Interviews & Essays
In Conversation With Christopher Lukas
Author Of BLUE GENES: A Memoir Of Loss And Survival
Can you sum up BLUE GENES for me in a few words?
It’s about a talented family - my own - plagued by poisonous genes; how that talent continued to function, despite generations of depression and bipolar disorder. How my mother and four other family members killed
themselves during my lifetime.
It’s about the relationship between my brother and myself - a complicated on-again-off-again tangle of feelings. And it’s also about looking back with sadness, but living with as much zest as possible. In others words,
trying to keep going. Trying to find hope in the middle of disaster.
Why did you feel you had to write it?
Deep feelings - like loss and abandonment - often don’t go away; they bedevil people. Many years ago, when my mother killed herself and I was, in essence, abandoned. I didn’t know I could write to exorcise or even
talk to explore the feelings of loss until I was in my 40’s. My brother was a writer; my wife was a writer. I wasn’t a writer. Then I started feeling I had to write whenever depression got to me (and there was a lot of
depression.)
When my brother killed himself 11 years ago, I immediately knew I had to write about it. It took me years to see what the whole picture was. But I had to write, or I wouldn’t have survived.
You say in this book, and in a previous one you wrote for survivors left behind by suicide, that no one was honest with you when your mother killed herself; not for ten years. What do you think your reaction would
have been if they had been? And do you think it ever makes sense not to be honest with children about suicide?
I was six. With small children, less is more. But something should have been said. Each parent has to figure that out for him or herself, and it depends on the child. But here’s the main point: Since they were so
frightened of dealing with the facts, my father and grandmother ignored the immense imagination of small children. Why weren’t they open with me, I thought? Aha, it’s because I caused my mother’s death. Had they
said something - anything - such as “You are a good boy. Little boys sometimes think their behavior causes bad things to happen, but your mother’s death was not your fault,” and left it there until I asked for more
information, that would be fine.
You ask what my reaction would have been if my elders had been open and honest. For one thing, since they didn’t talk about my mother or her death, I thought they didn’t care! And I would have thought “hey, I’m
allowed to ask about this precious mother whom I lost.”
With so much sadness around you and with your own issues with depression, how did you make it through the tough times in your life?
The short answer is: very good luck.
Here’s how I look at it. The genes we inherit help determine our character. Some children are born happy: they smile, the respond to their environment. Some seem less so. How their environment then treats them
helps govern how they grow and change. Sometimes traumatic things happen and the “happy” child - through the luck of good genetic loading - survives better than the “gloomy” child. Sometimes, persistence, talent
and survival skills are in the character a child is born with.
And, as in my case, even when there are skills you can learn, luck plays a huge role. I was lucky to find good psychotherapist. I was lucky to find a woman to spend my life with who had strength and vibrancy and the
ability to withstand all my depressions. And that isn’t easy - to put up with years of depression in your husband. I was lucky that the bipolar “genes” weren’t passed to me. I was unlucky to have so many people in my
life kill themselves. I was unlucky to be depressed off and on most of my life. But the good luck outpaced the bad luck.
What do you hope people will learn from your story?
It’s funny. I’ve never thought anyone would learn anything. It was simply a story I had to tell. But, I hope they’ll learn that some of the bad things that happen in a person’s life are not their fault. That bad things happen
to people. I’m talking about things that happen to us outside of our ability to control. I hope they come away with some hope.
Also: I am a big pusher for talking about grief and other things that frighten or sadden us. Keep the dialogue open, whether with adults or children. Finally, I want people to know that survival in the middle of trauma or
grief or war often seems impossible, but that - with luck, support, and good will - it’s actually often possible to come out the other side.
If your brother were alive, what stories would you and he be writing about today?
Tony would be on the campaign trail, I think, but not the same tack that everyone else is taking. He’d want to go into deep background about some aspect that no one else is covering: maybe a town in the middle of
the country where people have needs that no one is addressing. I don’t really know, because his talent was finding stories that no one else could find.
And you? What will you write about next?
I’m not sure. I have a play about my 16 years of dealing with cancer - radiation, chemotherapy, the whole shebang - that got a good workshop performance some months back and I want to expand that and get it
produced. It has only one actor in it - me. But now, after my wife’s sudden and unexpected death last April, and the profound loss that inflicted on my daughters, my wife’s friends and family, and myself, I think I have
to write about her. What form that will take, I don’t know. But I don’t think I’ll be satisfied until I’ve done that.
You already have something about her at the end of Blue Genes…
Yes, but that’s short. Kind of a eulogy. I want to try to write to purge my grief. To honor her. To come to terms with the pain of grief. If I’m going to continue to live a life that’s meaningful and supportive of my two grown
daughters, of my grandchildren, I have to do what I’ve always done: express my pain in the open.
