In the mid-1990s, what began as a casual visit to Lynn, Massachusetts turned into something quite different—a quiet extraction.

My brother David’s fourth son in a line of eight—Tommy, my namesake—was in a hurry to leave town. The reasons were never fully explained to me, and I didn’t press. What I did know was this: I could offer him a way out. He accepted.

He could’ve disappeared Hollywood style—behind the wheel of one of those shined up luxury cars he valet’d to their owners at the car wash, pointed west, and never looked back. But grand theft auto wasn’t really his style.

My version was cleaner. Quieter. And a lot less likely to end with flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

So I put him—and three cats, all of them narrowly avoiding a one-way trip to an animal shelter—on a United Airlines flight to San Francisco.

At the time, I didn’t have room for him in my three-bedroom flat in North Beach. But I did have something else: a large, clean, private garage in the Marina District—attached to a classic flat. It wasn’t meant for living, but it had space, a couch, a chair, my father’s old desk and a chamber pot.

It would have to do.

Tommy was used to spartan conditions and it fit the bill.

That garage became a place for quiet renewal—a place where something in him began to mobilize. Over the next couple of months, before a room opened up in the flat, Tommy read constantly. Psychology. Philosophy. The classics. He had always had range—he could paint portraits, cityscapes, still lifes, sculpt a bust—but now there was a new intensity to his life. What direction it would go was uncertain.

But intellect and artistic talent alone weren’t going to get him where he needed to go.

He needed to get back to gainful employment.

I had a tax client—Brendan Fox, one of many clients that had emigrated from Ireland both north and south—who was building a rooftop deck out in the Sunset, a block from Ocean Beach. I called and asked if he needed some help. He didn’t hesitate. “Have him there by seven. I’ll make a man out of him.”

Tommy showed up the next morning and was put to work hauling 4 x 8 sheets of plywood up to the roof.

By the end of the week, his fingers were numb, his hands raw and calloused, and his body spent. But he liked the work.

That job led to others. Before long, he was hired full-time by a construction company in the East Bay—Buestad Construction. What followed were two and a half years of hard, physically demanding and mentally challenging work which he fully embraced.

He had found his lane.

I was proud of him—and it showed. 

Looking back, I don’t think he had received much of that growing up — being one of ten kids competing for acknowledgment. It had been a hard environment. He was born into a religious commune in upstate New York—two hundred people living under a belief system where corporal punishment was not just accepted, but routine. When the leader died in 1980, the community dissolved and families scattered.

His landed in Matamoras, Pennsylvania. Mom and dad and ten children. Two small bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom upstairs. Eight boys in bunks in the basement with one bathroom. It was tight, chaotic, spartan and sometimes violent.

The discipline didn’t stop when they left the commune.

The story was that Tommy eventually got tired of being his dad’s whipping boy so he started lifting weights—seriously, relentlessly—his little home gym area became his forge, and he kept returning until he came out hardened and bigger and the boy his father could unload on was no longer there.

Strength and size, in that world, was a form of protection.

Like many families, there were nicknames. Some of them stuck longer than they should have. He carried those too.

His new nickname was “Chunk,” a reference to the body mass he had painstakingly built. His earlier one “Chink”—less kind, and harder to shake—came from the way his eyes narrowed into slits when he smiled or laughed.

Construction had always been a quiet ambition of mine—something I had come to too late. Now I was watching it unfold in real time through this young man who shared my name.

And he embraced it completely.

On the job and off. In his room, a well lit space with a big window and high ceilings overlooking our little alley street a few blocks from Washington Square, he built a beautifully designed platform bed bolted into the studs with posts. To go along with that he designed and constructed a wall unit with drawers. He helped build out office space for Nellie his future sister-in-law’s video company Spellbound in North Beach. He wasn’t afraid to take on anything. Always working, always learning, improving — always in motion.

Living within the same walls our lives developed a rhythm.

Weekday mornings, around five, we’d walk a few blocks through the restaurant, bar and cafe lined streets of North Beach to Café Puccini on Columbus. Cappuccinos. Chat about what the day had in store. Then he’d head over the Bay Bridge to work.

On weekdays, I’d stop by job sites to see what he was building, or on weekends to check in on Nellie’s office build-out. Those were good years. Solid years.

But there was always something simmering just beneath the surface.

He was doing well—thriving, even—but most of the time when I’d come home from work I’d find him sitting on the couch, staring off, somewhere far away. A kind of deep, internal brooding I knew better than to interrupt.

I didn’t push. I left it to time—the great healer.

What I did do was encourage him to get into therapy—and to his credit, he did.

