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

My brother David’s fourth son—Tommy, my namesake—was in a hurry to get out. 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.

So I put him—and his three cats—on a United 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, and my father’s old desk.

It would have to do.

And somehow, it worked.

That garage became a kind of staging ground—a place where something in him began to reorganize. 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—but now there was a new intensity to it. A direction.

But intellect alone wasn’t going to carry him forward.

He needed work.

I had a tax client—Brendan, one of my many Irish immigrant clients—who was building a deck out in the Sunset, a block from Ocean Beach. I asked if he needed help. He did.

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 hands were raw and calloused, 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, physical, demanding and mentally challenging work which he embraced fully.

He had found his lane.

I was proud of him—and I didn’t hide it.

Looking back, I don’t think he had received much of that growing up. 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. 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, 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. But he carried more than that—something internal, less visible, harder to name.

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, he built a platform bed bolted into the studs. He designed and constructed a wall unit with drawers. He helped build out office space for his future sister-in-law’s video company in North Beach. He was always working, always improving, always in motion.

Our lives developed a rhythm.

Weekday mornings, around five, we’d walk a few blocks to Café Puccini on Columbus. Cappuccinos. Quiet conversation. Then he’d head to work.

On weekends, I’d stop by job sites, or check in on the office build-out. Those were good years. Solid years.

But there was always something just beneath the surface.

He was doing well—thriving, even—but most of the time when I’d come home 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 had learned that lesson before.

His brother Matthew had come through my life in waves over the years—arriving, unraveling, rebuilding, leaving, and returning again. 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 1968 Mercedes 250S—until I could do better for him. One day we went truck shopping 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 favorite. And every time, without fail, the memory of him and me in San Francisco comes back—clear, immediate.

A mixed blessing.

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.

And there I was, standing off to the side.

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 made our way down to the Ford Ranger, packed for his move to Santa Monica. He was heading south to live with his girlfriend.

There was no argument. No rupture.

Just movement.

Forward.

I assumed we’d stay connected. That what had been built between us—the mornings, the work, the shared rhythm—would carry on in some form.

It didn’t.

The future yielded only a handful of calls. Over time, even those faded. I’ve met his three children once. One of them is now in college.

I had expected something lasting.

Something more.

Instead, what remained was this:

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

He carried it forward.

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 firm.

That mattered.

Still, I never fully understood the distance. When I asked him about it over the years, he couldn’t explain it. He would just say 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, leaving behind two young children.

When he arrived, he was fragile. Unsteady.

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 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.

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

For a brief moment, we were all back in the same place.

After his release, Matthew went to live with Tommy. It seemed like the right move. A change of environment. A reset.

For a while, it worked.

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

A bullet, where the knife had failed.

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.

Matthew came to me for the sixth time.

Then he went to Tommy.

And that was where his story ended.

I think about those years 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.