This passage is from Chapter 6: My Brother, A Businessman In Crisis and gives a first glimpse of the trouble he would bring to his business. Linda was his office manager and long time employee. “Linda was working late one night in the office when she got her first call from my brother during his […]

This passage is from the end of Chapter 5. “This unexpected and unsettling turn of events with the hospital gave my wife and I reason for a momentary pause to reconsider whether or not we had done the right thing trying to help my brother despite himself. We wondered if we should just back off […]

In this chapter I describe the events leading up to our attempted intervention with the help of some of my brother’s friends in an effort to have my brother voluntarily seek medical treatment. The intervention went horribly wrong, with the police coming to my brother’s home and taking him to the psychiatric ward of the […]

After the intervention, this conversation took place in Chapter 5. “Soon after my brother’s admission into the hospital, we all parted company and my wife and I went home exhausted from the stress of that evening, but we also were too agitated and anxious to go to sleep. I opened the conversation, “well, that was […]

This passage is from Chapter 5 and describes some of the Intervention that took place after each of my brother’s friends had related their bizarre encounters and conversations with him. “Based on this stark and striking composite of a severely troubled, highly depressed, self-destructive, and possibly dangerous person created from everyone’s personal experiences with my […]

In Chapter 5: My Brother, A Man In Need Of Intervention, I describe our failed attempt to convince my brother to seek psychiatric help. This passage is from Chapter 5. “In these early days, there were few more concerned about my brother than his boating friends. My brother kept a thirty-six foot boat on Lake […]

This passage is from Chapter 4 and describes some of my efforts to make amends with my brother. “I was three months shy of my sixteenth birthday when my mother had her first heart attack. It was severe enough for my mother to be hospitalized for six weeks. I remember that six weeks of my […]

n addition to our parents’ arguments, my brother’s childhood was also marred by the teasing he endured at the hands of my father and by me since I was too young to prevent becoming my father’s unwitting accomplice. I describe this in Chapter 4, My Brother, The Formative Years. “One of my father’s favorite tactics […]

This passage is also from Chapter 4. “It is very difficult to describe the intensity of these argument and virtually impossible to give the details of any particular argument. There were so many of them that they have become a blur in my mind. As a child and even a young teenager, I was so […]

This passage is from Chapter 4. “In an effort to cope with this level of constant tension and uncertainty, when I was 15 years old or so I started reading and did not stop for almost three years. I mean serious, voracious reading. I would read every free moment I had. Even if I went […]