Self-Imposed Exile - Afterword

Hello.

I’m “Sister.” At least that’s how I’m referred to in these journal entries. I’m sorry to be the one to have to finish this off, but, as of the writing of this, my brother is missing and presumed dead.

Around mid November, when his “self-imposed exile” was coming to a close, he stopped answering his emails and texts and phone calls. He had been slow to answer during the year, sometimes taking three or four days, but eventually he would, even if it was short and just to say he was fine. But when I didn’t hear from him for over a week, I got a little worried. So I drove up.

When I arrived I saw his car was parked in the driveway. Inside, his bags were packed and sitting by the front door. He wasn’t anywhere in the cabin. On the porch was a TV tray with a plate and a fork and a half filled bottle of water just sitting there. I thought maybe he was out walking around the lake. I went back into the house and grabbed the binoculars I knew my parents kept in the closet. Then I went back out to the porch and scanned around, not expecting I’d be able to see him or even where he was, but it gave me something to do. That was when I saw it. The canoe. Flipped over and sitting near the eastern shoreline.

I remember how he was with canoes and that terrified me.

I called the police.

It seemed like hours before they got there and, to be honest, a lot of what happened next was a blur. They searched the house and the shore of the lake. They took a boat out and retrieved the canoe. They found the paddle a few yards away, but nothing else. They asked me a million questions - why he was at the cabin, who he may have talked to, where he may have gone, and the worst, did he ever talk about harming himself.

The next day they had a handful of teams out on the lake with sonar. It had been a relatively warm November but the water was still only in the 40s from what they told me. They had dive teams ready, but they would only be sent in if the sonar found something. With the underwater currents and underground caverns, they weren’t very hopeful. They didn’t actually say that, but I could hear it in their voices.

The search continued for about a week. They searched all around the lake and miles into the woods.

They never found anything.

The weather began to turn and they had to call off the search. Not for good, they said. They would keep the case open and, in the spring, resume. But, by then, I knew it wouldn’t be a full on search.

I gathered his things and came back home. I left his laptop, his bags, and his journal in our spare room. They’d be there waiting for him when he returned. I didn’t want to think of any other possibility. Eventually, though, after a year had passed, I guess I came to realize that he wasn’t going to come back.

It took me a long time, but I did eventually read his journal. I wanted to know if there was anything in there that would help me understand what happened. I felt guilty. I still kept expecting him to come walking in, telling me he’d just gone out for a long hike or a camping trip in the woods, and then be mad I was reading his journal. But he never did.

What you have been reading is everything he wrote. It’s all here, exactly as he wrote it. I haven’t changed anything.

He was struggling. That much is clear. Some days he could barely write a sentence about the book. Other days he wrote pages about anything else - what he saw, what he thought, how angry he was at himself for not doing the work he’d gone there to do.

And then, at the end, something seemed to shift.

He wrote about “acceptance.” Not defeat. Not failure. Acceptance.

When I first read it, I took that to mean he had given up. That he was done trying to write the book.

Now I’m not so sure that’s all he meant.

In some of his earlier entries he talked about leaving. Not in a dramatic way. Not like he was actually planning anything. More like a thought he returned to when he was tired or frustrated. The idea of just walking into the woods and starting over somewhere else. I don’t think I will ever know if he paddled to the other side of the lake and did just that or if he took the canoe out for one last ride and accidentally flipped it or…

I know it’s not realistic, but I still like to think of him walking deep into the woods, heading toward some destination only he knew about.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t think I ever will.

He didn’t finish the novel he went there to write. But this is the one he left behind.

I wanted to help in his quest to become an author. It took me a while, but I finally found a publisher who was willing to take a chance on it.

That is what you have just read.

I think it’s a fitting legacy.

-Sister

If you’re curious how this all began, click here!