After having lived in the US for something like 14 years, my connection to my Swiss roots is at times a bit shaky. To say the least. While I regularly talk to my mom and older sister, I have aunts and cousins I haven't seen for probably close to 18 years, despite semi-frequent visits back to the motherland. I'm not sure why that is.

So when I randomly came across a drawing by my cousin Daniel in a stack of papers today, I was painfully jolted back into memories of my childhood. When Daniel and I would play in the sandbox together. Or later hang out in his totally hipped-out room (he was five years older than me), with a stack of Playboys in a corner, and posters of Jimmy Hendrix, Barbara Bach and Jane Fonda as Barbarella over psychedelic wallpaper. He would be smoking a joint, talking about the universe and giggling, while I would gaze at him in childish wonder and admiration.

I can even remember the exact day, hour, moment when he made this drawing - at his sister's wedding, sitting next to me at the white-clothed table, his wild black afro for once tamed, his tall and lanky figure clad in one of those horrible dark-blue 70s-style velvet tuxedos his Italian grandmother insisted he'd wear. He taught me how to draw an anatomically-correct face, then turned the paper over, and without ever taking the pencil off the sheet once, drew this insane Escher-esque collection of interlocked faces and creatures.



It would be the last time I'd ever see him.

But oh, how I had loved him. He was different from the rest of my family. Soft-spoken, sensitive and shy, with a timid, melancholic smile and eyes like burning coal, he was always the outsider, the black sheep. At the same time, he was magnetic, charismatic, charming. He could coax anything from anybody if he really wanted to. And there was a definite element of subversive danger to him as well. He could just sit and unblinkingly stare at our family dog, driving the normally docile Irish Setter into a furious, foaming-at-the-mouth rage within minutes - without ever uttering a word or making a single gesture.

Yet what defined Daniel was his creative genius. He was beyond just talented - he was truly gifted. Possessed by a uniquely powerful ability to draw and paint like I had hardly seen before.

Like many of his kind, he was also tragically and eternally misunderstood - by his parents, his family, the educational system, Swiss society at large. The fact that he didn't fit into the rigid cookie-cutter plan of schooling, a proper job and a career they had so firmly laid out for him, eventually drove him to utter and devastating madness.

For years he walked the narrow, sharp-edged path between genius and psychotic - getting by in menial jobs while creating freely, then getting hooked on drugs and being tossed from one mental institution to another. None of them could help him. There would be temporary fixes, bouts of sanity and happiness, then plunges back into despair, crime, drug abuse, madness. Pilgrimages to India to find spirituality, and to Israel to live in a Kibbutz (where he learned Hebrew in a matter of weeks and was very happy) followed - only bringing him short-lived joys however.

Last I heard of him - probably about 7 or 8 years ago - he was building violins in a mental institution in Switzerland somewhere. He eventually simply walked out of the heavily-guarded facility (like he seemed to be able to do with all spaces that tried to keep him captive) - and was never heard from again. Nobody knows if he is still alive, although the consensus in the family is that he has most likely finally succeeded in killing himself.

So today, on this day of Christmas, my heart bleeds for him. My soul mourns him. I've realized that I miss him terribly. And that life simply isn't fair sometimes. In a different age, in a different place, he could have perhaps been happy, understood, fulfilled.

I can only hope he comes back one day - and tries again.

[On a related note: should you, alert reader, ever find yourself in the lovely Swiss town of Lausanne, be sure to make time for the superb Art Brut or Museum of the Insane. It's one of the most impressive art exhibitions to be ever assembled.)