This essay discusses the recent death by suicide of a 25-year-old Army National Guardsman who was a celebrity via his appearances on the show “Sister Wives,” where he grew up in public starting at age eleven.
While it focuses more on the experience of being a suicide survivor after finding a loved one’s body than the experience of suicidal urges, still—if suicide is a difficult topic for you, from any angle, this essay may be painful for you to read. There are several resources listed at the bottom if you or someone you care about is struggling.
Last week, Garrison Brown died by suicide.
His body was found by his younger brother, Gabriel.
When that aspect of this tragedy became public, my heart sank and I burst into hot tears—for Gabriel, not for Garrison.
Through no fault of his own, Gabriel has joined a club nobody deserves to join. I know some of what the future holds for him because I joined this club as a teenager, when I found someone I loved after he died by suicide.
Knowing that Gabriel Brown, a young man I have long admired—he is the very same young man whose maturity and emotional intelligence I spoke highly of when I wrote about the Sister Wives show previously—has now joined the club has weighed heavily on my mind. For the last week, I’ve thought of little else. It hasn’t quite risen to the level of PTSD-memory-intrusion, but it’s been very difficult: the painful memories of my own experience, mixed with intense sadness. How unfair, and heartbreaking, it is that such a profoundly good kid now has to face a lifetime as a member of this shitty, shitty club.
About the Brown Family
The brothers are two of the eighteen children from the Brown family, made famous by the TLC show “Sister Wives.” The family is a large, complex entity with many relationships that can be confusing to follow. My previous essay has more detail and context, if you are interested.
For the purpose of understanding this tragedy, the needed contextual details are these: the Brown family has, through the circuitous and unusual route of polygamy, ended up in a very old and clichéd place, where the husband and father has chosen his new wife and family over his old one. Of the thirteen original children—now twelve, and holy fuck is that a gut punch—these two brothers were the two who had the most open and emotional conflict with the father.
If you have seen the viral clips of this show that go around the internet, the dead boy, Garrison, is the one who said to his stepmother (in absentia), “You know what? Keep him. We’re all grown adults that don’t need a father figure anymore.” The brother who found him, Gabriel, is the one seen weeping after his father forgot his birthday, only calling him on the day to talk about the boy’s stepmother, who was ill.
Seasons 17 and 18 also showed Kody repeatedly calling his sons—these two in particular—disloyal and disrespectful for refusing to stop every aspect of their lives (work, school, girlfriends, etc.) in order to live up to his “standards” of COVID mitigation. He also demanded that their mother kick them out if she wanted a husband. She chose her kids, and that marriage ended.
These most recently aired seasons featured their father saying many things that are blood-chilling in retrospect, including refusing Garrison’s invitation to Christmas at his house—the impressive young man became a homeowner at 22, a home which as of the last aired season of the show, his father had never visited—because of his anger and insistence that it was their place to submit to him as the “head of the family,” and come, cap in hand, to their father’s house.
When that didn’t happen, he made no secret of his feelings. “All of them are just kind of jerks. And I don’t want to call them, and I don’t want to talk to them.”
In words that will haunt me forever, so I can only imagine how terribly they will haunt him, Kody even said: “There will be other Christmases.”
Gabriel Joining the Club
From the official police report, which I have read, Garrison ended his life about fourteen hours earlier than his brother found him. He chose a time when all three of his non-family-member roommates (he rented out the extra bedrooms in his house) were home. Thus he likely intended to be found by a roommate, not a brother.
But of course, these things are no longer controllable once you’re dead.
In addition to processing my own experience and doing a lot of research, I’ve had two internet-pen-pal relationships with other members of the club. Through therapy, reading, and conversation, I’ve synthesized my understanding into two ways that we club members are changed by our involuntary initiation.
The First Way Club Members Are Different
It’s entirely counterintuitive, but members of this club are at a much higher risk of dying by suicide than most people. It’s counterintuitive because it seems like the experience would make a person determined to never put anyone else through such a thing.
But it doesn’t actually work that way.
We have multitudes of data that suicide is contagious. Suicide clusters are a phenomenon documented for centuries before mass media, and certainly before social media. Suicide becomes normalized for survivors, and in the case of club members this effect is magnified.
