Reviewed by Rod McLary
On 13 August 1987, seventeen-year-old Jasper Haigh died following a car accident in Geelong. Jasper – or Jaz – was the younger brother of Gideon Haigh the well-known author and journalist. As would be expected, the sudden death of his young brother had a significant impact on the life of Gideon both at the time and for many years after.
The epigraph to this profoundly moving and emotionally raw monograph is a quote from A Grief Observed by CS Lewis: ‘Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable’. This book is itself a collection of Lewis’ reflections on his personal experience of grief following the death of his wife Joy; and within it Lewis questions whether it is at all possible to return to normality afterward. It is indeed an apposite work from which to draw the quoted epigraph; and, from Gideon’s own experience, it is not possible to return to normal life after such a tragedy.
Through the monograph, we learn about Jaz – his being more rugged, more physical than Gideon, his ability to make friends more easily. All differences from Gideon but without any sense from him of jealousy or competition. But as a teenager Jaz lost his way and instead found alcohol and dope; and Gideon recalls that once a drug dealer found his way to their mother’s house to call in a debt. Then late one night, Jaz took the spare set of keys to his mother’s car and went out. With two other people in the car, he was driving ‘very fast’ and went through a red light; then drove through a second red light without slowing down. A car was approaching from the right and hit Jaz’s car on the driver’s side – Jaz’s side. Much later, a psychiatrist whom Jaz had been seeing said to Gideon ‘your brother killed himself’ [33].
As Gideon says to himself as he approached the hospital to see the body of his brother ‘Our paths have parted. I am on my own’ [45]. And he begins ‘to close those windows into my soul that events had thrown open’ [51]. His response to the overwhelming grief was to immerse himself in work which he saw as making something of his chances –‘chances denied Jaz’ [author’s emphasis] [63].
During the thirty-seven years between the death of Jaz and the writing of the monograph, Gideon continued to have ‘[t]he sense of Jasper … always there, out of sight, but bulking darkly like a submerged continent’ [5]. Although Gideon wrote some forty-nine books during those thirty-seven years, he was never able to address his ‘life’s greatest loss’ [5]. But after reading Richard Beard’s The Day That Went Missing – an account of the day Beard’s younger brother drowned – Gideon’s resistance to documenting his own tragedy softened. So, in seventy-two hours, Gideon Haigh wrote My Brother Jaz ‘to a point where it became impossible not to finish’ [12]. What resulted is an intensely personal and at times heart-aching journey through grief and loss.
But even the deepest grief eases over time, memories fade, events blur together – and those natural processes give rise to another form of grief: the grief of forgetting what the person looked like, periods of time in which the person is not thought of, and the times the grieving person enjoys life.
In a quote on the back cover of the monograph, Gideon Haigh says in part: It can’t remain unwritten, just as I could never leave Jaz unremembered.
My Brother Jaz is a beautifully written – and profoundly moving – memoir to Jaz.
Gideon Haigh has published more than fifty books and contributed to many newspapers and magazines over a long career in journalism. His book The Office: A Hardworking History won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction; and Certain Admissions won a Ned Kelly Award for true crime.
My Brother Jaz
[2024]
by Gideon Haigh
MUP
ISBN 978 052288 083 0
$24.99; 86pp