In memory of Ernie Roberts

The tragedy of unrealized potential, and our costly discarding of human beings

You spent 5 months, in 2023, living in my apartment. I had, just a few years before that, tried like hell to talk my sister out of housing you after whichever number of your stints in prison had winded down, and yet there I was deciding, and basically telling you when you were strewn out on her couch, that you would be sobering up at my place. You followed the order, actually. Went through your withdrawal symptoms in my extra bedroom.

When you were well enough, I drove you to meetings. You started communicating with the lawyer who was in charge of your next round of legal proceedings. Because, I suspect, you were able to present yourself better than “they” expected you to, those proceedings went better than you feared they would. And you started your house arrest, began working when and where you could get hours and jobs as a laborer, work you’ve always done ever since I first met you 12 years ago when you were rehabbing a house and giving a go at running your own business. That house you were living at was the one just a couple blocks over from where my sister was living at the time, and when you noticed her walks with her boxer, you used the fact that you had a dog, too (Max!), to make your move.

When I visited from out of town, I slept in a bedroom at your place, and you took me on a job one day—something we both soon regretted. Me because I felt useless in that environment, and you because you had to redo anything you tried to task me with. I was not impressed with how much soda you drank or your less-than-meticulous “filing” of receipts throughout your truck, which you needed for tax purposes. We played one-on-one in a church gym back when we both still had the knees to do it, and that was a better mutual environment for us. Just two Geminis out there in one of the few arenas that has always made sense.

I wondered sometimes if you would do extreme things to land you behind bars on purpose. Or at least subconsciously. A temporary reprieve from the stress of life “out there,” though I’m sure prison had its own miseries.

We celebrated my niece’s birthday, your daughter’s, at a roller skating rink on Valentine’s Day—the same day I heard you really had died in the hospital. It took me about 24 hours before I hit a total wall, couldn’t do anything else from the monotony of “regular” life before first taking a nap—one of those ones where you feel like it’s literally the only option you have—and then I woke up and wept. And wept some more.

I cried most of all for the loss of human potential, and for the loss of yet another important man in my family and for the way these losses always seem to expose our dark side, which we should probably give more light to while we’re living. I’d be lying if I said I ever really believed in your relationship with my sister, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t believe in you (and in her, too). I cried because if there was one reason I’d taken you in and tried to sober you up it had been because I wanted my niece to have a father who would be strong enough to father her. You deserved to be fought for, and I don’t regret doing it.

But I am also angry. And I have to admit that what I’ve felt a lot lately is anger. I’m angry that the schools you went to along the way didn’t do a good-enough job of recognizing and affirming the things you were good at. I’m angry at—from some of the stories I’ve heard—the prisons you spent time in for reinforcing the violence that you’d already experienced too much of on the outside. I’m angry at how badly we seem to be collectively at providing spaces for folks who seem to be struggling the most. Places where people might find enough safety within themselves and the relationships around them to find their a way to a life they actually enjoy. I’m angry that when I hear the statistical phrase “deaths of despair,” I know exactly what researchers are attempting to describe.

I’m angry at how much the quality of people’s lives seem to depend on how much money one’s family has, and if your parents happen to love each other. And how little control we have over either of those—how much entire lives can be haunted by one or both of those realities. I’m angry at the God or Nature that didn’t heal the wounds of yours, at least not in this life, which you did not choose or agree to. I’m angry that God or Nature gave us a physiology that seems permanently altered in ways that don’t serve people after they go through extreme trauma. You get screwed twice. I’m angry because I know that for all the things you probably did to piss people off, at your core you were a boy whose needs hadn’t gotten met and who was terrified inside his body.

Perhaps most of all, I’m angry at family lineages, my own as much as any other, that keep passing on the impossible legacies of poverty and addiction and abuse and neglect. I’m angry that my niece (and four other young girls) will live out the rest of her life without her father, and I’m angry at you, for the ways in which, functionally at least, those girls have already grown up without enough of you around and present. I’m angry about how careless you were about sex, no matter how many other people those decisions affected along the way.

Which doesn’t mean you didn’t parent your kids, in your way. Because one of the things that made you well-suited for fatherhood, I think, was that mode you had for playfulness. I got to meet a few of your other daughters, and while I can’t imagine how much pain all this is causing them now and will continue into the future, one constant in those environments was their laughter. It was you who produced that, and I won’t forget it was a real part of you.

I remember belting out Luke Bryan’s “Play it again” with you and a daughter of yours that I’m not related to by blood as we drove to a lacrosse game my sister was officiating. Another time, I picked you up at my sister’s place, where you were installing new cabinets in her kitchen. By yourself. And while I know you did stuff like that in part because you hoped the two of you would end up together, I think you also did it because there was someone who had a need, and you had the ability to meet it. That could be you, too.

You had a habit of introducing me as your brother-in-law. That pissed me off. Not because it isn’t true that we’re bound together for life (and now death), but because there was something dishonest about what you were doing, like you were trying to take a shortcut. You didn’t trust yourself to be able to travel the whole distance in the relationship—or to truly win a woman’s heart—so you would just claim it out-loud with other people, and I probably shouldn’t have let you get away with it as much as I did.

I don’t feel great about how your time in my apartment ended, though I don’t know if I could have done anything different. I’d reached my emotional capacity for dealing with all of it and still taking care of the other parts of my life, and I’m sure you were stressed at the prospect of needing to find a place of your own and keeping enough work to pay for it.

You locked me out one night (by accident with a lock I have that can’t be opened by a key), as you’d done a few different times, except that this time I knocked on both the door and on the wall near your room with no answer for so long that I finally gave up and went and crashed at my other sister’s place. I honestly wondered if you were dead in my apartment, and while we’re at it another thing I’m angry about is how many times you flirted with death, went right up to its edge, before it finally got you this time. You weren’t dead in my apartment, and you actually answered when I came back and knocked the next morning. As much of an apologizer as anyone I’ve ever met—I’ve come to recognize that as shame—you apologized, but there was something off in your communication, and I knew you had used. Then you took your shit and left without communicating or fully cleaning up the space. You were an easily-triggered person, just like so many other people who come out of chronic trauma.

You were able to get your own place for a while, and I had hope that that would be the start of better things for you, but part of me knew that the sheer amount of resources and support you would need was so beyond me, and I wasn’t sure you would find it. Or that enough people would be good to you through it.

The picture I used for this post is the one I will print out and put on my wall, and it is how I will choose to remember you, because for all the impossibility of this life, for the all the bullshit it contains, the image really is who you were. And I’m better for having known you.