The
other day it was siblings day on Facebook and I shared old photos of my Twin Brother Timothy who died on Valentine’s Day in 2004, 17 years ago now. We had a complicated
relationship.
His
short obit in the Chicago
Tribune read:
Timothy Peter
Murfin, 54, formerly of Chicago, IL and Portland, OR, died in Cincinnati, OH on
Feb. 14. Born in Twin Bridges, MT on March 17, 1949 to Willard M. Murfin and
Ruby Irene, nee Mills, Murfin, who have both preceded him in death. Survived by
children Ira Samuel Murfin of Chicago and Shani Colleen Menz-Murfin of New York
City; brother Patrick Murfin (Kathy) of Crystal Lake, IL; stepmother Rae Murfin
of Alberton, MT; former spouse Arlene (Packer) Brennan (Michael) of Chicago;
former longtime companions Luanne Menz of Georgia and Normandie Nunez of
Portland, OR; and three nieces. Memorial service is pending in Chicago.
I
was working alone at Briargate School
in Cary, Illinois where I was head
building custodian. It was a Saturday, but a basketball program used the gym
from 8 am to 9 pm. I had to be there and
was little resentful of not spending Valentine’s Day with my wife.
I was shampooing hall carpets
which were encrusted by tracked mud
and salt from a winter’s worth of boots.
About 7 pm I got a call on my cell
phone, a new-to-me gizmo that
seldom went off. It was from Kathy with the news that my brother was
dead.
It
was a shock, but oddly not totally unexpected in that he had abused his body with alcohol and a virtual pharmacopeia of self-prescribed medication for many
years. I was stunned, but went through
the motions until the last kid and the last chatty parent was finally locked
out of the building.
Two
or three days later I was in a car
driven by Ira S. Murfin, Peter’s—he
preferred to be called Peter, the Biblical
name he had adopted upon
entering a religious order years
before—son. My middle daughter Heather Larsen was with us. We were driving through the night to Cincinnati to make final arrangements and collect whatever was in his “estate”—the few personal belongings he had hauled with him to Ohio after his virtual exile from Oregon. An odd conversation we had in that car—maybe
more of a rambling monologue by me,
would become the gist of the opening
words of a memorial poem. More about that later.
The
two of us were adopted at birth by W.M. and Ruby Irene Murfin. Despite being twins, we were not
identical. In fact in many ways we could
not have been more different. Tim was dark
haired and so good looking as a
child that women stopped my mother on the street to compliment her. I was larger, blond, and from the beginning oafish. In school
I was simultaneously a loud
know-it-all showing off all of the hours of reading I did while still managing to fail at math and spelling. I had no
friends and was a magnet for
bullies.
Tim
was not a star student or an athlete. None-the-less exuded a kind of charisma. Other kids swirled around him, naturally
following his interests. From always
being Roy Rogers in the neighborhood cowboy games, to being the
12-year-old leader of Cheyenne’s
sidewalk surfers, to being the first
guy in town with a Beatle haircut
and Nehru jacket he was popular and naturally had the prettiest girlfriends.
When
we moved to Skokie and Niles West High
School he and his willowy girlfriend were elected to Prom court. He planned to be
a radio disc jockey and got himself gigs hosting sock hops and basement parties with his portable record player and boxes of 45s.
I
was into newspaper, theater, and increasingly radical
politics. Tim got interested in religion and was soon a leader in Young Life, a denizen of
church basement coffee houses, and
talking about becoming a minister. Always, a gaggle of kids followed him.
I
went away to college at Shimer.
Tim stayed home, mostly to keep his adoring
posse together. He attended Kendal College, a two year school in Evanston. I came home a long haired, dope smoking
hippy and draft dodger. It turns out he had discovered marijuana too and the use of hallucinogens as spiritual practice.
After
I left Shimer and moved to Chicago,
I lived with him a couple of times. Each
time he had a full house of roommates and acolytes. I was the
improvident brother he found space for in
an unheated room off of an Old Town kitchen or the unfinished basement of a Rogers Park townhouse. By then he had grown a patriarchal beard and seemed to be gathering his own hippy cult, which would literally gather at his feet as he smoked a fat one and waxed beatifically on arcane
mysteries.
Tim
married Arlene, a very nice young woman who worshiped him. She followed
him into an outfit called the Holy Order of Mans, which practiced some sort of mystical catholicism with a small c. He took
the name Peter—the Rock of the
Church. Together they were sent on mission to California. A few years late
Arlene returned to Chicago with
their toddler son Ira.
Peter
drifted out of the Order and pursued various
spiritual paths with complete
earnestness. He lived in Portland and had a day job at an early big box
hardware store. But he yearned to be a saint. He found folks who thought he might be. Got into another
relationship, had a daughter, Shani and lost that family to bouts
of depression and heavy drinking and
self-medication.