Reading Group Guide
Christopher (Kit) Lukas grew up in the shadow of tragedy, struggling to cope with a family legacy of mental illness. Raised in an era when children were often sheltered from the truth, he knew few details about his mother’s death (she killed herself)–only that the tender, loving woman who had cared for him was gone. Kit’s stoic father eventually remarried, shutting the door on a troubled past. Years later, Kit would try to piece together more of the story, attempting to understand what led his mother to become suicidal, and how her depression had affected those around her. He managed to find solace and hope in life, ultimately writing
Silent Grief, an invaluable guide to surviving a loved one’s suicide. But Kit’s brother, the award-winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas, continually showed signs of the debilitating melancholia that had shrouded their mother. Despite a sterling career, including two Pulitzer Prizes (one for the now classic
Common Ground)
Tony took his life in 1997, shortly before the publication of
Big Trouble, a book that would go on to win acclaim.
Raising fundamental questions about the nature of family ties and the often fragile dance between despair and joy,
Blue Genes is ultimately a profound meditation on healing. The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Christopher Lukas’s memoir
. We hope they will enrich your experience of this powerful work.
Forewords & Introductions
Christopher (Kit) Lukas grew up in the shadow of tragedy, struggling to cope with a family legacy of mental illness. Raised in an era when children were often sheltered from the truth, he knew few details about his mother's death (she killed herself)—only that the tender, loving woman who had cared for him was gone. Kit's stoic father eventually remarried, shutting the door on a troubled past. Years later, Kit would try to piece together more of the story, attempting to understand what led his mother to become suicidal, and how her depression had affected those around her. He managed to find solace and hope in life, ultimately writing Silent Grief, an invaluable guide to surviving a loved one's suicide. But Kit's brother, the award-winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas, continually showed signs of the debilitating melancholia that had shrouded their mother. Despite a sterling career, including two Pulitzer Prizes (one for the now classic Common Ground) Tony took his life in 1997, shortly before the publication of Big Trouble, a book that would go on to win acclaim.
Raising fundamental questions about the nature of family ties and the often fragile dance between despair and joy, Blue Genes is ultimately a profound meditation on healing. The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Christopher Lukas's memoir. We hope they will enrich your experience of this powerful work.
Read an Excerpt
Some people are disturbed most by events that are unexpected.
For me, it has always been the half-awaited ones that carry the
blow: the semiconscious fears that lurk behind closed eyes, the
half-dropped pair of shoes, the what-ifs.
Susan and I return home from a party. In an unusual show of
activity, our answering machine has had eleven hang-ups and one
message-from Linda, my sister-in-law.
"Christopher," she says, "can you call me, please."
Usually, no one calls me Christopher except strangers, but
maybe Linda is echoing my brother, who sometimes calls me by
my full name as a joke.
I make a mental note to call her tomorrow; it's too late tonight.
I figure that she 's probably planning a publication party for Tony,
who has just finished his latest book, nine years in the writing.
The book before this one-Common Ground-resulted in his
second Pulitzer Prize and dozens of other awards. One reporter
called my brother "the best journalist of our generation." Another
said he was "the patron saint of contemporary reporters." He has
won numerous accolades for his reporting for the New York Times,
has received honorary degrees for his deep analysis of crucial
episodes in recent American history, and has been wined and
dined by literati and academics alike. He is, in short, one of those remarkable men whose work received enormous respect and attention.
But Tony is not sure that the new book, a huge volume called
Big Trouble, is up to his previous works. It's due out in a month or
so, and we 'll all have to wait.
While I'm at the closet, taking off my shoes, the phone rings
again. Susan is near and she answers.
"Hello." A pause. "How?" Her voice is electric, alarmed. I
recognize a disaster in the making.
I come around the corner of the closet, a shoe in one hand, the
other still on my foot.
She looks at me, the phone to her ear, shaking her head, a look
of terror on her face.
"What is it?" I ask, already feeling the pain begin.
"Tony killed himself," she says.
I scream and throw the undropped shoe at the far wall.
most brothers have sibling-rivalry problems, interrupted by
close bonding, but Tony and I always seemed to have great difficulty
in finding common ground. The history of our family is
partly responsible, a history full of self-destructive events.
In the wake of a family suicide, there is sorrow, guilt, despair-
and anger. My reaction to my brother's death was no different;
in fact, because of the difficult relationship we had had, it
may have been worse.
During the first months after Tony's death, I viewed my life
with him through the prism of anger. Why did he do this to me
and to his family? If there had been good times in our years together,
I didn't allow myself to remember them.
But gradually the truth seeped in: there was a whole store of
other memories that I was hiding. I needed to make an effort to
dredge up those experiences-the ones that had provided pleasure and comfort. To put a picture of our relationship in some kind of
balance, if I could.
So, what would happen if I stopped thinking about all the rage
I had for the way Tony had died and for the slights I had felt?
What might occur if I recalled how much we had shared, what
burdens we had lifted together, how we had supported each other?
What then? I began writing about my family two weeks after my
brother's death. At first, I could put down only a few thoughts
about him, mostly about my anger and sorrow, but as the weeks
and months went by, memories came-long-ago events that had
been forgotten. Time passed; I would come back to the computer,
put down new recollections. About us. About our relationship. I
found memories of other family members, of the distant past, of
things I thought had been obliterated forever. The mind is tricky:
it brings back even the most distant feelings and events just when
you think they have left you alone, left you in peace.
