Noni and Brian had broken up a month or so earlier. They had been arguing ever since. And now, Noni was living alone.
The first officer to arrive at 404 ½ Walnut Street found the apartment door open. He walked inside and found the young couple on the floor, a .22 caliber rifle beside them. Noni’s face was covered in blood. She had been shot in the face. Brian had a gunshot wound to his head—a wound that the police on the scene determined to be self-inflicted.
* * *
—
THE YOUNGEST CHILDREN— Peter, Margaret, Mary—awoke to the sound of their mother sobbing.
Downstairs, Mimi was lighting candles on the kitchen table, and Mark was trying to calm her down. Don was on the phone, making arrangements, pulling their brother Donald out of Pueblo on a temporary pass so that he could attend his brother’s funeral.
The official explanation, at least for the little ones, was a bicycle accident. Margaret was eleven and Mary almost eight, too young to be told that Brian had shot and killed his girlfriend, and then turned the rifle on himself. Many of the others didn’t get the full story, either. Some believed the couple had been the victims of a robbery gone wrong. They most likely would not have thought that, had they been told what the police had learned—that Brian had bought the murder weapon from a local gun shop just a day earlier. What happened in Lodi seemed premeditated.
Years later, others in the family entertained other theories—that Brian and Noni had a suicide pact, or had taken LSD together. But what only Mimi and Don knew, and told no one for many years, was that sometime before his death, Brian had been prescribed Navane, an antipsychotic. There is no known record of the diagnosis that called for that prescription—mania, or depressive psychosis, or trauma-induced psychosis, or a psychotic break triggered by the habitual use of psychedelic drugs. The other children never learned when their parents first knew about this. But both Don and Mimi must have understood that one of the conditions Navane treats is schizophrenia. The thought of another insane son—their amazing Brian, of all people—was so devastating to them, they kept his prescription secret for decades.
* * *
—
MICHAEL WAS NUMB. He had been on his way to California, but had stopped in L.A., thinking he’d get around to seeing Brian up north some time later. Now all he could think was that Brian needed someone to throw a wrench in whatever it was that had been set into motion—and that he hadn’t been there to help. Now he was asked to help again: His father recruited Michael to come with him to California to get Brian’s body and find something to do with all of Brian’s belongings. They met with the police, but as an officer explained to him and his father what they thought had happened, Michael couldn’t handle it. He tuned out, refusing to hear anything more, about a second after he heard the words “murder-suicide.”
Even without knowing about Brian’s prescription, the younger boys connected what had happened to what was happening to their older brothers: first Donald, then Jim, and now Brian. John’s wife, Nancy, was the first to say out loud what everyone else had to be thinking—that what was happening to the Galvin boys had to be contagious. She and John left Colorado for Idaho, where they both found jobs as music teachers. The other sons started to drift away. Joe, the seventh son and the oldest of the four hockey boys, moved to Denver to work for an airline as soon as he graduated high school. Mark, the next in line, graduated a year later and headed off to CU Boulder.
After a brief furlough for his brother’s funeral, Donald returned to Pueblo—“quite intense about his religion,” the staff reported that year, “extremely controlled” in affect, again with an “underlying hostility close to the surface.” He stayed for more than five months, returning home in February 1974 with some new medications: Prolixin, an antipsychotic alternative to Thorazine; and Kemadrin, a Parkinson’s drug often prescribed to temper the side effects of neuroleptic drugs. Not counting Donald, Don and Mimi had just their four youngest children left at home: Matt, Peter, Margaret, and Mary.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 17
Don had spent years building distance between himself and his children. Even once they started getting sick, he kept working, out of necessity but also in such a way that it removed him from the day-to-day dramas, just as he’d always been. Two months after Brian’s death, he acquired an additional professional title, beyond his role at the Federation: president of the newly formed Rocky Mountain Arts and Humanities Foundation.
But what had happened to Brian proved impossible for any of them to move past, and while Mimi searched for ways to keep busy with the children who remained at home, Don internalized it all. Early one morning in June 1975, Don was getting ready to leave the house to take Peter to an early morning hockey practice when he collapsed to the floor.
The stroke hospitalized Don for six months. He was paralyzed on the right side of his body and seemed completely without short-term memory. As he regained control over his body, he still couldn’t remember anyone’s names, or much of what had happened in his life after World War II.
Don reluctantly announced his retirement. The farewell letter from the Federation was courteous, if a little cool. “In light of your recent stroke,” wrote the governor in charge, for whom Don had done all the grunt work, “I think your decision to seek a job which gives you greater control over time, travel, and responsibility, is a wise and sound decision.”
After years of leaving his wife to take care of the children, Don now needed Mimi to take care of him. Don had always thought that the sick boys ought to leave and get treatment outside the home. “God helps those who help themselves,” he would say; if the boys were unwilling, there was nothing else anyone could do. But now Mimi had her way with no protest from Don—in part because Don, in his weakened condition, had lost the authority to make decisions; and in part because they had let Brian go, and look what had happened to him.
All of Don’s old arguments—that Mimi had been babying the boys; that he believed in the school of hard knocks; that those self-help books he gave the boys were all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—would never work again. Now that the worst had happened, Mimi would never give up on another one of her sick children.
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