How to memorialize a complicated man, a brother of almost mythical proportions? In her quest to answer that question, writer Julie Thompson learned that accepting is at once an act of remembering and forgetting.
Words by Julie Thompson | Illustration by Courtney Garvin
June 18, 2024
hen my brother took his life at 35, I drank red wine, ate comfort food, listened to the same songs on repeat. Then I lined up with five of my siblings on a bench outside a suburban tattoo parlor.
We would mark his death, his life, with matching tattoos.
I had booked a five-hour time slot for March 29, 2021, the day after we buried him. One by one, my siblings entered and emerged with similar tattoos. I let the others go before me, and when our time ran out, I alone remained uninked. I could have asked the artist to extend the appointment, but I did not.
I was not ready. I did not know what parts of my brother I wanted to memorialize and which parts I should bury.
The truth was, I barely knew him. The truth was, my brother and I were hardly on speaking terms when he died; we had quarreled and become estranged. The truth was, I did not know where his soul had gone — to heaven or hell or someplace in between, and although I was a pragmatist by day, at night it frightened me to think I might dream of him. The truth was that as the police investigated the cause of death to rule out homicide, his body, which he had tended to so faithfully his entire adult life, was already succumbing to nature’s process, and no amount of ice or preservatives could stop it. The truth was, I felt like I was underwater, but the world did not seem to notice or slow.
But who asked for the truth?
• • •
My brother was 10 years my senior. We coexisted on this planet for 25 years but always in each other’s periphery. He was already a teenager when our parents divorced and had begun to establish his view of the world. My memories of our life under the same roof are vague, trivial. When I thought of my brother in the weeks and months after his death, I usually remembered more recent times – the Christmases and summers when he visited our mom’s house in Georgia.
I remembered drifting in orange inflatable tubes on the Chattahoochee River just before the sky blackened. Lightning struck a tree, which cracked and fractured a boy’s femur as it landed. When my brother lifted the tree and rescued the boy, someone proclaimed him a hero, and I basked in the glow.
I remembered watching a DVD of a bodybuilding competition in which he had earned gold. He wore bronzer and drank almost no liquids for days to accentuate his physique. I remembered the pride he took in self-care and discipline, but every Christmas, he would help himself to all the pie and turkey he could eat. He sang Disney songs in the kitchen while making himself 10 scrambled eggs. I remembered going to the gym together during the 2018 holiday season and watching grown men stop and ask to take a picture with him. He posed, flexed, and soaked in the attention.
I remembered the arguments, the shouts, the bitter disagreements over politics and morals. Eventually, we realized there would be no compromising or seeing eye to eye, and we agreed that to keep the peace, silence would be best. With both of us under Mom’s roof, I walked on eggshells.
Almost as soon as he died, these memories began to shuffle and swirl. My tattoo, I hoped, would make sense of what grief had warped.
• • •
Months passed, and the questions lingered. Though I felt my brother’s absence daily, I did not consciously think of him until I was alone, and it was dark. Then I would sit with the memories and the weight. Browsing online one evening, I discovered an archive about tattoos and their ability to help bearers heal from trauma. I eavesdropped on a 2016 interview with the creator, Deborah Davidson, someone I had never heard of but who seemed to speak directly to me.
A camera panned to show Deborah on a tattoo bed discussing her forthcoming book The Tattoo Project. Deborah’s calm voice transcended a needle’s looping buzz. It did not falter as the needle pierced her arm, creating her 12th tattoo.
As a younger woman, Deborah had never considered getting tattoos, much less writing about them. Then, in 2009, she met a woman named Helena while volunteering for Bereaved Families of Ontario. Helena was a conservative older woman, but eventually Deborah noticed Helena’s tattoo — a pair of ice skates and a name. This was a memorial tattoo for Helena’s daughter, Donna, who had died by suicide. Every time someone asked about the tattoo, Donna’s name was spoken, her death was destigmatized. Donna’s story was rewritten in her mother’s skin.
This awakened something in Deborah, who had her own story to rewrite, her own trauma to face.
• • •
It was the spring of 1977. Twenty-five-year-old Deborah lay on a gurney, waiting to go into labor with her second child. Unattended, she uttered deep, primitive sounds. Though she would go through the motions and through the pain of delivery, Deborah knew her baby girl, Mary, at just 27 weeks, didn’t stand a chance. As soon as she was born, a nurse whisked Mary into an emergency room and never brought her back. There would be no joyous homecoming, no first words or birthdays.
Deborah felt the pain twofold.
Two years earlier, she had given birth to a boy, Jason. Like his sister, Jason was born prematurely at 29 weeks. He lived just 10 hours. Deborah never saw her son, never held her daughter. She experienced a phantom ache. Years later, Deborah learned that a drug — diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen commonly prescribed to women from 1940 into the 1970s to prevent miscarriages and promote infant health — was likely the cause of both her babies’ deaths. The drug had been prescribed to Deborah’s mother during pregnancy and wrought intergenerational consequences. Silently, Deborah reaped them.
In 2009, the sociologist stepped into a shop on Queen Street West in Toronto and requested two simple butterflies — one blue, one pink. Shortly after receiving those tattoos, she spoke her children’s names out loud for the first time in decades.
For her 12th tattoo, which also served as her book cover, Deborah chose an elephant, a creature with remarkable memory and nurturing instincts, to represent trauma — the metaphorical elephant in the room.
• • •
When survivors experience grief for the first time, forgetfulness may soften its blow, smoothing over reality’s rough edges.