If you join this club at an early age, your brain changes in a way that is very difficult to describe.
It has taken me years to find the language for it, partly because this topic is so difficult that very few people can handle the discussion of it. Particularly if one has a history of depression, as I do, one feels that one must cover every conversation in caveats. It sounds like bullshit: this topic is on my mind because it’s never all that far from my mind because the day I joined the club split my life into Before and After, but I swear it’s not on my mind for any reason you should worry about. (It even sounds like bullshit to me, which is ironic and kind of funny.) Of all my friends, there’s only one with whom I can have this conversation and know that he gets it; it seems to take a black belt in trauma to really equip a person to handle this.
How does the finding experience change a young person? Essentially, the surreal notion of death becomes very real indeed. The sense of being invincible and invulnerable that most people carry when they are young ceases to exist. Death becomes real at the same time that suicide stops being a weird, dark, hypothetical notion and becomes mapped onto reality as an option.
And once it becomes an option, it’s always an option. That part is permanent.
This doesn’t mean it’s always—or necessarily ever—under active consideration. The best analogy I’ve found is this: for members of the club who joined at an early age, suicide is an option in the way that, for those of you reading this who are happily ensconced in long-term marriages, leaving your marriage is an option. You wouldn’t do it, but you understand that you could.
Even if you can neither feel nor imagine feeling the emotions that would motivate you to do it, you still know that you could.
You know what steps you would take, and in what order, and it’s not hard to imagine yourself taking the steps—even if you’d never take them.
The Second Way Club Members Are Different
Most adults are aware of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. And most adults are aware that these aren’t linear. A grieving person cycles in and out of them, often experiencing multiple stages at once.
Grief for a suicide victim is by nature complex, but members of this club have an extremely complex relationship with the anger phase of grieving. It is normal, reasonable, appropriate, and sane to be angry at someone who puts you through a serious trauma and splits your life forever into Before and After.
And yet, it’s very difficult to be angry at someone you loved who is gone. This is true under normal circumstances, and it’s even more true when someone you loved dies by suicide.
It feels selfish and wrong to be angry at someone you loved for dying by suicide, especially if you are also angry at yourself for not seeing it coming and stopping it. Being angry at them feels like a cop-out, a way of letting yourself off the hook, even though it is nothing of the kind.
Other people who loved the suicide victim are often having their own, complex grief, and it can feel impossible to express your anger without hurting them.
Where this often leaves club members is a very dangerous place—alone, angry, in agonizing pain that feels like it’s becoming simultaneous with living. And this happens at the worst possible time—when they are newly equipped with a fresh understanding that living is, in fact, optional.
Parasocial Relationships
The outpouring of grief online since Garrison died has been astonishing. He was an animal lover, and the various animal shelters in Flagstaff, Arizona, have had a torrent of donations in his honor. Several of the subreddits that discuss the show went dark for several days. Hundreds of thousands of people—perhaps millions—feel that they are grieving for this boy, who was so loved and yet felt so alone.
This Substack, and my former Twitter presence, has given me a platform that is a minuscule fraction of one percent of the size that the Sister Wives show audience represents. And even with that, the level of parasociality I’ve experienced has been considerable. I’ve had several creepy men try to seduce me via the internet, several well-meaning idiots try to parent me, and even had a few people who think that reading my essays gives them much deeper insight into me than my therapist has. I’ve read him some of these comments, and we’ve laughed really hard at the childish need for certainty that causes people to desperately cling to a belief in the rightness of their impressions. Internet interactions create a sense of omniscience, even to the point of believing that while they, themselves, are complex and multi-faceted, the people they follow online are not those things at all—the people they follow online are easily understood, fully comprehensible from reading tweets dashed off in a rush in between the events of a life.
I’m also aware of how this works from another angle—three of my closest friendships are with people who have much bigger and more influential platforms than I do. I met all three of them online before I became friends with them in real life, and I needed a brief adjustment period to recognize the real, complex, wonderful-but-still-flawed humans. Now the contrast between the conclusions that I see people draw about them and the people I actually know is often stark, sometimes to the point of hilarity.
