lovers and the Big Scary Thing) a few weeks ago. His story helped me understand the addicted brain better, and it gave me more compassion for you and your struggle.

You didn’t have an ID, a phone or a car, so how would anyone ever know who you were in the sea of anonymity? How will our family ever be able to grieve? This grief has no beginning or end.

Paul, why did this happen to you? Was it the amphetamines they fed you in the second grade because you were too hyper in the classroom? That Ritalin was to be followed in your teens by morning glory seeds, Robitussen cough syrup, crack cocaine and ultimately heroin.

Paul, I’m sad and sorry that I never really got to know you. There is a hole in our family that will never be mended. Never fixed. Always blank, empty, sad. I mourn what your life could have been under different circumstances.

I honor your life and I love you, my brother. Paul Norbert Fajkus, happy birthday wherever you may be.