As the boys grew older, Rose—a 46-year-old sales associate at a Honda dealership in Keene—watched her role in their lives diminish. “David was really involved with them,” she says, “and it came to a point when I felt like I wasn’t needed as much anymore.”
In September 1997, Rose and David told the boys (then 15 and 13, respectively) that they were separating. The brothers seemed unfazed by the announcement, and even their friends were unsure how it affected them. David sold the family house and he and the boys moved into a three-bedroom condo. Rose moved into a one-bedroom apartment two miles away.
♦♦♦
It was about this time that the brothers, already talented soccer players, became local celebrities of sorts in power lifting. In an article about the brothers in the local Star Spangled Banner, Greg said he was shooting for Eric’s state record. “He’s never going to do it,” Eric countered. “Although I can’t imagine losing the record to any better guy.”
The quote was typical Eric: cocky but respectful of Greg. One of the most popular students in school, Eric—tan and well built, with long eyelashes, curly black hair, and a crush-inducing smile—had many friends, but none meant more to him than his younger brother.
“Their favorite song was ‘Siamese Twins’ by the Smashing Pumpkins, and in many ways that’s the way they saw themselves,” says David. “They were inseparable.”
They were also different. Eric was a classic extrovert—outgoing, popular, funny, emotional, and, at least on the surface, sure of himself. Greg was studious, disciplined, and not as gregarious, although he shared Eric’s ability to make people laugh. (Greg’s imitation of Austin Powers could bring people to their knees.)
“The boys were very different, but I tried to instill in them a strong loyalty to each other,” says Rose. “I told Eric, ‘This is your brother, and no matter what happens, you are loyal to him.’ I told Greg the same thing. And they were. I remember I was upstairs at David’s condo after the divorce, and Eric had two friends over. I could hear that [the friends] were basically ridiculing Greg, and Eric joined in for a second. Greg got really hurt, and Eric told his friends to knock it off. But they kept going, and Greg ran up to his room. Then I heard Eric tell them, ‘If you ever fucking mess with my brother again, I’ll kill both of you!’ And that’s when I knew that what I had told Eric flowed through him. The boys were normal brothers, but they were not normal brothers.”
And it was clear early on that Greg was not a normal student. He was a voracious reader and had finished all of John Grisham’s books by the sixth grade. While Greg was two years behind Eric in school, it was Greg who would help Eric with his homework.
After reading The Long Gray Line in eighth grade, Greg became obsessed with attending West Point. “Eric always bragged to everybody that Greg would be president someday,” says Chad Wellington, a soccer teammate and friend of both the boys.
Eric was not particularly interested in academic success. Though also an avid reader, he was a B and C student prone to skipping school or sleeping through a morning class if the mood struck him. Eric’s focus was always on sports (soccer, baseball, weight lifting) and friends, whom he never lacked.
Eric opened social doors for Greg, and many of Eric’s friends became Greg’s friends, too. “We’d take Greg with us to parties, and Eric was always protective of Greg,” says Kris Kesney, a close friend of Eric in the ninth and tenth grades. “Greg was the innocent little child. He was shy and seemed insecure a lot. Eric was the partier. We used to drink a lot. Like most people around here, Eric liked to get fucked up.”
According to several Monadnock students, a majority of the school’s students smoke marijuana by the time they graduate. Eric was no exception. According to friends, he started drinking and smoking weed late in junior high.
In eighth grade, the school reprimanded him after he was caught drinking from a hair spray bottle that a fellow student had filled with alcohol. In ninth grade, Eric was suspended for two months when a fellow student’s parents complained that Eric had helped their child get marijuana.
Still, Eric was one of the most popular and best-liked students at Monadnock. “Everyone liked him, because he was nice to you whether you were popular or not,” says a Monadnock senior, Tim Wilder. “He was in the group with the snobs, but he wasn’t a snob at all.”
At home, Eric and Greg were polite and respectful. The family usually ate dinner together, and the boys had a deep respect for David, whom they called “a genius.” Still, friends said the boys’ relationship with their father was superficial.
“David isn’t comfortable talking about feelings,” says a friend of the brothers, “and I guess Eric and Greg just followed his lead.”
The boys differed greatly in their relationship with their mother. Though Greg didn’t get along well with Rose, particularly in the last year of his life, Eric routinely stopped by Rose’s work to talk.
“And he would always give me a big hug and say, ‘I love you, Mom,’ right in front of everybody,” recalls Rose. “And people were flabbergasted. Other mothers would say, ‘My God, if my son would only say that to me!’”
♦♦♦
The Monadnock View Cemetery in Keene is well kept, with narrow, circular paved roads that intersect islands of tombstones. Visitors drive slowly through the cemetery, often parking their cars with two wheels on the road and two on the grass, to avoid blocking traffic.
Not that there is much of that, which makes this a safe place for the meandering bike rides of elderly women from two nearby retirement complexes.
On a drizzly, overcast Sunday afternoon, the area around Eric’s tombstone is cluttered with flowers, engraved rocks, a small container with poems inside, a ticket to the school production of Ordinary People, and glow sticks (both boys liked to dance with them).
Kris Kesney, a good friend of Eric’s, and Denene Groat, Eric’s best friend and on-and-off girlfriend, are here to pay a visit. “After Eric died, I would come here and lie on his grave for hours,” Kesney says, lighting a cigarette. “At first I was so angry at Eric. Suicide is the most selfish thing you can do to a group of people who love you.”
