An excerpt from Losing Tim
By Janet Burroway
jburroway@fsu.edu
www.janetburroway.com
Seven months later he went home to his family in Namibia disillusioned with the war, President Bush, Coalition Administrator Paul Bremer, the American Army generally, and especially the company he worked for, whom he thought fraudulently greedy for American tax dollars and careless of the safety of his men. On April 23rd, like too many survivors of that war (“more than we can bear”), he took his own life.
What follows are excerpts from my memoir of his life and death, Losing Tim.
Shortly after my second marriage ended I met Rob Jones, a former Green Beret who’d come to FSU for his Ph.D. in English—rebound might come to mind. In any case I was vulnerable and he was protective. He was divorced, the father of three, courtly in the extreme, generous to the edge of oppressive, and romantic in a markedly door-opening Victorian way. He was also a decorated Vietnam veteran of at least two tours, an outspoken scold of the liberal left, and a lover of all things warlike. He had the requisite T-shirt that said, “Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out.” His cottage on Lake Talquin, described by one of my male colleagues as “every boy’s dream,” contained an extensive collection of guns, knives, military paraphernalia, and expensive tweed that was gradually being demolished by the moths and mildew of the Florida panhandle. When he wanted to give a party, Rob shot a few squirrels, skinned them, and boiled up a stew.
My friends were quick to opine that the major was a major mismatch for me, but Tim, then in high school, took to and ultimately idolized him; and there grew between them a bond that was partly born of being two warrior-hunters in a liberal university milieu, but also I think a deeper accord. Both felt they had been born a century too late. Both yearned for the test of their mettle. Rob had been shrapnel-wounded several times and used to boast, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” Tim took this particular brand of toughness as a touchstone. Later in Ranger School, humping a hundred and twenty pounds over a mountain trail without sleep or food for forty hours, he would use it as an under-the-breath marching song: The trick is not minding that it hurts. The trick . . .
It may be that, just as Tim’s need of his father had kept me in that marriage, his reverence for Rob kept me in the affair past its sell-by date. It may be that Rob’s influence pushed Tim farther in the bellicose direction he was already headed. It may be that Tim’s foundering relationship with his father was further damaged by the contrast with this soldier and his unconditional machismo. All that may be. It’s also the case that Tim found in Rob something he had sought and lacked, and that Rob accepted him as a son long after our infirm affair had ended. After Tim’s death I found two yearning mentions of Rob among his freshman college essays. In one he hoped that “maybe with luck we will be” a family. The other eulogizes the Rob-figure as a hero who deftly disarms a mugger, whose “views are slightly right, but keeps an open mind,” who “believes in America, something not often seen in people these days,” and who “is not my biological father, but the father of my spirit.”
As he came through puberty Tim read voraciously, mostly adventure novels, admired John Wayne’s acting and his politics, and more than once to my despair quoted, “My country, right or wrong.” At eighteen he came home at three one morning, in tears because he could not go to defend England’s honor in the Falklands. Shortly thereafter I realized that both my boys, who had spent their early years in shoulder-length dirty-blond shag, had shaved their heads—Alex for a Mohawk and Tim for ROTC. Both wore combat boots, the one for busking around the Eros statue in London, the other for jumping out of airplanes. It occurred to me that Tim was rebelling against sixties parents, the ones who had him out in the stroller at the sit-ins or confined to his playpen while we addressed envelopes for Mother Against the Bomb. Alex, instead of rebelling against Mom (what’s the point?—if she’ll let you be a soldier, she’ll let you be anything), rebelled against his big brother, the hero-worship and the Top Siders, all things buttondown or flag-waving.
Much of the time it seemed funny, and when we fought, my battles with Alex were the more bitter precisely because he and I were more alike. His impulses were generous, sloppy, and full of turmoil, whereas Tim would hold back and calmly stand his ground. Alex was a loud and messy liberal, like me. Tim said “Yes, ma’am,” ready to do a task right now, and I had to be grateful for military virtues in a son.
Nevertheless, when I disagreed with Tim there was a higher proportion of subtext to text. Our quarrels were less frequent and less personal, but they betrayed a deeper divide. I remember one evening in a slightly stuffy, pleasantly scruffy London flat with worn leather on the chairs, Kurdish rugs on the floor, and middle-aged versions of the Cambridge undergraduates we had mostly been—now pundits, publishers, writers, and actors, what the British call the “chattering classes.” Both my sons were with me on this trip, sixteen-year-old Alex out with his guitar and the punks of Piccadilly Circus, nineteen-year-old Tim somewhere in the adjoining room in Harris tweed. I recognized the man crossing toward me, glass in hand, as somebody I vaguely knew—first name Jeff (or Geoff), last name lost. Slender, sandy, he looked too young to be the president of London P.E.N. International, though I seemed to remember that’s what he was. I remembered he was witty and articulate, an impassioned campaigner for the freeing of imprisoned writers; my kind of person. So I was glad to see him headed toward me.
He charged a little purposefully, though, his look a little heated. “I’ve been talking to your son,” he said, and set his glass against his chin. “My God, how do you stand it?!”
My stomach clenched around its undigested canapés, brain wrung like a sponge. Shame, defensiveness, and rage (I am responsible for my son; I am not responsible for my son; who are you to insult my son?) so filled my throat that I could not immediately speak. What I felt was that I, literally, closed down. The free-speech champion offered me the kind of face, sympathy and shock compounded, that one offers to the victim of mortal news.
“I manage,” I managed presently, and turned on my heel.
I have never so far as I know run into Jeff or Geoff again, but I credit him with the defining moment, when choice is made at depth: the Mother Moment.
Burroway's courage and exceedingly precise writing is nearly dumbfounding. The Mother Moment says it all.
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