Today, more than a decade after Tony's death, I am still writing.
But my idea of who my family and my brother were has
changed over these years. The perception of who I was-and who
I am-has also changed. So I keep writing. Trying to get it right.
A week after the suicide, when Susan, our daughters, Megan
and Gabriela, and I attended a memorial gathering, Linda gave me
a copy of Big Trouble, fresh off the presses. I turned the first few
pages. In the dedication Tony had written, "To Christopher
William Lukas. My brother, my friend."
That was an extraordinarily moving moment. I turned from
the group around me and shielded my eyes, in tears. I had not had
the slightest inkling Tony was dedicating the book to me. Nor
could I have guessed that he would add "friend" to such a line. We
were brothers-no doubt. But when all was said and done, were
we really friends?
I decided I would start from there, from that emotional moment when it occurred to me that he really did care about me, that
all the battles and absences and slights did not, in the end, seem to
be as important as the fact that we were brothers-and friends. He
had thought about me when he wrote that dedication. And perhaps
he had thought about me even as he ended his own life.
Conflating the present with the past is an old theme of philosophers.
The idea of all chairs, said the philosopher William James,
is present in the image of any particular chair. So any particular
friend's essence is distilled by all the friends one has had.
And so it is with brothers. They are never what they appear to
be to others, or even to oneself. Tony is a combination of past and
present, of what he was and how I see him today.
But that is true of me as well. I am not merely the bald head in
the mirror, the tired knees, and the naps in the afternoon. I am the
sixteen-year-old with an enormous appetite, the twenty-two-year-old
having his first real love affair, the thirty-three-year-old looking
down at his first child.
Sister to sister, brother to brother, siblings can never be 100
percent fair about love and parental sharing and other sharp facets
of the bright and painful lives they have together-even when
much of that time is spent apart, even when they can communicate
well and take the burdens of their relationship with good grace. I
could not pretend that my brother and I were pals. Friends, perhaps,
but not buddies.
Tony and I are brothers across the stroboscopic echoes of the
past: dissolving across black interludes into the next image, and
the next, and the next, until all vestige of pure vision is destroyed.
All that is left is memory, and we know how faulty that can be.
Who Tony was is forever blurred by who I was and how I remember
who I thought Tony was. Yes, we are brothers in fact, in memory, and in wish, but he is dead, and I am alive-left to dwell on
the questions, and to seek the answers.
There were questions of great importance to me: Would I, too,
end up killing myself? Was the legacy of self-destruction I would
discover in my family too great for me to survive? If so, when
would the pendulum swing? And if it never did, why not? How
could I-almost alone among my family-escape?
To answer these questions, I needed to go back and delve more
deeply into my family and explore my relationship with Tony.
This is a story of two brothers in a particular family at a particular
time in the history of that family. If the tale often appears to
be as much about my parents and grandparents-and my emotions,
my life, and my memories-as it is about my brother, it is
because it is very much a story about relationships. The relationship
my father had with my mother, the relationship of my mother
to her parents. Mine with Tony, Tony's with those other people.
Beyond that, it is also a book about coming to terms with the
suicide of a brother-an event I had written about previously
when it happened to other people, but never before experienced for
myself.
The letters, autobiographies, and other written notes have lain
for decades in cubbyholes in an old rolltop desk that Susan and I
bought on a trip to my uncle Ira's house near Philadelphia. The
desk cost $40. At the time, I thought it was too much money to
pay for an "old piece of furniture," but as usual Susan was right:
you can always use a schoolmaster's rolltop.
Today, I love that desk. This is where the detritus of our lives
lies. With nineteenth-century wisdom, its makers built it with myriad
slots in which to stow important pieces of their complex lives.
Into those compartments I have put the passports used for various family trips-their photographs attesting to the passage of time,
change of hairstyles, even emotional states. I see Susan in early
years, with downcast aspect, her hair tightly wrapped around her
slender head, a strained smile on her face. I see her later, lovely
brown tresses surrounding a confident, smiling countenance. And
later still, the strands and flecks of gray shining in the sunlight of a
photo I took myself. My own visages: young and shaven, a boy on
the go; leather shirt from the 1960s; sideburns in the 1970s; finally,
balding pate-"aging criminal on the go," the family said, jokingly.
Here in this desk went the birth certificates of our daughters,
Megan and Gabriela, audiotapes of graduations and memorial services.
Old keys. Legal documents. Currency from trips abroad.
Broken pens. Broken promises.
It is through that desk, and from long-hidden events, that my
memory is awakened. I take comfort that I can substantiate there
the fact that Tony was not just a brother worth thinking about and
arguing over on a personal basis but a complex, world-class character
whose contributions to journalism and to his friends were
valuable and whose death by his own hand is made all the more
heartbreaking because it was not preordained.
Or was it?
What do I really know about the past? What do any of us
know? Who were these characters? What led up to the deaths in
my family? In truth, I was woefully ignorant-and, to be honest,
fearful of finding out.
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