Brother’s Keeper

Still, not every day was bad, and Greg’s two closest male friends that year—Jordan Self, then fourteen, and Casey Gallagher, then sixteen—said they never consciously feared that Greg would commit suicide (Greg assured them several times that he wouldn’t).

“I think he liked hanging out with us because unlike a lot of other people, we didn’t treat him like a dangerous person after Eric died,” says Gallagher.

The three boys spent most of their free time joking around and bonding over their difficulties with girls, which were endless. For whatever reason, Greg—who had a body that turned heads—had been rejected by several girls he had crushes on.

“He would always say, ‘Girls don’t go for nice, romantic guys like me,’” says Greg’s friend, Kristen. “And he was right. In high school, most girls go for the cocky jerks. But I think a lot of people also got weirded out by Greg toward the end. He was a lot different than he was before.”

For one thing, he started to look eerily like his brother. He wore Eric’s soccer uniform during games, sometimes wore Eric’s clothes to school, and grew his hair out long like Eric’s.

“It spooked people out,” says friend Kris Kesney. Greg also became obsessed with studying suicide: he read books about suicide, depression, and bipolar disorder, and he even wrote a paper for English class entitled “The Social Enigma of Suicide.”

“Even with all of the opportunities to identify and prevent suicide,” Greg wrote, “teenagers still complete suicides and throw their friends and family into turmoil and an endless void of ‘What ifs?’”

When David learned that Greg had also landed the part of Conrad in Ordinary People, he considered forbidding Greg to take it.

“Greg had become a student of suicide,” says David. “He knew everything about the means to do it, the reasons behind it, statistics on who does it most and in what circumstances. The play, the paper, it bothered me a lot on some level. I think it was way too much suicide so soon after Eric killed himself. But I didn’t stop it. The play seemed so important to him.”

School officials say they carefully considered letting Gregplay the role of Conrad.

“Greg’s therapist felt strongly that the play was going to be therapeutic,” says Principal Daniel Stockwell. “His parents had been consulted. In my mind, I’m thinking ‘Greg’s out there, he’s able to express himself, don’t take that away from him.’ Keep in mind that the ending of the play is the surviving boy coming out mentally strong. This could have been a very positive story—if it had stayed to script.”

There were countless signs that it wouldn’t: Greg was hospitalized a second time by his therapist, who considered him dangerously suicidal. Then, a week before his death, Greg cut his wrists, but David and Rose say they didn’t know about it.

“When I saw the marks and confronted Greg,” recalls David, “he said he had gotten cut at work. We didn’t find the truth out until after he died.”

Greg later told Katharine DePew that he was living for the play and that once it was over, he would kill himself. “Everyone was so worried about the week after the play,” says DePew. “No one expected he would do it before.” Greg also told several friends that he didn’t want to live to be older than his brother.

True to his word, he lived one week less.

♦♦♦

Like the news of Eric’s suicide fourteen months before, news of Greg’s suicide spread through Swanzey in a matter of hours. “People couldn’t believe it,” says the mother of one Monadnock student. “And people were so angry. Everyone wanted to find something to blame.”

There were two main targets. The first was Ordinary People. Angry students and parents—most of whom didn’t know Greg was playing the role until after he died—wanted to know why a suicidal student was playing a suicidal teenager in the school play.

“The first few days of school after Greg died, I talked to so many people who said, ‘I can’t believe they did that play! They shouldn’t have done the play!’” recalls Kristen Arrow. “I couldn’t believe people were blaming his death on that.”

But people did, and David Kochman added to the anti-play sentiment when he spoke to The Boston Globe two days after Greg’s death.

“When I heard about the play, I thought it was a sick joke,” he told the paper. “I couldn’t believe it. I blame myself for not stopping it outright.” David says he regrets making that statement. “The reporter talked to me as I was going to my son’s funeral,” David says now. “I don’t blame the play for what happened.”

Neither do most of Greg’s close friends, many of whom angrily defend Greg’s role in Ordinary People. “I am so sick and tired of all these people who didn’t even know Greg saying that the play killed him,” says Katharine DePew. “The fact is, if they had canceled the play or told Greg he couldn’t act in it, he would have killed himself the next day.”

But though many of Greg’s friends refuse to blame the play, they express anger and astonishment that David kept a gun in the house after Eric’s death.

David insists there was no ammunition in the house and that the gun—which he bought in 1988 as a security device and occasionally used for target shooting—was locked in the attic and had a trigger lock, but it’s an explanation that Greg’s friends say falls short.

“Who the fuck keeps a gun in the house after your first kid kills himself with it?” says a close friend of Eric and Greg. “When I heard the way Greg died, I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Why would David do that? Why would he even take that chance? What purpose did it serve? It’s not like the gun is a memento. I guess my question is, does he still have it?”

David says he doesn’t. “With twenty-twenty hindsight, I would have removed the gun, but I am quite sure that the result would have been the same,” he says. “Greg stressed many times how easy it was to commit suicide, and he was an expert on various methods. Greg believed in personal responsibility and liked the saying ‘Blame the finger, not the trigger.’ I understand that people want to blame one thing so they can say to themselves, ‘This can’t happen in my life because I don’t own a gun or because my kid isn’t in a play about suicide.’ The truth is, I’m not sure anyone could have stopped what happened. Eric died because he didn’t think he could live with his illness, which none of us knew about. And Greg? Greg died because he couldn’t live without his older brother.”

♦♦♦

The deaths of Eric and Greg Kochman left several of their friends suicidal. And years years later, the brothers’ deaths still invade their friends’ dreams.

Kris Kesney has a recurring dream involving Eric: In it, he and a friend, Travis Smith, are relaxing in front of an old ski cabin on a cold, dark, quiet winter night. Slowly, a police car pulls up. “Shit, what did we do now?” Kesney thinks to himself. Nothing, it turns out. Out of the cruiser’s driver seat steps Eric Kochman, beer in hand and a grin on his face. “I can’t stay long,” Eric says, lighting a cigarette.

The boys drink a beer together, after which Eric says he’d better be going. “I feel okay now,” he tells them. “I’m all right.” As Eric walks back to the cruiser, he stops, pivots, and looks at Kesney. “Kris, you better do your goddamn schoolwork,” Eric says. “You be well with yourself. I don’t want to see you fail.”

With a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Eric steps into the driver’s seat. He sits down, shuts the door, smiles, and drives into the black night.

Greg Kochman also had a dream after Eric died. Greg’s dream, according to a suicide note he wrote before he was hospitalized, went like this: “In my dream, I had killed myself but had come back to Earth as an observer. Eric and I were reunited and it was the happiest dream I have ever had. We talked with people, talked to each other about things we had done, and my death seemed almost like an unreal inside joke between the two of us.”

—Benoit Denizet-Lewis

Brother’s Keeper, which was reported and written while Benoit was a fellow at the Alicia Paterson Foundation, is excerpted from his book, American Voyeur: Dispatches from the Far Reaches of Modern Life.