The Sum of Mark

When my brother Mark visited last summer, I knew right away he was off his medication. He was on a manic jag, sleeping little, wandering the streets at night, spinning out of control. He thwarted my attempts at intervention and flew home to New York. It wasn’t long before he lost his apartment and was living on the streets, a stark wake up call to the seriousness of his mental illness. In August, Mark was arrested for assault and has spent the past 9 months at Rikers Island awaiting sentencing. I began pouring over old photographs of Mark, as if the seeds of his mental illness might be found there. Some in the family have attributed Mark’s condition to my mother’s estranged father Darrell who disappeared when she was a child and started a new family in a distant town. My grandmother swore that in certain lights, Mark was the spitting image of Darrell. Digging back thru family photographs, I traced traits and patterns in my brother’s life to distant family ruptures, such as the abandonment my mother experienced. I began melding images of Mark from various stages of his life with photographs of my mother and grandfather, layering the then and now. Will answers arise from this alchemy of images and offer a path toward understanding, or is this process more an act of therapy and reconciliation?