His brother Matthew had come through my life in waves over the years—arriving troubled and unraveled, rebuilding, leaving, and returning again and again.

Each time, a reinvention: a bicycle rental business, a PhD in Jungian psychology from Zurich’s Jung Institute.

You learn, in time, that not everything can be reached directly. Some things have to work themselves out on their own timeline.

Tommy got around in my old beater—a ’68 Mercedes 250S—until we completed the carpenter picture. One weekend in the East Bay, I bought him a 1987 Ford Ranger.
Copper-colored. A proper work truck.

Years later, I still notice that model on the road. It was ubiquitous. It became a carpenter’s standard. And every time, without fail, the memory of him and me in San Francisco comes back—clear, immediate.

One afternoon I visited  a job site south of Market on 25th street — a  commercial building under construction. When I pulled up he was directing a crane operator, guiding a fifty-foot glue-lam beam into place on top of the cinder block walls.

There he was—moving with confidence, on his way to becoming a general contractor who would eventually run hundred-million-dollar jobs in Southern California.

And there I was, a spectator, headed for the sidelines of his life.

Proud and to be honest sad that that ship had sailed for me.

We must have walked Varennes Street—the quintessential alley street that North Beach was known for and where the flat was—hundreds of times over those two and a half years. One day, in the late ’90s, we took our last walk.

We headed down to the Ford Ranger, already packed for Santa Monica. He was heading south—to a new life with his girlfriend.

He left just as he had arrived—without much fanfare. 

I assumed we’d stay connected. That what had been built between us—the mornings, the work, the shared rhythm of life—meant something and would carry on with some substance.

Not so much as they say.

The years that followed yielded only a handful of calls and a few visits in northern and southern California. Most of our calls were about our fallen loved ones—his brothers, my nephews—gone by their own hands. 

I met his three children once. One of them is now a junior in college.

Instead, what remained of us was this:

There is another man out there with my name, making a positive imprint on the world in a myriad of ways. And some part of that—came from those years we shared.

He went on to mentor others—two of his brothers among them. One became a licensed contractor and a principal in a successful Bay Area construction firm. The other became a carpenter with LEED accreditation. Other brothers picked up the trade in various ways.

My consolation is that he paid it forward. Whether those who received it ever knew where it came from—or how far back it reached—I can’t say.

Still, I never fully understood the distance—the sense of exile that settled in between us. Over the years, I asked him about it more than once. He never had an answer. Only that he was sorry.

And then, years later, tragedy brought us back into the same orbit.

His older brother Matthew—my oldest nephew—had come to live with me again. It was the sixth time in his life he had landed on my doorstep and under my roof. Each time followed a similar pattern—some form of collapse, followed by a search for footing.

This time was 2013. He had just split from his wife in São Paulo, Brazil leaving behind two young children.

When he arrived, he was fragile. Unsteady. Over the next weeks we would brainstorm with him about his next steps.

We would hear him on FaceTime in his bedroom, speaking softly to his children in Brazil.

One night, my wife Marcie asked him gently, “You wouldn’t hurt yourself here with us, would you?”

“No,” he said. “I would never do anything like that.”

The next day, I got a call.

“Uncle Tom… could you pick me up some gauze?”

“You haven’t done anything, have you?”

I drove home as fast as I could.

He was draped over the sink, bleeding from the chest. A trail of blood ran from his blood drenched mattress down the hallway, handprints marking the walls.

There was no time to wait.

I got him into the car and drove straight to the  emergency room.

He had stabbed himself seventeen times. He told me—he had counted.

They stabilized him. His mother flew in the next day. Tommy came up from Southern California.

For a brief moment, we were a team again.

After his release, Matthew went to live with Tommy. It seemed like the right move. A change of scenery. A reset. Soon he got his own place.

For a while things seemed to be heading in the right direction.

Then, on November 19th, he finished what he had started.

A bullet, where the knife could not reach.

It breaks my heart—the senselessness of his children losing their father.
One memory, in particular, is soul-crushing: his five-year-old son called him “Hon.”

I believe Tommy was the one who found him.

It wasn’t the first time he had been called into that role. Years earlier, he had flown across the country to deal with the aftermath of another brother—Mark—who had taken his own life by hanging.

Matthew came to me for the sixth time.

Then he went to Tommy for the third or fourth time.

And that was where his story ended.

I think about those years with Tommy often.

About what we shared.

About how you can step in at a critical moment—offer someone shelter, direction, even a path—and still not be part of the life that follows.

And how, even when you give someone everything you can…

…it doesn’t always buy you a place in the rest of their story.