He
cleaned himself up in AA and characteristically became a star. Soon he was speaking all over Oregon and northern
California and re-inventing
himself as a spiritually based addiction
councilor. He was making big plans and chasing various gurus
and guides looking more for tips on how to become one of them than
for enlightenment. Or so it seemed to me from my great distance
in Chicago when he would phone with
plans.
Eventually
he became a substance abuse specialist
with the county department of probation. He entered another relationship with an adoring older woman with a teen age daughter. But the depression never went away and he fell off the wagon in secret repeatedly. Each episode
became more intense. It became harder to hide.
In
all of those years I saw Peter only three times. We came to Missouri where he was asked as an ordained priest by my father
to conduct my mother’s funeral. He did so
with grace, although his
relationship with my father was strained. It would become an obsession which he would pour out to me in drunken middle-of-the-night telephone calls.
In
the summer of 1983 just after Kathy and my daughter Maureen was born, Peter stayed with us for a week. It was also his first visit with his ex-wife
and son. He showed up trim, tanned, and handsome. His black beard was neatly trimmed, his hair barbered
to a fare-thee-well, his clothes West Coast casual sharp. I was still a scraggly post-hippy in thrift
shop clothes and a cowboy hat. I had the family reputation, well earned, as a heavy drinker. I did nothing to hide it. Peter was supposedly sober. But Kathy walked in on him pulling from the fifth of whiskey he had
hidden in is bag. It turned out he was killing a bottle a day or more but never actually seemed drunk.
The
last time I saw him alive was after
we had moved to Crystal Lake. He was back for another visit to Ira and
spent most of his time in Chicago, but came up for a couple of days with
us. By this time he was in rougher shape. He ambled over to St. Thomas Church across the street where Kathy was an active parishioner and RE volunteer, to ask the Priest for permission to say a private mass at their altar.
He explained that he was also “an ordained Priest in the Higher Order of Melchizedek” and required
to say mass daily. He was upset that he
was turned down, saying that some
priest pal in Portland had let him use his church. He made Kathy and the girls uncomfortable.
Back
in Portland his life slowly unraveled. The relapses became more frequent, the depression blacker.
He wrecked cars, lost his job. Normandie
stood by him as long as she could, and supported
him in the later years. But in the end
he wrecked that, too. He exiled
himself to a closet of a room in Eugene where some former acolytes tried to help him. He burned
through that, too.
He
was virtually homeless and on the run from the law for failure to pay fines for his traffic accidents. David
Sellers, an old friend who he had met hanging
out at WLS radio studios while he
was in high school and who had lived with us in that Old Town apartment,
offered him a bed in suburban Cincinnati. He was reportedly trying to get himself together and was apparently sober. He had settled into regular Catholic worship,
but he still received tons of mail from all of the cults and gurus he had associated
himself with. Although he couldn’t find
work, he finally got qualified for Social Security Disability. Just after accomplishing that he came home one day, sat down on his bed and died of a massive heart attack.
To
our amazement, drugs were not directly involved, except that long
abuse had generally wrecked his health.
Ira,
Heather, and I arranged to have him cremated
and gathered the boxes of his life time
which were crammed in the closet and under the bed of his room.
Tons of mystical books, art work, beads, crystals, candles, vestments, journals in
his meticulous calligraphy. We packed the urn and the stuff and returned to Chicago. The stuff mostly went into storage, Ira and I each keeping a few
items.
We
arranged for a Catholic funeral mass
at an old Polish parish just west of
the Loop. The Mass was said by, a Milwaukee priest and the brother
of Arlene’s second husband Michael
Brennan. It was solemn and holy and in a
lovely old chapel. Peter would have approved. After the Mass
folks got up to testify about him in
one way or another. When my turn came I read a suite of six elegies that I had been
working on for weeks. This is what I
read:
Elegies for My
Brother
Timothy Peter
Murfin
March 17,
1949-February 14, 2004
I.
Hurtling down an
Interstate on any black night,
say the route
angling south southeast from Gary
for Indianapolis
then slung around the racetrack
to Cincinnati,
Queen City of the West,
you realize in
an instant that this great gray marvel
was not
constructed for the likes of us,
mere civilians
on inconsequential errands
encapsulated in
puny steel,
that it was
wrought for Commerce,
for that endless
caravan of behemoths
jeweled in red
and yellow charging indefatigably
for endless
rendezvous with profit,
and that our
vagrant desires to come home or to escape,
to begin a new
life or repeat by rote an established tedium,
to make love or
to break tender hearts,
or on this one
night in this one box loose amid that stream,
to unite the
living with the dead,
seize an
unworthy opportunity to tag along for the ride.
