Our Wild Thing by Amanda Kernahan

        Viktor Rutberg CC


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Our Wild Thing


     The grainy photo appeared in my social media feed, a post shared by an acquaintance, created by a news station, captured by low-resolution cameras inside a bank hundreds of miles from my home. I knew it was him, my baby brother walking out of the bank in an oversized hoodie pulled over his head, his shoulders slumped, eyes down. Through the screen and pixelated image, I could feel his despair coming through the phone and filling the air around me. He was wanted for robbing a bank, the same crime our older brother was sitting behind bars in another state for committing. I had seen James slowly disappearing for years, watching helplessly from the land of “loved ones,” a place I have inhabited as far back as I can remember. 
     I sat in my living room, stunned silent. I couldn’t make out his thick mop of hair beneath the hoodie, but I wished I could put a hand into it and hold him against me in a hug, give him the love I knew he would never find in the drugs he was seeking. 
James’ blonde hair had always been untameable, thick like hay, repelling water before finally absorbing it. His spirit as untameable as his hair. As a little boy, he would snuggle into our mother’s side at night and read his favorite book- Where the Wild Things Are. James loved the story of the boy who would romp around with the Wild Things unafraid, coming home after his adventures to the safety of his bedroom. The paperback grew ragged from love, creased and worn as little fingers with a mother’s gentle guidance turned its pages over and over again. 
     Our mom lovingly called him her “little Max,” or her “Wild Thing” when he was especially mischievous. As he grew, he would gallivant fearlessly during the day, whipping through the trees on his dirtbike with mud speckling his face and covering his clothes. The youngest of four siblings, James craved independence and adulthood from an early age, languishing behind the rest of us in various stages of dating, driving, and college. Mom gushed over him as her baby, a term often met with terse lips and an eye roll. As he ventured into his teenage years he put up a tough persona, a shield never strong enough to hide his sensitive child heart from those who knew him. His maturing age never stopped our Mom from sneaking little Wild Thing stuffies onto his bed- permission to remain a child, reminders of love. 
     He was staying at my house one summer morning when I got the phone call ending with three terrifying words- “Baby, she died.” Our 47-year-old vibrant Mom whose love language was laughter and practical jokes, petite in size but giant in personality, had died without warning. Sitting in a pale green oversized chair in her living room a heart attack stole her away in the dark of the night, her dog whimpering at her feet. I knew before my brothers, having to face each of them and break their hearts one by one. “Mom died,” I said softly, wishing I could withhold the agony I knew I was inflicting. James' 15-year-old face fell, the emerging adolescent mask of toughness revealing the truth- he was still just a baby, her baby.  
     Grief swallowed us up swiftly, our attention consumed by our own individual pain. We barely noticed as James sailed away to the island of the Wild Things, looking for a comfort this world did not seem to provide. The island was full of other lost boys and girls, new friends who loved him, and enough drugs to numb the pain. When we realized he had gone, we were desperate to get him back. Perhaps if we just love him enough? If we cry and beg? If we force help upon him? If we pray to a God we don’t believe in because he already stole our mother? Our love, enough to fill an ocean, was not enough to bring him home to us. The island held him there, captive yet unaware. 

