I posted this previously. Tonight is the anniversary of his suicide. Sorry to any who are unduly provoked. I am very sad tonight.
My brother's name was Paul.
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When I found the "truth", I told someone I knew very intimately about what I had learned. He lived in another state, but he was sufficiently intrigued so as to seek out the local kingdom hall in his area.
He was battling with excruciating depression, alcoholism, addiction to cocaine (free-basing was then the "new" thing; this was way before crack).
Within a few months of his intitiating a bible study, he was convinced. He attended all of the meetings, he changed jobs (a good thing: his employment was very "enabling"), he broke up with his girlfriend, he slowly stopped associating with all of his "bad" friends. He sold his stereo equipment to pay his old drug debts.
He had just become a publisher. He was having a difficult time making ends meet with the markedly reduced income resulting from his job change, and he was extremely lonely. He was a 27 year old man with no relatives within the congregation, and was finding his new lifestyle spiritually and intellectually rewarding, but replete with gaping holes in terms of a social structure. There was no one, NO ONE, in his immediate area, who was able to relate to him or assist him in this unfathomable transition. He was discouraged from the study conductor and local elders from participating in any 12 step programs.
I kept in constant touch with him, encouraging him, reinforcing the pearls of 'truth' he was embracing, supporting him in his lonliness, relating my own difficulties and sharing my own newly-found "scriptural" reasoning to continue fighting.
He was supposedly very close to baptism, and I was so thrilled. I mean it. I was so proud of his integrity and self-control; it seemed like there was so much evidence of "god's power" working in all of this. It reinforced my own faith. Not many people can pull off what he did; it reflected incredible courage and strength, the way he withdrew from the things in his life that had sustained him through incredible pain... but these very things, we reasoned, kept him from achieving an "approved" status with god.
Not long later, he filled up the back seat of his car with as many individual gallons of gasoline that his back seat would hold. He chose a good time: 4:30 am.... not many people on the highway at that time. He drove directly along a perfectly planned route, smashed his car into a telephone pole, resulting in it rolling down an embankment, where it exploded into flames. One witness gave a florid description of what they had seen. There was very little collateral damage, but his body was burned such that they had to identify him by dental records.
He was my brother. He was only 27.