The death of Joachim(Jocki)’s middle brother in a late-night car crash interrupts his exchange year in the United States and permanently changes the family he returns to. The news arrives over the telephone, but its consequences unfold more slowly: Joachim(Jocki) cannot find the English words for the loss, carries on with his American life, and comes home to parents whose familiar routines no longer restore their former life.

Causes and Background

Joachim(Jocki) is living with a host family in Laramie when his father calls with the news. The crash also kills the brother’s girlfriend, who is sitting with him in the back seat. A truck has stopped just beyond a hill in the middle of the night to let two hitchhiking women out; its lights are off. The car slides beneath it. The driver, the brother’s best friend, survives without injury.

The death reaches Joachim(Jocki) during the year he is away from home. Before the call, his exchange has been taking shape through school and daily life in Wyoming; the news abruptly brings that distant experience into contact with a loss in his family that he cannot yet absorb.

The Call and the Failure of Language

At home in his room, listening to music on his waterbed, Joachim(Jocki) hears the telephone ring in the living room. After the host mother tells him the call is for him, his father reports that his middle brother has been killed in a car accident. Joachim(Jocki) returns to his room. When someone asks what happened, he cannot produce an English sentence. He stammers, begins in German, and then reaches for a dictionary.

With trembling fingers, he builds the news word by word: first that his brother is dead, then that it was a car accident. When the person with him repeats the fact to check that she has understood, he nods and answers in German. The dictionary turns a sentence he cannot speak into something he can communicate, but it does not make the death easier to comprehend. His raised, outstretched hand stops the other person from speaking while he continues searching; in that moment, the effort to name the event takes precedence over consolation.

The Journey Home

The family had been about to leave for Yellowstone National Park. Because Joachim(Jocki)’s complicated return flight is still four days away, the trip goes ahead. He spends the journey amid long drives and vast scenery, seeing herds of bison and geysers. The grandeur offers no relief: he remembers the landscape as more desolate than any he had encountered.

He flies back to Schleswig for the funeral. The return takes thirty-four hours and involves four changes. At Frankfurt airport, he is back at the place where his middle brother had brought him before the exchange year; that was the last time he saw him. In Hamburg, his parents and remaining brother meet him. Before they notice him, he sees them sitting motionless on a bench behind a large pane of glass while other travelers run to greet and embrace arriving relatives. The homecoming he had once imagined—as a fit basketball star, fluent in English and shining with confidence—has become an occasion of shared bereavement. When his family sees him, they embrace and hold on to one another amid the moving crowd.

Grief Deferred and Family Aftermath

Only fourteen days later, Joachim(Jocki) is back in Laramie with his host family. At school, no one knows about the crash; outside the host family, he receives no sympathy, and this absence of attention helps him continue living as before. He rarely thinks of his brother, usually only after Sunday telephone calls with his parents, and refuses to grieve. The months that follow fill with ordinary activities and new experiences, including basketball, horseback rides across the prairie, and long trips with his host parents. When he eventually leaves the United States, he weighs ninety-five kilograms, can do one hundred push-ups, and speaks fluent English; these visible changes stand beside, rather than resolve, his avoidance of mourning.

At home, his parents have become different people after the death. They both return to work and support one another in their sorrow; they also eat together, watch television as a family, and take walks. Yet to Joachim(Jocki) these shared routines look like a simulation of their earlier life, an effort to recall who they had been and what that life had felt like. The hope, as he understands it, is that real life might gradually grow back into the strained framework of everyday habits. With his eldest brother studying in Munich, Joachim(Jocki) is the only child living with his parents in their house within the psychiatric hospital grounds.

Narrative Significance

The episode makes the gap between receiving news and experiencing grief central to the loss. At first, death is an untranslatable statement assembled in a dictionary; later, it is set against Wyoming’s overwhelming landscape, the stillness of his parents at the airport, and the repetitive domestic acts through which they try to keep living. Joachim(Jocki)’s return to ordinary life in Laramie does not undo the bereavement: it shows how mourning can be postponed even as the family’s shared world has already changed.