Play to Win

In the Summer of 2020, my brother was on an internet reality show called Play to Win.

The show, produced by a husband-and-wife entrepreneur team, is a spinoff-of-sorts of NBC’s primetime hit The Apprentice. A group of contestants compete for a “life-changing job” or a “six-figure coaching opportunity”. [1].

During one interview with the hosts, the wife called my brother out for being fake, wearing a mask. She said, “I feel like there’s something you’re hiding. …Maybe it’s because you always have a smile on your face. …You hide your true self behind the smiles and the positivity all the time.”

With teary eyes and trembling voice my brother described how, for most his life, he felt like a failure. He dropped out of college, he had a string of failed business ventures, mentors he let down… His divorce only added to his sense of personal failure. Overall, he just felt he was a disappointment to his family and his parents. All he wanted in life was to make that up. To make his parents proud. To prove he was a success.

My heart reeled as I watched the footage that Fall.

Over the next several weeks, I found myself filling up page after page in my prayer journal asking God to help my brother know he was not a failure. That he was loved.

I wanted him to know my mom and dad absolutely did not care about his success. They didn’t care about how much money was in his bank account, or his status in business, or the emblem on the front of his car, or the size of his house, or where and how often he vacationed.

I could see all of these things so clearly because God, my Heavenly Daddy, had whispered the same Truths to me over the last two years. It was revolutionary. A complete 180° to everything I had believed up till then.

God showed me He is not at all concerned with the number of books I sell, or the number of attendees at the conferences I speak, or how many followers I have on social media, or the size of my mailing list.

He wants, more than anything, to spend time with me. To be in relationship with me. He wants me contentedly at rest in him. And He wants that to be enough, without any of those other things.

I prayed so fervently. I could see how blindly my brother was deceived. I envisioned him in the midst of a dense fog, or with a shroud pulled over his head.

I wanted my brother to feel peace. To enjoy his life – really – not just pretend to enjoy it on Facebook Live. I wanted him to be able to rest. To stop all the striving for his worth, his significance, for love and acceptance, for validation. To just be with us, and to know that was enough.

I prayed against spiritual strongholds. Demonic deception. I prayed in the name of Jesus. For him to be set free. His eyes opened. Revelation to come.

I prayed it. But I never said any of these things out loud to my brother.

The regret of that stings more deeply than I can describe.

*

My husband and I have confessed to one another several things we regret not saying to my brother while he was still alive.

On a walk in the days after they found my brother’s body, we were talking about the show and this particular topic.

My husband wondered aloud, “Even if we had said all the things, even if we had held a family intervention to try to shake him awake, to tell him we could see through all the bullshit and to stop faking it, would he even have been able to hear it?”

We both knew the answer was ‘no’.

He would have laughed it off. Diminished or dismissed it. Possibly even turned it around on us to make us the bad guys for calling him out with the truth.

My brother had spent the previous twenty years of his life programming himself every single day, in every single way, with every piece of input he took, that a man’s worth was only as great as his financial “success”.

He could not see, what literally hundreds of people have reiterated now after he is gone, that his success was within the impact he made in others. In the fact that he showed up every single day and made a point to reach out to someone, to send an encouraging note, to send a funny text, to send a voice clip with encouragement.

That was his legacy. Those things were more than enough. But he couldn’t see that.

Stronghold, indeed.

*

This is one of the hardest and most exhausting parts of losing a loved one to suicide – all the wondering. The questions. The trying to get inside their head after-the-fact.

The “Why?” and “Why now?”
and “How did I not see it coming?”
and “Was it my fault somehow?”
or “What could I have done differently?”
“Was it impulsive or premeditated?”
“What pushed him over the edge?”
“What if I had done this or said that, would it have made a difference?”
“What if….what if… what if…?”

The mental merry-go-round is debilitating. Endless. And the regret that comes with all the questions is absolutely haunting.

The day after they found my brother’s body I was taking a shower and suddenly became gripped with the thought of what more I could have given my brother that would have made him stay? That would have made him feel differently?

And I realized, no matter how much more I gave, nothing would have ever been enough.

The Grand-Canyon-sized expanse of emptiness inside of him could never be filled by another human. Or by any external factor in this life.

The lyrics to The Greatest Show’s “Never Enough” lilted through my head as the water ran down my face that morning:

All the shine of a thousand spotlights
All the stars we steal from the night sky
Will never be enough
Never be enough
Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it’ll
Never be enough
Never be enough
For me
Never enough
Never, never
Never enough
for me
For me

*

Just a couple weeks after my brother’s death, I sat in my OBGYN’s office for my six-week postpartum check-up. My OB asked me if I was experiencing any PPD symptoms.

“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know the difference between postpartum depression and regular old, my-brother-just-killed-himself depression.”

I told him the hardest part was all the mental ping-pong, all the questions. And the hardest question of all to answer was why he did what he did.

My doctor said the most helpful – and true – thing to me. He said, “There’s no use trying to make sense of what he was thinking it what he did. There is no understanding it from a rational perspective…. because rational thinking people don’t kill themselves. His brain wasn’t functioning ‘normally’ at the time.”

I found out he was speaking from experience. His own brother took his life 18 months prior to mine.

Harsh delivery aside, it gave my mind a great degree of peace and rest.

But the “what if’s?” still plagued me in time.

*

In October of 2022, I answered this prompt in my guided grief journal:

If I could talk to you one more time, I’d tell you…

…What’s hardest about watching this [Play to Win] video is the knowledge that I didn’t follow through on the nudge to talk to you after [the first time].

I want you to know:
It breaks our hearts to see you restlessly striving, working, producing, posturing and pretending.
We just want the real, authentic you.
We want your time & attention.
We want to laugh with you over funny movies and card games.
We want you to be present with us when we are together, not multitasking a thousand different ways.

Brother, I want nothing more than for you to wake up. To hear the voice of Your Heavenly Father say, “Look up Child.

Look up from your toiling and searching and striving and see that I love you just for who you are and where you are. No matter how many times you’ve failed. Your failures were a result of you trying to do things on your own, seeking things I don’t even want for you.

Learn to live and walk with Me. And I will give you Peace and Rest and Satisfaction. Deep and Abiding. I will show you the work I want you to do. It will be rewarding and it will make an impact. But that’s not even what matters most.

Come sit with Me for a while and I will give you a new perspective.

I made you the way you are, now let Me show you how I want you to use everything I put inside you.

Let Me reframe and redefine for you what success looks like.

I love you.”

These are the things I regret not saying to my brother four years ago.
And maybe if I had, it would have made all the difference.
Or maybe, it would have never been enough.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/rayhigdonpage/videos/883545428687674/

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This post is part 6 in a series that starts with: http://racheldawnwrites.com/blog/reads-like-fiction/