Uncle Chris and Kara are playing tennis, and he accidentally bashes her in the nose with his backhand stroke. I sit on the side of the court and watch as Kara doubles over in surprise and pain, and he runs to stoop by her and cover her nose with his hands, trying to stop the torrent of blood gushing from her nostrils.

Another memory, I'm about eleven, making my sister thirteen or fourteen. Uncle Chris, then a ski patrolman somewhere in New Hampshire, takes us for a weekend trip to accompany him during his duties, allowing us to take advantage of a couple of free lift tickets.

He awakens us at five in the morning. We all bundle up, and eat greasy fried eggs and toast and bacon at a nearby diner which must have relied on the service of crazy-assed predawn skiers like my uncle used to be. I remember that I the runny yokes of my eggs with my buttery toast, and glanced across the breakfast table at my beaming uncle. The three of us, Kara, Chris, and I, all wore our ski gear, replete with goggles at the top of our head. It is still dark outside. Kara is not happy to be awake before sunrise. I'm fine and hungry ... I've never been all that receptive to actual clock time.

(Okay, switching to past tense. This is taking too much concentration.)

The mountain where Chris patrolled was one of the more advanced in New England. I remember skiing, at an early age, through narrow passes where I was flanked by a craggy rock wall to my left, and a steep woodland drop-off to my right. I sang to myself the whole way down.

Chris, before the mountain opened, escorted us on the lift to the peak. Once at the top, he gave us signs to carry down the hill. The one I remember read "SLOW - ICE AHEAD." Kara and I each carried a spoke to post in front of a path which, in fairer weather, would have been easily managed, but given the upcoming forecast would have become treacherous. We poked it in the icy ground before the sun rose. Chris probably knew our mother would never have let us do that. He was an excellent mitigator of transgressions.

Later that weekend, on the mountain, the wind chill dropped to below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That's really fucking cold. Chris had left Kara and I to ski on our own while he went on his patrol rounds. Kara and I rode the lift together, and I remember staring at the trees far below me, trying to ignore the pain in my frigid body, while Kara began crying because she was colder than she'd ever been in her life. Hearing my big sister, my hero, cry at something as ubiquitous and irreversible as the weather scared the shit out of me, but I knew we would still get to the top of the mountain.

Once we dismounted the ski lift, I said to Kara, "I can't feel my nose." She told me that the tip of it, the only part of my body unexposed to the elements, was pure white. I had frostbite, and we had to get inside.

We skiied to the patrol shack at the top of the mountain. Chris was nowhere to be found, but his colleagues siphoned clam chowder down our throats and kept us occupied until he could meet us. My nose was fine. Chris said, "Don't tell your mother."

I remember having so much fun that weekend, and feeling very important for having posted a patrol sign at the entrance of a treacherous path.

For those of you who don't remember, Chris helped me move from Chicago to Oakland, CA almost two years ago. He flew in from Reno, I picked him up at the airport, and we drove off. At the time, I was nervous about having him as a traveling companion. He'd been really mopey, and his defense for his mopeyness was to preach The Word of Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen. I wasn't in the mood to listen to it for three days, cooped up in a moving van.

As it turns out, he was awesome company. I'm not romanticizing his posthumous memory; I would feel the same way if he hadn't killed himself.

I remember somewhere in, I think, Wyoming. We were in the moving van, and both realized we had to pee like a couple of motherfuckers. Seeing how we had just past the exit to a rest stop, we took a wayward dirt road off the highway, thinking that it would lead to a less-traveled downtown area.

Holy shit, were we wrong. It ended up being one of those rural roadways you see while driving on the freeway. You look out your window and wonder, "Where the hell does that road go?" Quenching your curiosity (and saving you a few thousand hours of bladder-straining), let me tell you it goes NOWHERE.

On the sides of the road was evidence of civilized life: i.e. sheds and gigantic construction monsters. From what I gather, though, the only thing those monsters could possibly have been mining was sand, and after too many miles, Chris and I about-faced to drive back to the freeway. We were both like, "Well, that was that."

Later in the trip, after a brief stopover in Utah, Chris and I unwisely decided to take another unmarked road.

We found ourselves ricketing up the gravel-pathed, ever-narrowing passage of a mountain. Chris was having a blast, and complimented me on keeping my shit together... I was driving at the time, and couldn't ignore the sound of all of my earthly belongings shifting themselves in the cabin of the moving van as I tried to edge us away from certain death.

That's the memory I hold of Chris. That of purely embodied joy and daring, wanting to encourage me toward adventure while protecting me. The way he engaged my sister in a grown-up game of tennis and tried to fix her when she bled. The way he gave us both signs to post as warnings to others, giving us a task both dangerous and responsible. I don't know how he broke so completely. Things break.

I knew he was depressed. I knew he was in and out of hospitals, was on and off thousands of different pills, and eventually tried electroshock therapy, all to no avail. I knew that he was suicidal to the point that he couldn't be left alone. I knew that with all he had gone through, he probably wasn't the carefree playmate that I always loved. But I still loved him, and he knew that. Life just got too hard.

Up until he died, he was clear that he didn't want anyone to see him or speak to him in the state he was in. I received updates from my mother, upon whom he still relied, and I respected his wishes for privacy, because I knew that the people he trusted to see him at his worst were doing their damndest to save him.

The last time I spoke to Chris was a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. I called to ask if I could visit him, thinking that the presence of family might cheer him up.

When he answered the phone, his voice was something unearthly. It's hard to explain, but it sounded as if, as he spoke, he was enduring a crude back-alley abortion. His words came like a howl from the pit of his stomach, and at the end of every sentence he sounded like he was being flushed down a drain.

He told me he wasn't feeling up for a visit. He said he loved me.

That's the last I heard his voice, but it wasn't really his. I wish I could bridge those two identities, and figure out what went wrong.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Days and Nights - 10.01.07

Eye-Boners - 07.20.07

Something About My Big Frickin' Bed - 07.11.07

Summertime Fix in Hawaii - 06.12.07

About Zigs - 04.26.07

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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