WHAT MY BROTHER KNEW

Amelong’s memoir explores the untimely death of the author’s teenage brother.

When the author was 17 years old, her 13-year-old brother Jay was killed while riding his bicycle. The accident occurred when a driver lost consciousness, only waking up after his vehicle struck Jay and dragged him under its wheels for several feet. The driver wasn’t impaired or ill; he had never passed out before and had no idea why the black-out episode happened. Making things even stranger, Jay had earlier predicted his own death, making statements like “I will die young. It’s not going to be much longer,” buying their mom an early birthday gift, and even mentioning a green car as an instrument of death. The loss of Jay greatly impacted his sister. Amelong writes that she felt as if her life had suddenly turned flat—she “became one-dimensional” when she found out he died. Gradually, she spiraled into drug, alcohol, and sex addiction to numb her pain and guilt. After getting clean, the author tried many different methods to deal with her trauma, including Alcoholics Anonymous, re-evaluation therapy, death cafes, and writing retreats. She also became obsessed with solving the riddle of Jay’s death: How was he able to foresee his own fate? Though Amelong doesn’t exactly find answers, throughout her journey she learns more about herself and about dying, gaining additional insight from her mother’s bitter death from cancer. Amelong writes from the heart and has a gift for arresting imagery; experiencing disconnection with her own body, she describes her lips as “two slugs mating on hard cement.” However, the text sometimes feels stretched thin, elongating conversations the author has with people connected to Jay that all end up fizzling out. Part of the problem is that Jay was a young teen when he died and had not lived long enough to acquire depths to be plumbed—he was a popular kid who loved rock bands like Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, getting high, and BMX bikes. His unchildlike apparent foreknowledge, sadly, remains a mystery without hope of resolution.

A sincere and valiant attempt to understand the unfathomable.