Ed was surprised by how many people he knew at the Ridges.

Ed wouldn’t have expected to find anyone familiar at a mental hospital. We grew up outside Athens in the country, where mental illness didn’t exist. Make no mistake, Lodi Township was full of people who were crazier than shithouse rats, and there was no shortage of crazy old coots. Old Man Bradley once welcomed a new neighbor to Long Run Road by driving to the guy’s house, hoisting a pistol into the air, and discharging several rounds. Mr. Bradley was mean as a snake and by all accounts “crazy”, but I don’t remember anyone describing him as “mentally ill”―not even so much as, “He has issues” or “He needs help.” Overt violence was simply part of his personality. Rural culture reads psychotic behavior as eccentricity.

We also knew people who were touched or one brick shy of a load. Others weren’t all there, weren’t right in the head, or had elevators that didn’t go all the way to the top floor. Still others, like Mark and me, were predisposed to getting blue, down, or low. According to Mom, while I was growing up, Dad often said to her, “It seems like Joe has been pretty low lately.” But mental illness, as a concept, didn’t exist. Even had we been aware of it, conventional treatments like “seeking help” or “talking to someone”—all of which involved telling your business to some namby-pamby egghead and likely Democrat (and paying through the nose to do it), would have struck us as unadorned big-city nonsense.

Of course Ed was surprised by how many people he knew at the Ridges. Up to that point, he probably thought he was the only person in Athens County who was slowly being killed by his own mind.

One of the nurses had dated our brother, Joey Gavilan Jarvis, and she looked out for Ed.

Having dated Joey Gavilan, the nurse probably knew our family history. I imagine Joey told her about the two suicides in our immediate family. Frances Jarvis killed herself in 1969. Frances was Dad’s second wife and mother to seven of my nine half-siblings, including Joey, Bobby, Patricia, Mark, and Ed. When Frances ended her life, the gunshot woke up the entire house. Four years later, Bobby’s wife pulled into their garage to find him hanging from the ceiling.

In 1975, long after the nurse and Joey had broken up, Joey was murdered in Akron. Four years later, my sister Patty was shot dead in a trailer park. I’m sure the nurse heard about all of this. Our family had a reputation in Lodi Township. People called us the Hillbilly Kennedys, given our knack for blood-soaked tragedy.

For the nurse, seeing Ed show up at the Ridges was probably one of those situations where you’re shocked, but not the least bit surprised.

Overall, Ed enjoyed his stay.

Unlike Mark’s time at the VA hospital some 30 years later, Ed didn’t have to attend boring classes. He stayed at the Ridges for two months. The staff gave him plenty of space, and the nurse who dated Joey made sure he was comfortable. In the end, Ed vindicated the judge. By institutionalizing my brother, the judge actually offered Ed an escape―both from the situation of prison and the condition of mental illness. Ed, to his credit, made the most of it. Ed went on to serve honorably in the U.S. Army as a tank commander. During his enlistment he married a woman named Vicki, and they have been together some 25 years. Ed started his own trucking company after leaving the service, and today he still drives big rigs. When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, he hauled in supplies from Florida, his adopted home state.

As for that old childhood memory about visiting Ed at the Ridges, I don’t remember Mom turning off Dairy Lane and slowly climbing Park Drive in our groaning Ford Escort. I don’t remember standing on the porch of Building 21 and looking out at the low-lying Hocking River, Ohio University’s football and basketball stadiums, and the hospital where I was born. All I remember is this: I am in in an unremarkable room. Mom sits across a long table from me. Behind her, books cover the far wall. Ed stands off to my right, in front of a window. Sunlight streams around him, like water around rocks. The outline of his body softly glows. He is gilded, like the pages of a family Bible. The light bounces off his blond hair, making a Frisbee-sized halo. When I look at him, I have to squint.

I sit down on the two-by-four and walk backwards until the rope is taut. Now I run forward, holding onto the rope for dear life. At the edge of the gully, I push my bottom down hard into the seat and kick my legs forward.

I soar.

During springtime the gully floods, but now it is dry as bones. Fifteen feet below me, jagged rocks and sun-baked red clay eagerly await a loss of balance. At the highest point of my outward trajectory, I lose my momentum. I hover for a split second in mid-air. I look down. My stomach bottoms out. Then I start falling backwards, quicker and quicker towards the bank. Between my feet I see rocks, red clay, grass, little brittle scrolls of sycamore bark that are speckled gray and white. Then Ed’s hands catch my shoulders. There is another split-second pause before he pushes me back out over the edge. Again and again we repeat this cycle, me soaring out above the abyss and then falling back to safety, into my brother’s steady hands.

A man in a beret is yelling at me.

The man is named Gary. He and I are standing outside Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chestnut Street in Chicago. The church is limestone. The sky is limestone, about to dump snow. Around Gary’s open mouth, vapor swirls like exhaust from tail pipes. Time has washed out Gary’s face into age-spotted porcelain. Under his beret, strawberry-blond hair covers half of each ear. A deeper red is checkered across his Burberry trench-coat collar, which is flipped up against the cold. Gary has been sober for a quarter century, and he has practiced meditation for nearly as long. Every year, he attends several meditation retreats and buys CD recordings of his favorite guest speakers. Our current situation notwithstanding, Gary has always been kind to me. In AA meetings, I used to talk about wanting to kill myself. Back then, I still had all the problems that originally drove me to drink, but I no longer had alcohol to ease those problems.

I forgot about this saying. It’s popular in AA and still means something despite widespread use. AA members often talk about the Geographic Cure, which is the idea that we can escape our troubles by moving somewhere new. Sadly, our troubles always follow along. That’s because our troubles are of our own making. An old-timer in AA might convey this wisdom to an antsy newcomer by saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”