So I do understand parasociality, and I know that, despite my feelings of intense sadness and having shed buckets of tears in the last week, I’m not actually grieving for Garrison. I feel unusually attached to this show and the characters—especially Christine and Janelle—but I feel this in a way that is akin to how I feel for the authors of books that have helped and inspired me. If I found myself on a plane with Ryan Holiday, Yeonmi Park, Gary John Bishop, Julia Cameron, Jennifer Michael Hecht, or other authors of books that have been pivotal and helpful on my journey, I would struggle not to make an embarrasment of myself. I would almost certainly start gushing in my desperation to express my gratitude for their help, inspiration, and insight, and I would probably get a little emotional.
I feel something like the “author of a great and inspiring book” kind of gratitude to Christine and Janelle, and deep fondness for their kids, who I’ve watched grow up for the last fourteen years on TV. I watched Garrison become a soldier, a homeowner, and a mature young man who tried so hard to overcome estrangement from his father and be there for his siblings and his mothers. I admired him and felt proud of him.
But I know that I didn’t know Garrison, and that I haven’t lost anything.
I am sad for his family, who now face a complex and agonizing grieving process, one that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and certainly not to have to carry it out in public.
And while I have been crying for Gabriel, to some extent, my therapist has done a good enough job that I didn’t need him to point out that I was crying as much or more for myself.
The part of me that was frozen in time when I found the body of someone I loved after he shot himself is a much smaller part than it used to be. That fragment of my soul has shrunk over time, but it is still extant, and it is still a fragment, and in the past week it’s been much closer to the surface. Its feelings and needs have been much louder than typical.
PTSD is an injury, which comes from trauma. The word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek and literally means ‘wound’. Wounds heal. Depending on how deep and serious they are, the extent of possible healing can vary. All wounds can heal to some extent, but some wounds can never fully heal.
I believe that there are many, many wounds that our society and culture tells us can never fully heal that absolutely can, and do, fully heal. Our society has gotten so fucked up in this area that we act as if incredibly minor slights are lifelong traumas—while simultaneously pretending that serious traumas, like the kids whose lives were up-ended for one or two school years during which they were told constantly that they were walking disease vectors who might kill their grandparents—are minor annoyances.
The scars left behind when a wound heals, even heals fully, can vary. I have seen, and possess, physical scars that are barely noticeable by anyone but me. And I have seen, and possess, scars that are white and lumpy and look funny—scars where it’s obvious that something terrible happened.
In both cases, the healing is complete, but the scars are permanent.
The scar of finding a loved one dead by suicide is a deceptive one: it can look the same for years, then suddenly get inflamed or even infected, requiring more attention and care in order to return to normal.
Garrison’s family, especially Gabriel, have a long journey ahead of them to get to the point where a gaping, bleeding wound has a chance of becoming a scar.
Remember them in your prayers, if you pray, and especially Gabriel.
And if you are able to find an unusually deep well of compassion, also say a prayer for their father, who made many terrible parenting mistakes in front of the entire world—and who will consequently never be able, nor allowed, to fully move past them. If Kody Brown is at all capable of self-reflection, he is being punished much more severely than anyone deserves.
Rest easy, Garrison.
I hope you have found peace.
Garrison Brown was a patriot, Staff Sergeant in the Nevada Army National Guard. He also loved and rescued several cats. Consider donating to one of his local shelters in his memory. I chose this one. It would also be appropriate to donate to 22 Zero, an organization focused on eliminating suicide among veterans of the US Military. I didn’t put this essay behind the paywall because it felt wrong to do so, even though it’s the kind of personal reflection that I would normally put in my exclusive series. But if this essay causes anyone to upgrade from free to paid, I will make another donation to 22 Zero in Garrison’s honor.
Comments are normally open for paid subscribers, but not this time. I’m emotionally exhausted. It’s been a tough week.
RESOURCES
If you or someone you care about is struggling with suicidal ideation, calling 988 in the US will connect you to help 24/7 via Lifeline. You can also text STRENGTH to 741-741 to text with a crisis counselor via Crisis Text. I have a history of serious depression and have written about how to endure suicidal ideation here.
About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.
My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and memoirs by Rob Henderson and Konstantin Kisin. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.