12 Years On...

Rainn Wilson, Dwight Schrute, and Shane

Photo by Pablo Varela on Unsplash

That day again. Super Tuesday it was, that year. Which sometimes feels like lifetimes, and other times like minutes, ago. The day I got the voicemail.

A grad student at the time, I was walking out of a freshmen writing class that I had taught when I noticed it. It was from a friend across the country, in a place I’d once lived. A man from a church I’d briefly attended, a man who had been kind to me and to my older brother, Shane. We gone several times and played basketball with him and a bunch of other guys in his lit driveway on Tuesday nights.

When I called my friend back that day, there was urgency in his voice. A shooting had occurred, he told me, at the school where my brother taught. Though he did not know who, two people were rumored to be dead. He had not been able to get a hold of Shane.

I said goodbye, hung up the phone, and called Shane. His phone was turned off. So texted him, nothing back. I logged onto a computer. Headlines were already hitting the Internet, but no names yet listed. I scrolled down to the comments, which I knew could 1) be inaccurate/lead you astray during a time like this or 2) someone on the inside could be spilling the facts before journalists had time to confirm them. My instinct was spot on: the fired Spanish teacher, someone said, had killed the school’s headmaster, and himself. My brother taught Spanish.

By that point, things were not looking good, but nothing was certain. I had known nothing about Shane’s firing. There had been concerns about his mental health but no history of violence. A friend of mine, who I happened to be texting at the time, suggested I call Jacksonville police. So I did. Right when I said my name and the reason for calling, the operator showed more-than-average interest and got me through to a detective. After the detective got enough identifying details about Shane and me, he finally admitted what I had already all but discovered on my own. Shane had been the shooter. And so I hung up the phone and started calling family members, a process that took hours because one of them, a sister of mine, was in Ecuador at the time. I did not collapse, emotionally, into what had just been heaved at me until my younger brother picked me up that night for a drive to our parents’ house. I felt the event, for the first time, once I was out of logistical-and-information mode.

It has been long enough now that my life looks different in some ways, though not so different in others, from that time. I have burned some sacred cows, I have yelled at the cosmos, and I have sat in my own confusion, grasping for anyone or anything—usually not finding it—that could be my anchor during an undoing. I do not want March 6, 2012 to be the essence of my life, and I have to admit that it was the day that signified the end of what I knew it and the beginning of that which I did not know. This life that gives and then takes.

By accident or fate, the tool that put me in the mood for remembrance this year was Rainn Wilson’s Peacock show, The Geography of Bliss. I watched the last couple episodes with one of my sisters today after she picked up a couple milkshakes for us. It was, we were told by a promotion, National Oreo Cookie Day, and so Denny’s offered buy-one-Oreo-milkshake-get-a-second-one-free. Except Mandy waited about fifty minutes for the shakes because they were having problems with the machine or whatever. Finally they told her they could give her strawberry shakes, not Oreo ones. When I learned that we would be consuming strawberry shakes while watching the show, I had to laugh: Shane was about the only human I’ve ever met who preferred strawberry shakes and ice cream in general.

In the five episodes of The Geography of Bliss, Wilson travels to Iceland, Bulgaria, Ghana, Thailand, and back to his hometown of Los Angeles to explore places that score on differing levels of various “happiness” indexes and ratings to explore the question of “what makes us happy?” A pursuit, he makes more than clear, that comes from his own history with anxiety and depression.

It was a fun show, and the journey in search of happiness—I daresay my older brother was on that same journey himself, though it was cut short—took Wilson to all kinds of places and people: hot springs, a lamb farm, a band practice, a gathering of “ocean dipping” even in the cold, a house concert, a skateboarding park and exercise, a conversation with stand-up comedians, an opportunity to spar with a young boxer (and later, an older kickboxer), a food truck owner who had moved across the world, a fishing expedition, a conversation with an activist theater group, a coffin maker who mixes creativity and splash into his work, a locale that has preserved to remember how and where people were sold off in the slave trade, a fortune teller, some time with drag queens, a kid’s birthday party with the person who makes piñatas for a living, a hitting session with a tennis therapist, and a video-making excursion with TikTik influencers.

While a mix of the profound and cliche were offered up along the way, I would suggest that anyone who thought the show would actually “answer” the question about happiness with any kind of finality would be disappointed. In part because there isn’t one answer, but also because to the degree that there is any answer at all, it’s a veiled one. Mysterious, a little secretive. Found in the living, not necessarily in the thinking. In this sense, too, if there was a failure of the show it was that the structure set Wilson’s hosts up to be the authorities, which they could not really be, though they tried valiantly. This is not a criticism, not really: they are surely all somewhere on that spectrum of trying to find that which Wilson is trying to find. Trying to be something that Wilson is trying to embody.

By accident, the show sort of becomes about culture, and Wilson is great fodder in this sense, as he is almost always willing to try something. This, I now suspect, is at least part of what made him such a masterful Dwight Schrute on The Office.

