In our living moments the dead always scrape against our hearts. Remembering Peter on his Birthday-Socialist, artist, brother-good egg.

This time of the month always feels the same because rent is due. The hours ahead until the 1st of the month are as nerve-wracking as diffusing a bomb because not paying the rent creates the real possibility of homelessness- which obliterates like an explosion-normal life.

September is a hard month to keep focused because it's thorny with memories of loved ones starting in life but also their ending.

Tomorrow, it's Pete's birthday, and if he were still alive, he'd be turning 64.

Peter’s been dead for fourteen years. On his last birthday alive, he was in an ICU, breathing from a respirator and unable to talk.

In his hospital room, there were photos from Pete's life taped up on a wall near his bed. It was a cruel reminder to him that once he was healthy, much like the birthday card he was given that played the superman theme song. But the photos pained Peter. Anytime, he looked at them, a grimace of despair came over his face.

He wanted them gone from his sight except ones from childhood. I obliged and then left him to spend the remainder of his birthday with the sounds of machines monitoring his vital signs or pumping air into his destroyed lungs.

Peter died a few weeks after his 50th birthday. Even staying alive for half a century was, for Pete, as arduous and precarious as surviving a Mount Everest climb without oxygen cylinders because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his twenties and then pulmonary fibrosis.

In the last year of his life, he told me he couldn’t remember a time- when he didn’t hear voices that mocked him and attempted to distort his reality.

When I was twenty-two- and Pete was twenty-six, I'd never have guessed mental illness stood around the corner for him, preparing to rob him of his sanity and a normal progression through life. He was an artist on the verge of recognition by the public. He was a scene painter for the Toronto ballet company, and his social life was vibrant, exciting and filled with rebellious people from the arts.

I both envied and loved my brother. He introduced me to the music of Elvis Costello, the films of Fellini, the socialist historian A.J. P Taylor, the novels of Steinbeck and scotch whisky on a Saturday night while listening to jazz. He was cool, confident, generous and kind. Peter took after our father when it came to loyalty and hard work. He was a non-conformist who marched to the beat of his own drummer and wasn’t afraid to stand up to bullies. When he was 10 and me 6, I witnessed Pete fight off a bunch of anti-Semitic boys who harassed a Jewish shop owner in Roncesvalles.

Schizophrenia ended much of what made Peter Pete when he was twenty-eight. Had my parents not taken him home to live with them, I know my brother's life would have ended on the streets or in suicide.

My parents stood by Peter during- the worst of his journey across the terra incognita of schizophrenia. My parent's determination to keep Peter safe in an environment where he was loved because society under neoliberalism refused to do its share came with a heavy financial, emotional and physical price for my parents. My mother's life was shortened because of the demands caregiving for Peter took on her body weakened from Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Peter's illness tested everyone in our family, and at first, I failed that test.

I tried to straddle accepting my brother was mentally ill while denying his illness to others. In the beginning, I was ashamed of his mental illness and I resented any extra burden placed upon me because of it.

I was selfish because I wanted my early twenties to be about me and not the traumas others in my family struggled with. I mourned for the brother I lost to mental illness and grieved for what I felt my own life lacked because my parents were compelled to triage their concern for the one most in need.

In time, I patched things up with Peter, and we formed a brotherly bond that was truly deep and emotionally honest. I apologised to him and asked for forgiveness, which he gave me with his customary generosity of spirit.

My father helped Peter's mental illness stabilise by encouraging him to resume his artwork. From then on, Peter used his artistic talent to document the harsh journey schizophrenia compelled him to take across the geography of his spirit.

My brother used his art to bang against the bars of the prison mental illness had sentenced him to. His work balanced tragedy with whimsy, humour, and the wonder of existence.

In 1999, a month before our mother died, Peter married his girlfriend and moved into an artist co-op housing complex in Toronto. Peter began to work as an artist mentor with other mentally ill people to help them use their art to express their life experiences.

Life isn't fair because it has plans of its own for you. At forty-eight, Pete developed a cough he could not shake. He blamed it on cheap cigarettes bought on the black market. If it had only been that simple.

It was something worse; his lungs had become fibrotic. They were losing their elasticity and ability to breathe and distribute oxygen throughout the bloodstream. There is no cure for this disease and his was progressing at breakneck speed.

To have psychosis and a life-ending disease produces anxiety of enormous proportions. He fought it the only way he knew how. Peter worked day and night on pieces for his last gallery show wearing a respirator.

He was heroically trying to express his ideas, his loves, his terrors and his essence in all those works he completed whilst dying.

After he died, those paintings and sculptures made in the last two years of his life became Peter's artistic epitaph that travelled on a cross-Canada art tour hosted by university art galleries. .

Some of his 'work adorns the walls of my apartment. It consoles me because, in it, I see the moments of his life through his eyes rather than mine. His artwork reminds me of my purpose in life. I've committed what's left of it- to preserving my family's working-class socialist legacy that was expressed in art, literature, politics and in existing anonymously through the harsh conditions of capitalism.

Thanks for reading this piece about Peter. I miss him so much. There is really no one left but me who has as many memories of him, so I cultivate and cherish them.

It's a big ask, I know, but I need your help. I got sick with a mild infection last week, which slowed my scramble to find the cash for rent. I am shorter than normal this month.

So, if you can subscribe to a paid membership, thank you. I appreciate the loyalty of each subscriber. You have allowed me to build a community.

Next month, my early pension begins. It is not much,. I couldn't live off it but it adds to the base that keeps me housed.

Right now, at around 1100 subscribers, with 10% as paid, I need to increase my subscription base to 3k or double my paid subscriber base for an income of $14k (Canadian).

So, if you can please subscribe. It is appreciated by me and it ensures the work of Harry's Last Stand has a working beachhead.

Soon enough, I must figure out who can be my literary executor because my time may not be as short as Peter's. But it is running low because of the rot in my lungs.

Take care, all.