     He wasn’t the first of us to visit that place, our oldest sibling had resided there for decades. He had come home on and off over the years but our mother’s death was enough to summon him back, James following quietly behind. 
     Addiction had always been an island I couldn’t reach, the Wild Things terrified me. Learning about drugs from the D.A.R.E. officer in my elementary classroom, I naively thought saying no would be enough. He didn’t warn us that drugs could find their way into your home, into your blood and your marrow, without ever ingesting them. He didn’t explain that the dark and dirty criminals he described were actually just people’s brothers. Siblings they had grown up riding bikes with and splitting the mounds of Halloween candy strewn across the living room carpet in pure sugar bliss. “I will trade you 2 Snickers for 1 Reeses!” 
     When James followed our older brother into this land I had never stepped foot in, I stood and watched the waters retreat from me, waiting for the tsunami. We tried everything from the shore. We hosted an intervention on the porch of my aunt’s house, where I looked him in the eye across the weathered wicker table and croaked out, “I don’t want you to die” before tears closed my throat. We forced him to go to rehab in hopes it would bring him back to us. We loved him. Angrily, fully, desperately. He loved us too. None of it was ever about a lack of love- it was neither the problem nor the solution. 
     For 7 years James lived in the land of the wild things, visible to us but out of reach. Addiction infiltrated him like a poisonous moss his bare feet padded in search of a soft landing- only to find it grew tentacles, wrapping around him and refusing to let him leave. Every time I saw my youngest brother, I could see a little boy unable to make his way home. I knew the home he was searching for was our mom, an echo we could no longer access. She was in the space between us, not in the realm I walked or the island James lingered on. We each raged in our own ways at the unfairness of it.  

     Sitting on my couch staring at the blurry security camera image, I knew it was him instantly. I knew him from the contours. Low-quality photos cannot hide from us the things we love. We need only the silhouette, one piece of the puzzle we know so well. I told no one, retreating within myself, the only island I have ever felt safe on. 
    I nearly drowned in anxiety waiting for an outcome. It came several days later with his arrest, our beloved wild thing contained. It took time for the drugs to dissipate, to give up on their host unable to feed them. A judge mercifully sentenced him to a long-term rehab program rather than jail. 
    Slowly, James came back to himself, to us. No longer the 15-year-old boy sailing away, he was now a 23-year-old young man daring to look into a future here among us mortals. He began to read. First of a bird named Jonathan Livingston Seagull, learning to fly as an outcast among his peers. As his fervor for reading grew, I sent him my favorite book- Wild by Cheryl Strayed, proof that so many of us are lost wild things in search of the way home to ourselves. As he devoured books and pondered things like inner peace, I dared to reacquaint myself with hope. 
     James left the rehab center to begin again as temperatures rose into summer, the sun visiting for longer hours each day, the dark season retreating. His thick blonde hair was buzzed short, a soft fuzz in its place. He chose to live on a wide swath of land that belonged to our uncle, in a camper set among trees and grasshoppers. A home in the beautiful wild. A crackling campfire he could watch dance just outside his door. 


     The island he had once frequented seemed a distant memory for us, but it still beckoned him in the dark. On a warm August evening, he returned to his home among the wild things. A place that would eat him up and never let him go again. 

     Another phone call brought me to my knees. I stood on the shore with my family, anger and sadness pouring out into a sea of tears. His joyful laugh and mischievous smirk, his vast future potential, the children he never had and the wife he never met, all extinguished. 

     It has been 6 years since my brother James was reduced to ashes, 14 years since our Mom was lowered into the ground. Federal prisons across the country are the ever-changing home addresses of my older brother. We have been scattered like the tufts of a dandelion, all beginning from the same stem. 
     I still think about all of the wild things and all of the families who hope they come home for dinner. Max, King of the Wild Things, swings from a branch surrounded by flowers and a pinecone on my upper left bicep. My other brother Shane carries Max hoisting a royal scepter on the back of a Wild Thing over his right lower ribs. My husband has him in a boat, sailing a rough sea on his arm. Ink seared into our skin, scars we keep visible for the world. We romp around and adventure, taking him to the mountains, on airplanes to distant places, to warm sandy beaches where our children run into the waves with wild abandon. We stand at the shore, toes in the sand, wind in our faces. We look out at the faraway unknown and whisper, we love you so. 

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Amanda Kernahan is a writer, host of the Grief Trails podcast, founder of RememberGrams, and a proud Adirondack 46er. She has been published in Slate Magazine as well as The KeepThings, and is working towards the publication of her memoir about grief, loving those with addictions, and seeking solace in nature. Find her on Instagram @AmandaKernahanWrites or on Substack @AmandaKernahan. She lives in Rochester, NY with her husband, two children, and their big loveable German Shepard

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