It was a snowy February Friday in Mid-Michigan in 1981. I was a senior at East Lansing High School. I trudged home through the snow to our family's home in a very nice suburb. I anticipated my mom's typical pre-game meal: chicken noodle soup, turkey & Swiss on rye and a Diet Coke. We were playing Lansing Sexton at home later that night. Sexton was a school in central Lansing that typically fielded a predominantly African-American team. Sexton was coached by a hard-nosed, future-Izzo-assistant Doug Herner. His kids had game, and he was a very good coach. We were a bunch of white kids from the suburbs. The game results usually followed the script one would expect given the demographics of the two schools. Read: Sexton usually kicked our ass. We returned the favor with an abundance of joy in football.
I entered the house where I grew up with two loving parents and two siblings - an older sister and an older brother. They were both students at Notre Dame by this time. Kate was a senior and Pat was a junior. Both were pre-meds. I took my shoes off in the laundry room before I entered the family room. My mom was standing by the kitchen table with a pensive look on her face.
'This came for you from Notre Dame,' she said and handed me an envelope.
I looked at the envelope with the gold, embossed university logo in the corner. I was too naive to realize bad news comes in thin envelopes. I opened the envelope. The letter mentioned an extremely strong pool of applicants and other introductory platitudes. It said I had been placed on the 'wait list,' which I did not interpret optimistically. The letter closed by saying, 'Thank you for your interest in Notre Dame.'
Thank you for my interest in Notre Dame? Fuck you. You just ruined my fucking life. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I told my mom the verdict. She tried to remain upbeat. She said there were other colleges out there, and I would find a school that was a good fit for me.
I told her, 'I don't want to go to college. I want to go to Notre Dame.'
She hugged me and said it was Notre Dame's loss. She assured me that everything would work out fine in the end. She reminded me that I was on the wait list, so hope still existed.
I ate my pre-game meal and made the snowy trek back to ELHS. I proceeded to play the best game of a very non-descript high school basketball career. I scored eight points in the first half, and we were tied with Sexton at halftime. I started the second half for the only time my high school career. Sexton, ultimately, had too much talent, and it won the game 58-51. But Coach Herner was very complimentary of our team in the newspaper the next day. He said his team really had to work to get that win against a tough group of guys from East Lansing. That meant a lot. Doug Herner was not a man known for faint praise.
Ultimately, I chose Miami of Ohio over Marquette. Both my parents went to Marquette, so I had followed Al McGuire's teams as closely as Digger's as I grew up in Michigan. But I had fun visiting Miami, and it seemed to have a plethora of pretty girls. Not the greatest decision-making process, but Miami it was.
In early May I got another letter from Notre Dame. I could not believe it. It said I had been accepted off the wait list. I went to my sister's graduation in 1981 and heard President Reagan give the commencement address. My sister's friends in Walsh had heard my good news. Hugs and high fives abounded during the party in the basement of Walsh Hall the Saturday night before graduation.
My sister graduated and got accepted to medical school. My brother, a year younger, was a super-high achiever academically. Read: He got the third highest MCAT score in class at Notre Dame. He was academic heavy hitter and great older brother. He would be accepted to University of Michigan Medical School early admission the next fall.
I arrived on campus in August of 1981. My brother was living off campus after spending three years in Sorin. I moved into Sorin and started making friends with guys whose grades and SAT scores put mine to shame.
I went to the Mass that ended freshmen orientation in the North dome of the ACC. Fr. Hesburgh celebrated the Mass. He closed by saying to class of '85, "There's always something special about the kids who are going to Notre Dame. We love you, and we expect great things from you."
Great things? I didn't even know what I was going to study. I knew I didn't want to be a pre-med. The Thursday nights before Emily's legendary Friday seven-question chemistry quizzes validated that decision quickly and decisively. But what would I do after Notre Dame? I didn't know, but it appeared that big things were expected.
Classes went OK initially, but I felt overmatched academically. The competition for grades seemed brutal. I felt a bit anxious and got slightly depressed as September faded into October and then November. I wasn't sure what to do about my increasing feelings of apprehension. So I did what any red-blooded suburban white kid would do in that situation: I drank a lot of beer and smoked a fair amount of weed. I think I finished first semester with a 3.1 GPA. But no Emil and a pud math class - no Calculus for me, thank you very much, even though I really liked math.
I self-medicated my way through three years at Notre Dame. Lots of nights were spent at Bridget's, Corby's, Nicky's, The Commons and, ultimately, Senior Bar. But senior year the noose slowly tightened as the question, 'What are you going to do after graduation?' became more pervasive. I was an American Studies major with no plan and no clue what I was going to do after graduation. I developed a go-to line about law school being an option, even though that had no real appeal to me.
I became increasingly anxious, panicked and depressed as first semester progressed. I talked to Fr. Monk Malloy, who resided in Sorin Hall, a lot, and he was very kind and supportive. But he did make it know that he had become aware of how much I was drinking and smoking. He was not keen on that, to say the least. I talked to a woman, Sue, in psyche services. She was very nice, but our talks were largely unproductive.
