In memory of my cousin Chris Conrad

A poem he wrote at age 12: Helping.
Helping is freeing someone from struggle,/
Helping is also freeing
yourself too,/ It makes you feel good,/ It
makes the person you're helping know that
someone cares,/ Helping is making a difference,/
It is changing the future,/
Helping is the meaning of life.

Today, my cousin Chris Conrad, would have turned 33. But on May 19, 2018, he died by suicide. As with everything that happened in 2018, both the good and the bad, I didn’t feel I had the proper time to process and grieve and wrestle with it and try to understand it. I wanted to write a blog piece about it to 1) honor my cousin and his memory, and 2) contribute to the push for people to talk openly about mental health.

Chris was three months older than me. He grew up in Elmhurst and me in Skokie. We saw each other at family gatherings and given we were the same age, we spent a lot of that time together. We were among the youngest grandchildren and were always seated at the “kids” table together. Chris moved back to Elmhurst a few years ago as his mental illness worsened. We began to see each other more frequently again at family gatherings and such. We always celebrated the holidays together. We saw each other much more frequently this time last year, as Chris was a dedicated volunteer on my mom’s campaign for state representative. He came to the house most weekends to help with data entry. Charles and I always intended to have Chris over more often; I regret that we only managed to do that once since he moved back to Chicago from Denver.

Passover Seder, April 2018.
Chris is over my left shoulder.

The last time I saw Chris was at my family’s annual Passover seder. Part of the seder tradition is that you break a piece of matzah. One half, called the afikomen, is hidden, while the other is reserved for the end of the meal. The seder cannot end until the two halves are reunited. After we found the afikomen, we went into the Matzah holder to reunite the two halves to conclude the seder. The original half was missing! And then Chris who was sitting next to it, looked around, and confessed that during the meal he’d eaten some matzah, and that special half was the piece he chose. We ended the seder by him eating the afikomen so the two pieces could be “reunited.” We all had such a good laugh together that night.

Chris always marched to the beat of his own drum. He was incredibly intelligent, and one of the most thoughtful people too. He had this incredible ability to remember something someone had mentioned and then follow up with them to see how it went, even months later. I remember that he would often ask me, “Hey, how was that meeting you had?” I have a dozen meetings a week, so after prodding him for details, he’d reference a meeting I’d mentioned to him months earlier. Rarely a significant event, but somehow he remembered that I’d mentioned it and thought to follow up on it. Chris would often listen quietly to conversations and then would land the best one-liner. He was kind and earnest and genuine. My cousin, Will, Chris' older brother, recently shared a quote from a friend of theirs: "There's a way that some people stay child-like, where they never get cynical, never stop seeing unfair things as unacceptable, and also never get self-conscious about the way people see them and their eccentricities. That was Chris."

Chris was brilliant with both sides of his brain. He earned a Masters degree in climate science while he earned his Bachelors degree in music and math. Chris cared deeply about social justice, as evidenced by the poem he wrote about helping others when he was young, and especially about stopping global warming. He and I shared similar politics, which we enjoyed discussing together. He was an exceptional artist and musician and scientist. My aunt’s house is filled with his beautiful artwork.

And Chris struggled with a deep deep depression. It ebbed and flowed and there were periods that were better for him than others. He spoke honestly about it, no matter how uncomfortable others felt, which I appreciated. He was good at sharing what was going on for him. I remember at family gatherings, he’d say at some point to everyone, or privately one-on-one, “I’m just so fucking depressed right now.” It often burst out of him, like a bottled up emotion. I remember one conversation where he shared his obsession with death. We talked about the books he was reading on the subject. I always tried to listen to Chris and to let him share the darkness he was experiencing. It felt hard to know how to support him or how to respond to how he was feeling. I wished, and still wish, there was something I could’ve done to make it better for him. But that is not how depression works. In the last year of his life, Chris was in and out of the hospital with suicide attempts. Again, it felt hard to know how to support him. He once reflected that if he’d had stage 4 cancer, we all would’ve been around his bedside. In fact, he wrote that he felt his illness was like a cancer, turning his brain to mush. But because we treat mental illness so differently from other types of health, his illness was not treated like cancer. I feel badly about the way I contributed to the loneliness he and his family members might have felt.

Chris struggled with his mental health for much of his life. But it did seem that his depression, anxiety, and OCD thought patterns were exacerbated by a hip surgery six years ago in which the doctor, while doing the requested surgery, also conducted an unauthorized, experimental procedure and severed Chris’ psoas muscle. From then on, he experienced discomfort every time he tried to move. It wasn’t easy for him to stand up or sit down or remain standing or sitting for long periods of time. I still carry a deep anger toward that doctor. The surgery wasn’t the cause of his mental illness. But it did seem that after this surgery, his mental health declined to a point from which he did not recover. And Chris desperately wanted to get better. He tried every treatment there was. And my aunt supported him every step of the way. I’m grateful for Medicaid that provided health insurance for him since he was struggled to maintain full time employment with his physical and mental health issues. I imagine many other resources also went into his attempts to recover; I'm grateful he had access to those resources and services and know that many people do not have that kind of access.

Thanksgiving 2017.

It is so painful that he is gone. His absence felt particularly poignant at the holidays last year. Death is incomprehensible to begin with. And for those of us who don’t live with mental illness, it feels even more difficult to comprehend choosing to die. It challenges an underlying assumption that humans should have an inherent desire to live. It’s hard to understand that he knew every step of the way that his last day was his last day. That he knew it was his last tastes of food, his last time drinking water, his last time brushing his teeth, his last time driving, his last time saying goodnight to his mother. I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t know that I ever will. I do know that I miss him and his family misses him. I wish we had better treatments for depression and other mental illnesses so people don’t have to go through what he and his family went through. I wish people talked more openly about mental health and that we could erase the stigma so that he and others in his family wouldn’t have to feel alone in navigating the illness and his attempts at recovery. I wish he could have lived the full life he wished to live. I can’t change what’s happened. Instead, I’ll do my best to keep his memory alive by talking about Chris and work to reduce the stigma by speaking openly about mental illness; please consider doing the same.



P.S. My family has set up the Chris Conrad Memorial Light the Way Fund through the Citizens Utility Board to honor Chris' commitment to climate justice. We'd be honored if you'd like to support this fund. I also know NAMI Chicago does great work supporting and providing services for people whose lives are affected by mental illness. They are another fantastic organization to support.