In her Southern Gothic The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers masterfully captures this phenomenon that is akin to amnesia. When innkeeper Biff Brannon suddenly loses his wife after a surgery to remove an abdominal tumor, he struggles to recollect any vivid details of her physical appearance. When he tries to remember her face, there is “a queer blankness in him.” What lingers is the absurdity that someone who had been a constant, albeit nagging, mainstay of his life was suddenly gone. Although they had a strained relationship, Biff finds himself living with the memory of his wife and gaping at the fact that “their life together was whole as only the past can be whole.”
When my brother died, our relationship was complete, but it did not feel whole.
We never had the chance to reconcile. I never had the chance to recapture the admiration I felt toward him when I was a child. I never had the chance to see his demeanor soften as he raised a family. And I know that’s what he wanted — a wife, kids, dog, the whole works. But in the last years of his life, the world seemed to be falling apart, and it was hard to tell what was real and who to trust. We fell into our own echo chambers of news and truth. We forgot how to find common ground and how to discern a person from their politics. The last time I saw my brother alive, he branded me with a political party’s colors, yelling “you people.” Silently, I did the same. I put him in a box long before he put himself in one.
• • •
I returned to the suburban parlor three weeks after my siblings had received their tattoos. I possessed few answers about who my brother was or how I should remember him, but I had begun to suspect it didn’t matter. Remembering is for the living.
My tattoo artist, I learned, had worked as an administrative assistant at a lawyer’s office before beginning her tattoo apprenticeship. I told her about my brother as we discussed the design my siblings and I had chosen.
For my commandeering brother, we’d settled on an obvious choice: a swallow. He was one of the first of my siblings to get exposed tattoos, and his arrived in pairs. Parallel guns marked his chest. Shamrocks on opposite shoulders doubled his Irish luck. On his enormous traps, twin swallows soared in flight.
The swallow, he said, was a sailor’s tattoo. As a Navy Seabee, he believed he fit that category. Swallows themselves are grand voyagers. These scissor-tailed travelers spend early winter in South and Central America and make a transcontinental flight in February to California and Texas, the state where my brother spent his entire adult life except for his deployment.
In February 2021, a snowstorm had knocked out Texas power lines. A massive blackout ensued. He was laid off from his job as an overseer on an oil rig that had been shut down for months. He must have needed us, his family, in those uncertain months but never admitted it. At home all alone, he hoarded guns and booze. Shadow claimed him. Near the river by his house, I pictured swallows molting when the freak storm passed.
In the tattoo parlor, I lay on my stomach and surrendered to the artist and her process. The needle hummed, and I closed my eyes. I thought of my brother, not of any moments we had shared but of a photograph of him riding a horse on a beach. He seemed free. He had returned to innocence. I bled just a little, and my head tingled like I was drunk. In my mind, the image of him lingered, and in my pores, I experienced a sensation that transcended pain.
• • •
On a Sunday in early October, Deborah’s Canadian accent projected from my computer speaker as we met virtually. It was the first of several meetings in which we exchanged stories about our losses, tattoos, and thoughts about death. Even on that first Zoom call, I felt as though we knew each other.
Deborah asked about my tattoo. I instinctively touched the bird on my upper back. She laughed and indicated her memorial tattoos with a similar gesture. Bearers always want to touch their tattoos, she said. Maybe it’s the closest thing to touching the people who are no longer here. I, too, laughed and reveled in this simple comfort.
There is joy along with the pain. There is regret. For now, I will laugh as I remember his flaws. I did not expect to share his story, my story, but it felt so damn good.
“Martin. Martin. Martin.” Deborah said his name three times, emphasizing a part of him that lingers still.
• • •
Accepting is a simultaneous act of remembering and forgetting. Details slip into negative space as his absence expands. Forgetting is inevitable, but I long to hold onto what I can, even memories so heavy that I buckle under their weight.
Perhaps we feel the need to memorialize out of guilt. As soon as someone leaves us, we start to forget. We smooth over the parts of a person we don’t want to remember. Often, we only speak of the good. In time, their memory is a shrine that only faintly resembles the person they were. As Biff contemplates his wife’s death, he wonders if memorializing is a duty, a miraculous resurrection so that “the one who has gone is not really dead but grows and is created for the second time in the soul of the living.” I believe Biff is right.
Our tattoos resurrect versions of Martin mingled with parts of ourselves.
I had planned to get a small tattoo, something easy to conceal. An introvert since birth, I rarely seek to call attention to myself. But the idea ballooned, drawing life from Martin’s giant-sized ego, which breathed inside me. I am now bigger than myself. Catching a glance of the bird spreading its wings over my shoulder, I trust that he will always have my back.
Five of us carry memories of our brother as unique as the swallows in our skin. My sister’s sits like a coin on her wrist, while three of my brothers carry theirs on their chests, close to their hearts. Each of us knows him in a different way, cherishes our own secret memories. He is a mystery now, like every person who dies young.
In that mystery lies an echo, a scream in the hollow dark. We fill the shadows with our own light and love as we stumble forward. Our tattoos are talismans, reminding us where to find him.
On March 4, 2022, we marked a year since our golden brother left us. The sun reappeared, and the earth expanded. So did my senses. I breathed earth and energy and heat. Hundreds of miles away, swallows flew to Texas. The breeze tickled my back and blew west. ◊
Julie Chantal Thompson is a freelance journalist, art enthusiast, and educator based in Atlanta. Raised by missionary parents, she spent many of her childhood afternoons in the back of a crowded van contemplating folk art, language, and geography as her family crossed state and national borders. She writes personal essays and research articles to shed light on marginalized groups and topics and hopes her words will promote self-reflection and intergenerational healing.
Courtney Garvin is an Atlanta-based designer specializing in branding and design strategy. She received an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University and a BFA in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.