Charlie Odum
August 10, 1969 - May 1, 2009
My brother Charlie dared to live his dreams in ways that few people ever do. Starting in high school, he pursued a fascination and love of Japanese culture. He won an essay contest by International Youth for Understanding, and spent a summer on the Japanese north island of Hokkaido with a host family. After this experience, he went to the University of Florida and majored in Japanese. He earned his bachelor’s degree, and went to work in Orlando as a guide for Japanese tourists. He was really good at it. This life was not satisfying to him, though.
He sold all of his worldly possessions and moved into a bamboo hut in rural Japan to study wood-fired pottery in a tradition dating back thousands of years. No electricity or commercially prepared materials are used. If you want a glaze of a particular color or consistency, you burn rice hulls, or add copper, or something like that. You kick the wheel with your leg to make it turn. You fire the pots with wood that you chopped yourself, in a huge kiln, in a process that takes days and requires a communal effort. Charlie successfully completed his 5-year apprenticeship and began to work as an independent potter. He made beautiful things in the age-old way. He lived in poverty and grew a lot of his own food, slaughtered his own chickens. He worked sometimes as a laborer in the rice paddies to earn a little more money. After years of this, he decided he would not be a commercial success as an artist, and it was time to pursue something that would allow him to support himself better. He would always do pottery, but not for a living.
Charlie became a simultaneous translator of Japanese and English for Honda. He remained in his little rural village, which he dearly loved. He was an incredible translator in a demanding job. His Japanese was so good that Japanese people didn’t know he wasn’t a native speaker unless they saw him. On the phone, you couldn’t tell. This was not just because he spoke Japanese nearly flawlessly, which he did, but also because he was so acculturated that he also behaved like a native Japanese person in almost every way. Little expressions, the way he moved, everything. When I went to visit him, I was surprised to find his house contained no forks, no chairs, and no beds. He ate with chopsticks, and sat and slept on the floor. His skills as a translator were highly valued, and he was promoted and advanced in this his third career.
In the end, though, all of his gifts and talents could not overcome his illness. On a trip to Korea to visit other potters during his time as one, Charlie had his first manic episode and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He came out of the closet at the same time. He was liberated, and debilitated. He ended up trapped in a Korean mental institution because he couldn’t pay the bill for his care. My parents, loving their son more than they understood him, accepted this somehow. My dad went to Korea, got him out, and took him back home to Japan. My dad stayed for months, living with my brother long enough him to get settled again and seem like he was on the road to recovery.
Over the years, though, Charlie did not recover. He had times that were better than others, and he always took his medication and did what his doctor recommended. Before he died, he had been hospitalized repeatedly, for months. He really tried to make it work. He tried so hard. Even today, with all the advances in science, the neurobiology of bipolar disorder is not understood. The mechanisms of actions of the medications that provide some help are also not understood. For some people, the medications work better than for others. The medications do not really often return a person to normalcy, and they have many side effects. Some of the side effects are just a nuisance, and Charlie put up with those without complaint. Some of them can be really debilitating, and even dangerous. The day before he died, Charlie kept his regular appointment with his psychiatrist. He told him that his hands were numb, and that he couldn’t remember things. The doctor said he should just continue taking the medication as it was, that it should improve eventually, that if he reduced the dose, he was afraid Charlie would have another manic episode. Charlie was not able to work or really care for himself with the medication levels so high, yet he could also not function if they were lowered. There was no good solution he could see, over 10 years of struggle and effort after his diagnosis.
When my brother took his own life, I don’t think it was a rash decision, made on the spur of the moment. In the time preceding his death, he had put all of his affairs in order after years of difficulty and recent months of intense suffering and struggle. His rent, his bills, everything was taken care of. He had applied for disability wages months before, and after a lot of delay, he found out the wages had come through. The amount was enough to cover all of his final arrangements. I believe this was what he needed to let go, the assurance that his death would not be a financial burden to his family. He knew his family loved and accepted him, and he was in a committed and loving relationship. There was no sudden crisis or event. Just his thought that he could not expect things to get better, and that he would grow increasingly debilitated and unable to function as an independent person.
I am not saying I can understand his decision, or that he was right about what to expect for his future. I don’t know. What I am saying is that it is difficult to put the pieces together in a typical picture of a suicide in the United States. You can put them together better as a typical picture of a suicide in Japan, though. He suffered terribly, he tried, and in the end he decided not to burden his family, partner, and friends. I believe that to Charlie, his decision was an honorable one.
I am not angry at him, and I don’t blame myself. If you are sorry for my family and me, just be sorry that my brother is gone. He was an incredible person who was loved by so many, and I don’t plan to retroactively take that away from myself.
My dad went to Japan for Charlie’s funeral. My dad and Charlie’s friends decided on a mixture of Christian elements and traditional Japanese Buddhist rituals. Charlie was placed in a simple wooden box filled with flowers. People came to see him at a wake, and his closest friends and my dad slept overnight in the room with his body. There was a funeral service, in which people talked about what he meant to them. My dad said he was overwhelmed with how many people had so many touching memories of Charlie. Altogether about 150 people came to pay their respects. Charlie was without a doubt a kind, loving, funny, gifted, generous, thoughtful, and honest person who affected so many. In the final ritual after the funeral, my dad and my brother’s friends sorted through his cremated remains with long ceremonial chopsticks to place the last bits of his bone into a bamboo box. It was what Charlie wanted - he had expressly said so. I believe it was a fitting end to his life.
Some of his ashes will be scattered in Japan, and some in Florida, but he will always be in our hearts.
