The Third Thing That Killed My Brother
1. 05:35 am 11/18/2013
Decedent’s name: Justin Ross Heacock. The certificate of death is an official form with the seal of the state of Alaska and words I’ve never learned before. Decedent (noun): a person who has died. The informant is someone who provides information to help complete the death certificate. When I try to look up the word “informant,” I am met with definitions about people providing clues to the police about criminal activity. There is no mention about this kind of informant, the kind my father was when my brother died. Further research leads me to websites dedicated to explaining death certificates and the statement that the informant may not be an absolute resource because unless the decedent was an infant or small child, the informant often does not have access to the birth certificate. There is no accounting here for my father, now sixty, who had the undesirable task of providing information about my thirty-three year old brother upon his death. People don’t want to acknowledge that sometimes adult children die before their parents.
Decedent’s usual occupation: commercial fisherman. This is the only part of the death certificate that provides any semblance of relief, knowing that upon my brother’s death he could be known, remembered, noted on an official government document as a fisherman, the only job he held proudly. Not bartender, not waiter, not attempted lawyer who couldn’t pass the bar, not ex-convict, not criminal. My brother moved to Alaska to become a commercial fisherman, and this certificate allowed him to die as one.
I’ve never traveled to Alaska, but I know now the exact address, down to the apartment number, where my brother lived and died. I have studied the map, stared at the Google street view to try and make real the life my brother spent for years in Anchorage. He lived near a trail, a lagoon, Valley of the Moon Park—all these beautiful glimpses of nature in green and blue that make up the map of my brother’s death. There is irony in him dying in a place known for its natural beauty when he died of a decidedly unnatural cause (manner of death: accident). I zoom in and out of the map to try to make sense of this, how he could die of an overdose in the presence of mountains and rivers. People here should die of something heroic.
Date pronounced dead: 11/18/2013. The funeral director and the doctor who certified my brother’s death have near indecipherable signatures. I don’t know anything about them other than their compressed handwriting, business addresses, and that they declared my brother dead at 5:35 am. What a horrendous time to be pronounced dead. What a destruction of sunrise. The death certificate comes up short in this aspect because it can only provide the time he was declared dead, though we know it happened sometime during the previous night. We know that his neighbor sat with him in the backyard the night before—what view did he have? trees, I hope—and that the neighbor and his dog found him the next morning. I don’t know how long my brother’s body sat frozen in the darkness, that night wilderness. I know nothing of the person who last saw my brother alive, and this disconnection feels like its own kind of wilderness.
Cause of death: combined drug intoxication due to (or as a consequence of): heroin, codeine, alprazolam, and ethanol. I’m familiar with heroin, it’s stench of seediness, of unsafe streets. I recognize codeine medicinally, as a painkiller. Ethanol is just a fancy way of saying alcohol. But it’s alprazolam I don’t recognize, its mouthful of a name indicating prescriptions and side effects. When I look it up I realize the death certificate noted its official name, though to the general public it’s called Xanax. My brother suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, so at the very least, this one may have been prescribed to him. That offers me little consolation.
Describe how injury occurred: Used various drugs and drank alcohol. My brother’s death and my brother’s life summed up in the same sentence.
Read the full story in Crab Creek Review Fall 2016 Issue
Since you published with Crab Creek Review, how has your work grown or changed? What excites you now that maybe didn't back then?
Since this piece came out in 2016, I've written much less short fiction. Perhaps that is related to my short story collection coming out that same year. Many of the stories in Siblings and Other Disappointments, like my piece “The Third Thing That Killed My Brother,” are inspired by my brother and influenced by Raymond Carver, two men who were raised in Yakima, lived rowdy lives and died too soon, and shaped so much of my earlier reading and writing habits.
Now, I'm more focused on longform fiction and exploring beyond the Carver style of concise and emotionally constrained short stories. I've also written much less nonfiction since this piece's publication. After my brother died, I published a string of pieces inspired by him. Then I retreated back into the cocoon of fiction, where I could write from a more removed and observational place. Now, I am excited by forward momentum, by tight plotting, and precise language. If I could return to “The Third Thing That Killed My Brother” for an edit, there’s a sentence with three examples I’d love to cut down to one. But that’s the life of a writer, always tinkering.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
I saved this question for last because it's a hard one. "Write from your scars, not from your wounds" comes up a lot for me when I look back at this piece—it's one big wound, and I wonder how it would look if I wrote it now instead of during the aftermath of my brother's death. I have one platitude that still bounces around my head and that I've actively had to undo: A real writer writes every day. It's a schedule I strive for, but it's dangerous to put those expectations on yourself if you have a day job, bills and responsibilities, and especially during a pandemic. Today, I finished reading a moving essay by Ann Patchett in Harper's called “These Precious Days.” It's about life in the first months of quarantine, an unexpected and life-changing friendship with Tom Hanks' personal assistant, and the inner life of a novelist. She delivers many nuggets of wisdom throughout it, including this: “When I’m putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don’t take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I’m nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main characters I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I’d barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again.” I suspect these lines will rattle through me for some time.