“I used to come here every day, too,” Groat says as she brushes dirt off of the container with poems. “After Eric died, I would be driving to school, and somehow I just ended up here instead. I was suicidal. I don’t know how I’m even alive. I would lie here for hours every day. I would talk to Eric. And I would ask myself over and over again how I couldn’t have known that he was depressed. How can you know someone so well and not know that?”
Eric Kochman didn’t look depressed. He made his first and only plea for help in late July 1999, as he walked along Hampton Beach with his mother. “Eric looked at me and said, ‘Mom, I have a chemical imbalance,’” recalls Rose.
Knowing little about mental illness or clinical depression, she assumed Eric was talking about his hormones. Eric shook his head. “Mom, it’s not that.” (continued on page 3)
As a pharmacist, I was mostly appalled at the number of drugs this child was prescribed. Those are very heavy drugs and I can’t imagine putting a child on trazodone. Suicide is largely preventable, but I see this as a parental failure compounded by poor psychiatric care. People are so afraid to say “are you thinking about suicide? do you have a plan?” because they think it will give someone ideas. And while there is always the possibility that a suicidal person is committed enough to lie, most will be honest. And if a child’s sibling, parent, or close friend… Read more »
Having endured a two-year suicidal depression I feel compelled to respond to the tone of many of the comments. Unless you are terminally ill with a non-related illness, suicide is a tragic mistake. No matter how bad you feel, or what your reasons–wait. Suicide is nowhere near as inevitable as many of the commenters say. Tough it out. I don’t think you could get much worse off than I was, though this is not a competition! I couldn’t understand why anyone wanted to be alive. I thought my family would be better off without me dragging everyone down. I often… Read more »
Allison, You and I have a lot in common. I too suffered a crushing depression. I spent a year planning my suicide, but I never attempted it because I had no intention of failing – and I needed to know there was aboslutely no other solution before taking that final step. That was more than half my life ago. But it is a mistake to assume that because you and I were able to survive, that everyone is able to ‘tough it out’ as we did. As you pointed out, somewhere deep inside we wanted to live. A friend of… Read more »
I just sent this note to my editor at The Good Men’s Project after reading your column here as I just sent him a column on my brother Erik yesterday: “OMG just read Brother’s Keeper on your site as I saw a post on my facebook thread from the page there..way too eerie…Eric a brother who commits suicide…brother’s keeper …my brother’s name is Erik and he attempted suicide as I say in my article and I have felt responsible …holy coincidence!” A tragic story, sad for everyone. I’ve been living with guilt for 30 years and my brother “lived”. I… Read more »
Some people’s troubles are so great they’re a black hole, swallowing everything their friends and coleagues can spare. And it makes no difference. There’s no reason to feel guilty for not having an infinite amount of time, attention, care, and competence.
I am happy to see this piece edited from its original version, which still is floating around on the web. I was one of the girls who turned Greg down in the weeks before his death, and at the time when this story was being written, I refused to be interviewed. It’s been over nine years since we lost Greg, and I have thought of him every single day. Recently, I saw David (his and Eric’s dad) for the first time since Greg’s funeral, and it was the first time I was able to talk about Greg without having it… Read more »
Thanks for your insights. Hopefully your comments, and the piece as a whole, will give a broader understanding to mental health at such a precarious age.
I finally got around to a lot of reading I’ve been putting off due to a family crisis, and i read this poignant, yet perfectly reported piece, with great intensity. Years ago, I reported on teen suicides for a local CT newspaper and the ignorance then—1983 or so—was astounding. The title of the article was “When Feelings Prove Fatal” But in those days no one completely understood the name and/or prevalence of bi-polar behavior, and other chemical risks for suicide, including congenital, self-induced or both. Unfortunately, in 1988 I learned too much about suicide when a dear friend drowned himself… Read more »
Benoit…that was really a poignant and terribly tragic story. I feel so bad for the parents. It’s not fair for people to blame the father for having a gun in the house. That kid was so overwhelmed with thoughts of suicide and depression he would have found some way to take his life. I’ve worked in a facility with suicidal kids. When they are obsessed with committing suicide they will find a way to do it. If there is no mental breakthrough with the kid, then it’s only a matter of time. It’s enough of a loss for the parents… Read more »
Greg was “so overwhelmed with thoughts of suicide and depression he would have found some way to take his life”. At the funeral, David called Greg’s suicide “a train wreck in slow motion”, and I believe that it would have happened even without a gun. But if Eric’s first attempt had ended the way Greg’s first attempt did, which would have been much more likely without a gun, he might have received better treatment and they might both still be alive.
It’s what we mothers of unstable kids fear all the time. This is not a completely unusual case. The suicide rate for bipolar people is 1 in 5, for schizophrenics, 1 in 10. Knowing it’s almost impossible to prevent is the hardest thing of all.
Thanks for writing about this, Benoit. It really brings the issue home.
Great piece. It seems they were wired the same and when one decided to end his life, the other was too grief-stricken to go on. Tragic.
Wow. Great reporting and writing, Benoit. What a human tragedy. And somehow made even more poignant since Monadnock is the favorite mountain of Grover’s Corners in Wilder’s Our Town.