There are a couple things that must be said about Dwight and The Office in relationship to my family: 1) it was Shane who caught on to the show way before the rest of us did, and quickly spread it, like wildfire, and 2) one of the ways we, even annoyingly and maliciously, talked about the was to decide who the show’s characters were in our family (or vice versa). For example, much to her dismay, we decided that my sister Angela was Angela on the show (for her moodiness). My dad was definitely Michael: socially-oblivious while somehow in charge. In my mind, at least, I was Jim, the cool one. And Shane, it was well agreed-upon, was definitely Dwight. Looking back, I still agree that Shane is Dwight, but when I say that it is less of an insult than it perhaps used to be.

Who was Dwight on the show? I would describe him as being one who possesses two initial traits that we often consider as negative (though one of them isn’t necessarily, and the second one may be more the rest of our problem than the people who have it) and one, less obvious, that is certainly not a negative trait. There is a scene I often remember where—after a conference-room, human resources lecture about “time theft,” which Dwight cheered on—Jim decides he is going to watch Dwight to make sure he isn’t stealing company time. He has a stop watch with him and uses it any time Dwight takes a personal call or yawns or goes to the bathroom. Dwight responds as he often does to Jim’s antics: by doing exactly what he wants him to do. He starts working manically, stopping for nothing. He pees in a bottle underneath the desk. He is humming along quite nicely and not stealing any time until Jim turns to their coworker, Andy, and asks him if he had watched the recent episode of the sci-fi Battlestar Galactica. Jim then riffs his own take, which he knows will upset Dwight, and all the while with his stopwatch in hand for whenever Dwight tries to pipe up.

All of this “works” in the way it does because Dwight is weird. His passions—beet farming, volunteer sheriffing, martial arts—are out of the mainstream and easy to make fun of. If Dwight is a nerd, he is also socially awkward, a poor reader of cues, just like his beloved boss, Michael Scott (who is played by Steve Carell). Michael is not a nerd, but he is awkward and bad at reading social situations; Dwight is both. Shane, in some ways, was both.

But there is something Dwight offered—something Shane offered—that Michael did not (at least not as often). Dwight and Shane were sincere, they acted in good faith, they tried to act in accordance with a set of values. This doesn’t mean they were perfect at it (Shane killed two people, including himself, and Dwight set the building on fire and caused thousands of dollars worth of damage because he was offended that his coworkers blew off his safety lessons), or even that the values themselves couldn’t change, but what Shane and Dwight—for the most part—were not going to do was sell you down the river for social approval. Michael, on the other hand…

Last year at this time, I wrote about this concept of “survivor’s guilt,” whereby people who who outlast a suicide victim hold themselves responsible for what happened, and they have certain memories that serve as evidence for that blame. I actually think this is a healthy aspect of grieving—it’s part of “bargaining”—so long as it doesn’t spiral out of control by becoming too dominant in one’s thinking or view of self.

And so, as I observe that Michael was capable of trading his own integrity for social approval, let me offer up a few haunting memories that I hold of when I did that with Shane as the expense. Because Shane didn’t always read social situations well, and this embarrassed me, I would sometimes take too much of that on, and sort of over-explain for him in anticipation. I can remember doing this with two girls in particular in college (Shane and I went to different schools, but he transferred to my school for his fourth year, which was my third). One of the girls probably took the “warning,” which she more-than-likely did not need from me, as she was capable of making her own assessment. The other rightly saw that what I was doing was, first of all unnecessary, and second of all, not at all helpful to Shane, who she actually liked (as a person) and cared for in her own way.

The third memory also involves a girl and is much further back in my life. One of those memories that probably wouldn’t even be in my memory if it were not so associated with a strong emotion (in this case, guilt). I was at a neighbor’s house, almost surely pre-kindergarten for me, though the neighbor girl was a couple years older than me, and older than Shane, too. The two of us were playing on a swing set in her yard. Shane started coming toward us, and my little friend decided, for whatever reasons, to try to exclude him from our activity by calling out a bunch of silly things like, “Hey Shane, let’s play a game. We’ll play fat people and skinny people. You can be the fat one, and we’ll be the skinny ones. Or we could play ugly dogs and cute dogs. You can be the ugly one, and we’ll be the cute ones. We’ll play smart aliens and stupid ones. You can be the stupid one, and we’ll be the smart ones.” Keep in mind, again, that we were very young, and it was the spirit and tone of what was happening more than the words themselves that were cruel. I may not have said much, but I stayed put, choosing my allegiance with my physical presence. And I have this image of Shane on the top of a little hill, his eyes on us, looking sad.

This memory, of course, takes place early enough in our lives that obviously I did not know who Shane (or I) were or would become. But some of where I go in this reflection is that I do not think we human beings are yet very good at handling socially-awkward, weird, people. People tend not to snap, in other words, without a few instigations. Some such people may come with diagnoses, and maybe that shields them a little bit, gives them in the rest of our eyes, “an excuse.” But diagnosis or not, does anyone really choose to have a hard time fitting in, making friends? Not to mention that this also probably inhibits many of our personality expression, too.

Shane would eventually make many good friends in his life, first in public school, then in a private high school, then again in college, and even in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where the murder-suicide took place. He may even have been better at making friends than I am. His friends, though, tended to be like him: high intelligence, out-of-mainstream interests. Basically quieter, less-abrasive Dwights.