Free My Mistake by Daniel Menaker Page A

can’t help it, but they fairly
glow
with energy and youth. Dave Hiley approaches me in the back yard and I put my hand on his shoulder—to keep him away, to draw him close, to keep myself from falling to the ground in grief.
    The funeral, conducted by my sister-in-law’s uncle, the Reverend Francis Sayre, Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, takes place in an Episcopal church in Manhattan, Mike’s Jewish nipples notwithstanding. Everyone there—and there are hundreds and hundreds—looks sick and white, as if some terrible epidemic has struck them.
    Two years after my brother’s death, researchers develop an antibiotic that effectively combats hospital-acquired staphylococcus septicemia.
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    Twenty-six to fifty or so
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    When I tell people about this event in detail—as I do seldom and only when the conversation makes doing so unavoidable—they tend to wince as I describe how Mike was injured. As if they themselves have been hurt and as if they sense how deeply I have wounded myself. Because look—I know it’s true that I didn’t take a vial of staph bacteria and pour it into the incision during surgery, and I know that the accident’s outcome was violently random and arbitrary, and I know that we all tend to take responsibility for things we aren’t responsible for. But on the other hand, try telling me that there’s no chance that my brother would be alive today if I hadn’t done what I did. Try not to grimace when you think of the causal chain that led to my brother’s organs shutting down one after another way out in Brooklyn, where there weren’t even any tall buildings to add some grandeur to his death.
    That challenge isn’t as bitter as it sounds. I really
was
still just a kid then, I realize. Twenty-six. And after decades of hard psychological work and simply getting on with things, I’ve forgiven myself, and I understand that what all of us have done is surely what we were going to do. The past is the definition of inevitability. And as the years have gone by and the broken emotional bones have knitted, I’ve come to understand and appreciate not only what I lost in this catastrophe but what I found. I’m good at consoling others, for one thing. And this is not a small thing, especially recently, as the casualties of ordinary life have begun to mount among family and friends. Petty reversals, my own or others’, remain more or less where they should among my concerns—way down on the ladder. I do whatever I can to shape my future but when it becomes the past, I can leave it alone back there pretty well. Nothing to be done except learn from it. I think I respond even more deeply to art, music, and literature because of the lesson in life’s fragility I unwillingly learned from my brother’s death. And as my parents’ suddenly only child, I assumed and carried out a kind of lonely responsibility toward them, especially as they got older.
    And there’s this: About ten years after Mike dies, it begins to dawn on me that his death will ultimately leave me in better financial shape than I would have been if he had lived—my parents’ modest estate undivided, Enge’s house and land in the country similarly wholly mine. This comes as an almost overnight surprise to me, I’m ashamed to be proud to say—it has never once entered my mind before then—and it makes me feel good and awful at the same time. Good because the inheritance situation has at least had the decency to wait a decade to occur to me. Bad because it means I’d won the battle between us. Somewhere in my hideous id, I killed him. I vanquished him from the field, and the spoils are all mine. And the only thing worse on a primal human level than Oedipal defeat is Oedipal victory. This one, in conjunction with early-childhood illnesses and askew family geometry, has been making intimacy difficult for me for