By early November I was experiencing a full-blown mental health crisis. I did not feel like I had any viable options. All I could think about was that big things were expected of an ND grad, and I knew I could not deliver on that. Most of the time I spent in South Bend I was convinced I was stupidest person on campus, even though I had a 3.3 GPA (remember, we're talking American Studies here, not Chemical Engineering).
So one night I walk out of Sorin and drove to a Walgreen's in South Bend. I bought two 16-ounce Mountain Dews and four bottles of sleeping pills. I drove up US 31 and paid cash for a room at the Knight's Inn. I went to the room and swallowed all four bottles of pills as I washed them down with Mountain Dew. I laid down on the bed and waited to die. I said a few Hail Mary's and Our Father's. But my mind wandered to a high school friend named Brendan. He had dove off an elevated back patio over a small lake into about two feet of water two summers earlier. He was completely paralyzed from the neck down. But he kept fighting; he kept living. 'What will Brendan think of me at my funeral?' I wondered as the room slowly started to spin.
I got off the bed and stumbled. But I caught my balance on the edge of the bed. I made it to the door, opened it, and promptly passed out. Someone found me in the doorway, and he thought I was drunk. He called the police. The cops found the empty pill bottles in my room and called an ambulance. The ER personnel found my ND ID so they call student info. They found out I lived in Sorin, so they called Monk. I remember coming to, momentarily, in the ER and seeing Monk and Sue standing over me. Monk said I looked up at them and said, 'Thank you.' Then I passed back out.
I was taken to room in St. Joe's to sleep and get an IV. The next day my parents, panic stricken, drove to South Bend from East Lansing. My brother and sister were both living in Ann Arbor by this time. They took the two-lane highway that cuts across southwestern Michigan and hits US 31 around Niles, MI, just north of South Bend. As they drove, a guy with a 0.24 BAC decided to go on a joy ride in his Ford pickup going away from South Bend. He passed a car going up a hill on the two-lane highway and hit my brother's Honda Civic at the crest of the hill. My brother swerved the car, so the driver's side absorbed the impact. He was killed instantly. My sister, mercifully, was putting her pop can on the floorboard when the impact occurred. I envision God's hand reaching down and gently pushing her forward, so my parents would lose only one child that day. My big brother.
I was in a hospital bed in St. Joe's with an IV in my arm. Monk and Sue were there with me. My parents arrived. Not much was said. After a while, they all left. My dad, Monk and Sue eventually came back in the room. My dad said there had been an accident. My sister was unharmed, but my brother had been killed. My dad fell down on all fours after he delivered the news as though he had been hit in the abdomen with a 2x4. Monk helped him back to his feet. Monk hugged my dad as he wept.
The rest of the week was a bit of a blur. My sister made it back to East Lansing. My hugged her when she entered the house. My sister just sobbed and said, 'It was so horrible. Oh my God, it was SO HORRIBLE,' uncontrollably. I just sat there thinking, 'My God, I just killed my brother. What am I supposed to say?'
All the therapy in the world can tell me that I am not responsible for my brother's death. But his death weighs on my soul. Still. Almost 40 years later.
Monk came to East Lansing and stayed at our house the Friday night before the funeral. He took me for a walk around the block. We barely said a word. I think I asked him if he thought we'd beat Ole Miss tomorrow. He said the game would be played and someone would win. He told me that was the least of our worries. The funeral Mass was 10 o'clock the next morning. It poured down rain all morning. He said he looked at me once in the front pew of St. Thomas Aquinas church, and he said he felt like he was saying both my brother's and my funeral. He never clarified what he meant, but I always remember that.
My brother was deceased, my parents were grief stricken and crushed, and my sister was unharmed physically. I was still highly suicidal. My parents took me to talk to a psychiatrist at Michigan State for a few hours. He then met with my parents. He recommended that I be hospitalized at the Menninger Foundation (at that time, known as the 'Mayo Clinic of Mental Health’).
I asked where Menninger's was located. The replied, 'Topeka.'
'Kansas?' I replied. Yep.
I arrived at Menninger's on January 2, 1986. An African-American mental health tech approached me after I had gotten moved into my new living quarters. He was very upbeat and asked, 'And what brings you to the famed Menninger Foundation, sir?' I replied that I tried to kill myself I couldn't make it through Notre Dame. 'Such a harsh sentence for a college degree,' he replied. Then he said jokingly, 'I was damned proud to make it through Washburn and get a BS.' Washburn University is in Topeka, and it has about 8,000 students. He said, 'I think we'll have lots to talk about. I look forward to getting to know you and your family.' He left as his shift was over.