What are you reading?
For the Women's Review of Books, I recently read Justine. It focuses on teen girls, the need for control, and was described on the back jacket as “sinister,” so I knew I had to review it. I read a lot of philosophy in the fall, including phenomenal essays like “Pyrrhus and Cineas” by Simone de Beauvoir, and now I've transitioned into her fiction with The Mandarins. The book is set in France at the end of WWII, and characters are having conversations in it about class and who has power that could be had today. It's remarkable how so much can change and so much feels the same. I've also started working through The Artist's Way, which feels like a cliche at the start of a new year, but I’m finding it helpful. One week of morning pages down…
What are you working on?
Since this piece came out, I've dipped my toes into the fantasy realm with The Lost Grrrls, a manuscript about riot grrrl vampires (a queer, feminist homage to the 80's vampire movie The Lost Boys); I've channeled my rage after the 2016 election into the manuscript All The Boys Laid Out Like Princes, which is about teenage girls, cults' and religion's power over people, and what contributes to a person's psychopathy; I've recently started writing down scenes for Horror Camp: A Love Story, what I consider the third in this horror-adjacent trilogy, a story about sisters and their friends who attend an immersive adults-only, horror-themed camp. It explores fear: the surface-level kind like fear of spiders to the deeper kinds like fear of your identity being erased if you have children. My fiction goes to a lot of dark places, but my goal is for this one to have some levity. Balance is good to have these days.
Since this piece came out in 2016, I've written much less short fiction. Perhaps that is related to my short story collection coming out that same year. Many of the stories in Siblings and Other Disappointments, like my piece “The Third Thing That Killed My Brother,” are inspired by my brother and influenced by Raymond Carver, two men who were raised in Yakima, lived rowdy lives and died too soon, and shaped so much of my earlier reading and writing habits.
Now, I'm more focused on longform fiction and exploring beyond the Carver style of concise and emotionally constrained short stories. I've also written much less nonfiction since this piece's publication. After my brother died, I published a string of pieces inspired by him. Then I retreated back into the cocoon of fiction, where I could write from a more removed and observational place. Now, I am excited by forward momentum, by tight plotting, and precise language. If I could return to “The Third Thing That Killed My Brother” for an edit, there’s a sentence with three examples I’d love to cut down to one. But that’s the life of a writer, always tinkering.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
I saved this question for last because it's a hard one. "Write from your scars, not from your wounds" comes up a lot for me when I look back at this piece—it's one big wound, and I wonder how it would look if I wrote it now instead of during the aftermath of my brother's death. I have one platitude that still bounces around my head and that I've actively had to undo: A real writer writes every day. It's a schedule I strive for, but it's dangerous to put those expectations on yourself if you have a day job, bills and responsibilities, and especially during a pandemic. Today, I finished reading a moving essay by Ann Patchett in Harper's called “These Precious Days.” It's about life in the first months of quarantine, an unexpected and life-changing friendship with Tom Hanks' personal assistant, and the inner life of a novelist. She delivers many nuggets of wisdom throughout it, including this: “When I’m putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don’t take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I’m nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main characters I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I’d barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again.” I suspect these lines will rattle through me for some time.
What are you reading?
For the Women's Review of Books, I recently read Justine. It focuses on teen girls, the need for control, and was described on the back jacket as “sinister,” so I knew I had to review it. I read a lot of philosophy in the fall, including phenomenal essays like “Pyrrhus and Cineas” by Simone de Beauvoir, and now I've transitioned into her fiction with The Mandarins. The book is set in France at the end of WWII, and characters are having conversations in it about class and who has power that could be had today. It's remarkable how so much can change and so much feels the same. I've also started working through The Artist's Way, which feels like a cliche at the start of a new year, but I’m finding it helpful. One week of morning pages down…
What are you working on?
Since this piece came out, I've dipped my toes into the fantasy realm with The Lost Grrrls, a manuscript about riot grrrl vampires (a queer, feminist homage to the 80's vampire movie The Lost Boys); I've channeled my rage after the 2016 election into the manuscript All The Boys Laid Out Like Princes, which is about teenage girls, cults' and religion's power over people, and what contributes to a person's psychopathy; I've recently started writing down scenes for Horror Camp: A Love Story, what I consider the third in this horror-adjacent trilogy, a story about sisters and their friends who attend an immersive adults-only, horror-themed camp. It explores fear: the surface-level kind like fear of spiders to the deeper kinds like fear of your identity being erased if you have children. My fiction goes to a lot of dark places, but my goal is for this one to have some levity. Balance is good to have these days.
Kait Heacock is a fiction writer and book publicist living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared most recently in Evergreen Review, Women's Review of Books, PANK, and Literary Hub, and her debut story collection Siblings and Other Disappointments came out in 2016. She is also the West editor for Joyland. Learn more at kaitgetslit.com.