Alone and Unobserved

When I was fifteen, my older sister and I went out to South Dakota to spend the summer with my aunt and uncle and their family. By then four of their seven children had left home: three were at college or at work in other states, and one, Kevin, was on a Mormon mission in South Korea. Their family dynamic was very different than the one I had grown up in. They had a proper house with an upstairs and a downstairs; they had a Super Nintendo; they watched television, and had a large movie collection; and their children were not homeschooled.

That summer was full of happenings. There was friction, and there were new experiences, and I made friends and enemies, and I had my first bout of seasonal allergies. We watched Twister on the big screen, and then huddled in a gym bathroom watching a tornado warning on the small screen. We painted the house, and we chased fireflies, and we went to church.

To keep busy, my sister and I took a handful of part-time jobs. We worked for a little while in a fabric store, stocking shelves, doing odd jobs and even helping with a little craft day fair for local kids. For two weeks we detasseled seed corn in a series of South Dakota fields. The pay was good for a fifteen-year-old, but the sun was hot, the corn leaves cut my hands, and I was called a faggot by the other teenage workers. I hated it.

About two-thirds of the way through the summer, things suddenly changed. Something was wrong in Kevin’s mission. There were a few fraught, late-night phone calls from him and his mission president in Seoul. We prayed for him especially hard during family prayer. At last, my aunt came and told us all that he was coming home in two days.

“I know you two were supposed to stay here until August,” she said to my sister and me, “but we’re thinking about sending you back right now. We don’t want you to be exposed to this situation.”

I got the impression that Kevin had had a defining crisis of faith, that Satan had gotten ahold of his heart, and that my aunt and uncle were afraid he would contaminate us, his innocent younger cousins, if they didn’t protect us from him. The idea seemed frightening and appealing at the same time. We did not want to go.

I don’t remember why—whether we whined and begged, or Aunt Joy and Uncle Mike simply changed their minds—but we did stay in South Dakota another month or so after Kevin came back. That was almost the best part of the summer. At nineteen or twenty he seemed so old and grown-up, and yet, for someone so very much older than we were, he was always nice and fun and utterly non-patronizing. Nothing was said about him coming home early, or what had precipitated it. The family simply welcomed him back and included him in the rest of their summer plans.

In August, my sister and I went back home. Over the next few years, Kevin came to visit California once or twice, but never our family. I heard that he had dyed his hair (!) and that he had piercings (!!), which seemed all the evidence necessary of his debauched and sinful life. When I was nineteen I went on my own mission, and I’m convinced the memory of Kevin’s fall from grace is one of the reasons I was able to serve out my full two years; despite my being gay and neurotic and terminally anxious, I didn’t want to end up with piercings and highlights.

Just about three years ago, I got an email from my Aunt Joy saying that Kevin had passed away. It was suicide. Even though he and I had been living forty-five minutes apart for three years, I still hadn’t seen him since 1996. At that point I no longer considered myself Mormon, and was just waiting to graduate from BYU to come out to everyone as gay and ex-religious. I went to his funeral, where I saw his grieving family, some of them for the first time in fifteen years. At one point, one of my uncles—not Kevin’s father—announced his conviction that Kevin would be with his family in the Celestial Kingdom. I remember feeling a sense of blind rage overwhelm me. What if he doesn’t want to be in the Celestial Kingdom?? I fumed. How dare they condemn him to spend eternity in a place that denies everything he is and wants? And then I felt guilty, because I had no idea how Kevin had felt about anything, and it was me who had no desire to find myself in the Mormon heaven when I died.

I still feel guilty about not have taken the time to visit him in Salt Lake City when he was alive, about not writing or calling or emailing. The more I learn about him, from his family and friends, the more I think he would have been a great person to know. If I had realized he wouldn’t be around . . . but none of us is going to be around forever.

My cousin Bill has written a poem about his little brother, and about that July. It makes me want to re-watch Kung Fu Hustle, and find and watch that movie about the cannibal samurai, and get to know Kevin before he’s gone.

Why I Hate July, by Bill Tibbitts