I got a lot of help from Menninger's. The black mental health tech and I became very close. We remain friends to this day. He's now an LSCSW and ABD from a PhD in social work. After six months in the hospital, I moved into a halfway house and eventually my own apartment. I took some classes at Washburn, but my Notre Dame snootiness wouldn't let me complete a degree at a school I had never heard of one year earlier. I transferred to the University of Kansas and enrolled in the William Allen White School of Journalism. I got a degree from KU in 1989 (so I was there for Danny & the Miracles basketball championship in 1988). It was really wild. And a blast. I worked part-time at the Topeka Capitol-Journal while I went to KU. But journalism wasn't it.
I kept finding myself going to high school football and basketball games. I followed Topeka Hayden Catholic pretty closely. Most of my coaches in high school were math or science teachers. I decided I wanted to teach high school math and coach basketball. I went to the math department at Washburn to find out what I needed to do to get certified to teach 7-12 math.
‘Well, you start with Calculus 1,’ some professor told me.
I hadn't looked at a rigorous math problem in 10 years since pre-Calculus my senior year of high school with legendary football coach Jeff Smith. I was definitely not prepared, and in hindsight, I should have taken College Algebra and then Trig, then Calc 1. But I dove in without the proper underlying knowledge.
I took good notes and wasn't afraid to ask questions. I could mimic what the professor did. He said, 'd/dx(sin x) = cos x and d/dx(cos x) = -sin x.' Sounds good to me. I could commit it to memory, but I had no true understanding of what those derivatives actually meant. I picked up the trig on the fly and I did recall some of what I learned in Coach Smith's pre-Calculus class. Soon we moved into the Power Rule, the Quotient Rule, the Chain Rule, Implicit Differentiation .... holy shit … what have I gotten myself into here. Somehow I fumbled my way through and got a 7 - 12 mathematics certification from the state of Kansas. In the interim, I had talked my way into a volunteer coaches' aid job with Kansas coaching icon Ben Meseke. He won six 4A state basketball championships at Hayden. I was on the staff for one of those in 1990. I contributed about 0.1% to that championship, but I learned a ton. It was a great experience.
I got a math teaching job at a small rural high school about 25 miles southwest of Topeka called Mission Valley. I also coached football and basketball. I planned to stay two or three years, get some experience, and move on to 'bigger and better things.' But I got comfortable. The school had its challenges: lots of rural poverty, apathy, little emphasis on academics in many families. But I liked the staff and the principal. I genuinely cared about the students.
My future wife, Rose, was a widow who taught FACS across the hall from me. We became friends doing hallway duty together during passing period. The high school girls would tell Rose that, 'Hey, I think he really likes you.' Rose would just laugh and reply, 'No he doesn't. He's just a kid.' Rose was 10 years my senior. Our first date was to a Mission Valley softball game. The girls in the dugout and in the stands were going crazy giggling and pointing. 'Oh my god. I think they're here TOGETHER!' It was very comical. When quizzed about it, Rose referred to our encounter as an appointment rather than a date. We had lots more 'appointments' and we got married in 2004. I was 40 and she was 50 so we did not have any children.
Rose had breast cancer but she beat that. Then a few years ago she came home from a walk and said something was drastically wrong. She was out of breath and sweating profusely after walking less than a mile. We went to the doctor and he discovered that she had cancer both on her adrenal gland and in her inferior vena cava. She had a seven-hour open heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. She pulled through it. Rose was a tough Kansas dairy farm girl. The cancer was in remission for two years, but it came back on her liver. We tried chemo, but it spread to her pancreas. She died in 2004. I miss her so much.
I wish I could report that everything was peaches and cream after Menninger's, but it was not. I had three more suicide attempts. I got back in therapy with my original therapist from Menninger's. He's been a big help. I had about a 15 year stretch where I wasn't in therapy at all. I still struggle with feeling responsible for my brother's death. If I'd not drank and partied so much maybe I would've made it through ND. Or if I'd just stayed in my own 'academic lane' and gone to Marquette or Miami, the accident would never have happened.
I got out of teaching six years ago. I couldn't keep dragging kids through classes they had little interest in and less aptitude for simply because KSDE decided it was wise to make every high school student complete Algebra 2. The constant competition for students' attention with texting, SnapChat, Instagram, TicTok, et al just got to be too much. Rose encouraged me to retire early. The job was killing my physical and mental health.
As KByrnes has said before, 'Life is for the living.' I need to keep taking it one day at a time. Sometimes one hour at a time. All we can do is take Bob Dylan's advice and 'Keep on keepin' on.'
If you read all the way through this, thank you. I didn't mean to go 'nuclear' on the board. I couldn't sleep and I just started typing this at about 4:30 am. So that's it. That's it. That's my story.
And to be clear, Notre Dame is a very special place to me and my family. I will always love it, even though I have some very painful memories associated with it. But I still have some very dear, dear friends from my time there. And I think that's what sets Notre Dame apart. The people. Fr. Hesburgh was right. There is something special about the kids who are going to Notre Dame. Because they are what makes Notre Dame what it is.
God bless.
Please don't drink and drive.