II.
Roy Rogers is
dead.
The King of the
Cowboys with his nickel plated, pearl handled revolvers
resplendent in
pearl snap shirt and neckerchief
with a cockeyed
and confident grin,
the hero of
every summer morning adventure
with Dale Evans
at his side
and Hopalong
Cassidy on loan from the two reeler next door,
has fallen from
Trigger,
Bullet noses his
lifeless sprawl in the dust.
[Here sing Happy
Trails to You]
Happy trails to
you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to
you, keep smiling’ on ‘till then.
Who cares about
the clouds when we’re together?
Just sing a song
and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to
you, till we meet again.
Happy trails to
you, ‘till we meet again.
III.
Youth bestows
its virtues capriciously,
a dollop of
beauty here, audacious valor there,
sweet innocence
and brash confidence
doled out as if
rationed by a miser,
many seeming to
be passed over
and left with
only churlish resentment,
bad skin and
worse judgment.
But he stood
beneath the fountain,
let its waters
bathe him in every gift
a dark
handsomeness,
a dj’s soothing
voice,
charm,
charisma,
so that he
dazzled his way through life,
gathering around
him tight circles
not just of
friends, but followers
who dreamed his
dreams.
The hippy guru
of Sheridan Road,
they gathered as
acolytes at his feet
as he sat with
Old Testament patriarchal beard,
eyes blazing one
moment,
the beatific
smile of yoga saint the next,
in
hallucinogenic communion.
And I, no
account wastrel with dim prospects,
swung on the icy
path of an asteroid
orbiting far,
far from that blazing Sol.
IV.
One year, just
before Christmas,
he wrote from
somewhere on the West Coast.
This year, could
I send him a blank book,
bound in
leather, hand stitched,
virgin velum
pages waiting for his pen?
I want, he
wrote, to be a Saint
and no mere
tablet or collegiate spiral notebook
would be worthy
of the great and inspirational words
which he would
meticulously enter
in that fine
calligraphic print he assumed.
It struck me,
even in my heathen ignorance,
that saints had
no ambition but simply were.
But I hunted
through the stationers until I found the perfect journal,
inscribing on
its fly leaf my own haughty judgment—
See Ecclesiastes,
Chapter 1, Verse 2
Vanity of
vanities saith the Preacher,
All is vanity.
V.
He took his
religion like he took the whiskey
that he stashed,
straight from
the bottle,
no ice, no
diluting soda.
He demanded the
real thing,
raw and
powerful,
burning the
throat on the way down
but leaving a
warm belly glow.
He may have
wandered here and there
amid crystals
and pyramids,
astrologers and
New Age frou-frou,
but settled only
where the mysteries
were deep and
hard.
For him no
dallying among the ladies of
Saturday morning
yoga and meditation,
no time for the
plain/simple Buddhism
of the agnostic
heart so embraced by
disappointed
Western rationalists,
but the stern,
demanding Tibetan school
with spinning
prayer wheels,
real gods and
real demons,
The Book of the Dead.
And no Vatican
II Catholicism for him,
no priests in
sweaters named Father Phil,
no guitar masses
and suburban congregations in Ban Lon,
no cheap and
easy grace,
only the
penitent's worn out knees,
the endless
rosaries endlessly repeated,
icons,
medals,
Holy Water,
the prophetic
apparitions of Mary,
the stigmata of
Padre Pio
in which, if he
could,
he would dip his
handkerchief
to press to his
lips to kiss.
VI.
Something inside
of him was broken.
He knew it and
spent a questing life
trying to find
it,
trying to fix
it.
Was it some
trauma of childhood,
inflicted by the
fragile, damaged woman who raised us
or the god-like
but distant father?
He often thought
so, obsessed over each moment
of remembered
agony and rejection,
taking the hard
knocks of ordinary childhood
and building an
edifice of unremitting pain,
unable to forget
what he had constructed,
unable to
forgive.
Or, now that
Freud has been cast aside as Fraud,
was it just some
accident of biochemistry,
a roll of the
dice that elected him
by alchemy of
genetic chance
to have neurons
that misfire just so?
As a former
Friend of Bill W
did he have to
assume responsibility
and seize
control of the disease himself,
or did the
pickling years of hidden bottles,
the various
stews of pharmaceuticals prescribed
and
self-prescribed
finally overcome
that mind?
Was it all
three?
Does it matter?
He was broken
and tried to repair himself as best he could
and in the
process leaned how to balm the wounds
of other
troubled souls,
but like the
Physician, could not heal himself.
—Patrick
Murfin
Stunning, the man, the elegy, you
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