The most unsettling aspect of my brother’s death by overdose are all of its attendant mysteries.
Where did he buy the drugs? Did the dealer cut them with something dangerous? Why didn’t he call me if he was struggling with cravings? Was he thinking about his family as he died? Did he wish we were there to comfort him? Each question ends at a doorway that opens into the same windowless antechamber.
We lost Phillip on November 16. He died alone. He was my baby brother. He was 31.
After Phillip died, many of his ostensible friends – people who my brother told me he hated, people he used needles with, interlopers and leeches who abused, robbed him sucked him dry – showed up at his funeral. I was forced to play nice in the face of this cruelty.
I know Phillip wouldn’t have wanted them there. But he also wouldn’t have wanted me to turn them into the focus of his service. Their presence was eclipsed by the super-abundance of love and support from others who filled the room. The love is what mattered.
My brother was a remarkable talent. The accolades, praise and attention he received were more than most people will experience in an entire lifetime. By the time he was 18, he was a prodigy in the National Ballet of Canada, “the next Rudolf Nureyev,” my mother was told.
The best art and dance schools in the world were enamoured of him. He was staggeringly attractive and gifted in a way that elevated him above his peers, still able to land a full aerial flip over a decade after he stopped training and dancing.
My wife and I cleaned up his room in the days after he died. We found his awards, newspaper clippings and contact sheets of photographs from his days as a model strewn across the floor. Along with those memories were needles, pipes and scraps of tin foil, the obvious signs of a man attempting to wrest hope from the past while grappling with the evils of the present.
For men like my brother, death always waits beyond the threshold of the next high. This is a grim truth every addict is aware of, and one in which I am also deeply acquainted. Addiction is a world of absolutes, existing along a stark dichotomy of life and death.
I can recount the times I sat transfixed in terror as my heart writhed in my chest, my cellphone in hand and ready to dial 911. Through some blind act of divine intervention, I got clean at 28. I wouldn’t have survived another year living the way I was living.
Inveterate drug users attempt to satisfy a bottomless, ancient hunger, an undertaking that often ends in oblivion or worse. I know many drug users who have died young, either by suicide, an act of violence, disease or overdose. The fact that my little brother now joins that list is an agonizing reality that’s hard to accept.
I spent years trying to convince Phillip that his life was worth saving. I noticed a shift in his outlook and attitude in the weeks before he died. He started to text and call me again. For the first time ever, he had taken the steps necessary to enter treatment. I could sense that he was proud of himself for being proactive.
We spent our last day together talking about what he wanted for himself. He didn’t know for sure. All he knew was that he wanted to live, and that he felt he was deserving of another chance. He had even entertained the idea of starting ballet again with aspirations of one day becoming a teacher. He could have done all of that and more. Something had revived his spirit, but it wasn’t enough. He was one week away from entering rehab when he overdosed.
Millions of addicts make the choice that Phillip made. One last “party” before checking into treatment. One last shot at the illusory euphoria of that first high. Some manage to wake up from the chase, damaged and dirtied but alive.
A friend once told me that the world’s inhabitants are drifters in a limitless stream. Some of us are better swimmers than others. Phillip was trying to stay afloat. But swimming is hard work. He decided he needed just a brief respite from the tides, some time along the shore under the soft sun, one last moment of absolute calm, before jumping back in.
I can identify with that feeling. I understand what compels a person to want to shut out the world and recede into a narcotic warmth.
Today, I do what I can to stay active, to keep apace in a march that presses onward. I have a full life to lead. I have a wife and a dog and a family who needs me. I laugh or cry whenever necessary and allow my grief to express itself freely. But there isn’t much time to rest.
I will take my weeks, but then it’s back into the fray. Until then, Phillip visits me in my dreams, where we joke, commiserate and laugh as if he were still here with us all.
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