"It's Been A F**king Blast."

He's been dead these past fifteen years- but Pete's birthday is today. So, I will be of good cheer. There won't be cake but I will raise a glass of beer to him as I eat yesterday's leftovers for supper.

The Death of someone you love is an amputation, done without anaesthetic.

A portion of your spirit or soul- call it what you will is violently cleaved out from your life. The phantom pains from that cutting last a lifetime despite the scar tissue that grows over the memory of what was lost. Pete's voice was similar to mine and sometimes when I speak I hear his cadence rather than mine.

My brother's last birthday alive was his fiftieth. It was marked in an ICU where he lay dying. He was on a respirator that kept his lungs functioning after a botched exploratory operation on his lungs, done three weeks previous, caused irreparable damage to them- already rotten by fibrosis.

Being on the respirator left him unable to speak, and so he communicated through hand motions.

To make the ICU room more comfortable, less clinical Peter's wife had tapped up photos from his life on a wall near his bed.

On that birthday in 2009, Peter indicated that he wanted all the photos torn down except those when he was a young child. He fixed his eyes and imagination for the little time left to him on the moments when he was not under siege from mental illness or dying lungs-boyhood.

Peter died too young. But 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 his late forties.

In the last year of his life, he told me he couldn’t remember when he didn’t hear voices in his head mocking and abusing him- attempting to distort his reality.

When Pete was twenty-six, I wouldn’t have guessed mental illness stood around the corner about to rob him of his sanity and a normal progression through life. He was an artist on the verge of recognition. Pete was a recent art college graduate and a scene painter for the Toronto Ballet Company. His social life was exciting, and he was in a relationship.

During my youth, I loved and envied my brother. Pete 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.

Pete was 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 twenty-eight, Pete's symptoms of schizophrenia which he had controlled and concealed for most of his 20s overwhelmed him. He was hospitalised in a psychiatric ward and treated with pharmaceuticals and talk therapy. But the disease had him good and it disabled him so much that he couldn't work and lost his employment. Friends found his behaviour aberrant and abandoned him.

Had my parents not taken him home to live with them, I don't doubt my brother's life would have ended in suicide because he was terribly ill. My parent's stood by Peter, during the worst of his journey across the terra incognita of schizophrenia.

But it took a toll on them and our entire family as severe mental illness is a brutal disease that tests even the strongest love.

At first, I failed the test. I tried to straddle accepting my brother was mentally ill while simultaneously denying his illness to others. It was selfish because I wanted my early twenties to be about me and not the traumas others in my family struggled with.

Eventually, I came around. Yet, I mourned for the brother I lost to mental illness, and grieved for what I felt my own life lacked because my parents could not be there for me during my times of need.

In time, I patched things up with Peter, and we formed a brotherly bond that was more emotionally honest.

During the mid-1990s, Peter's mental illness began to stabilise. Our dad helped that happen by encouraging him to resume his artwork. It saved my brother because Peter used his artistic talent to document the harsh journey schizophrenia compelled him to take across the geography of his spirit.

Peter's artwork depicted the tragedy and comedy of existence. There was so much beauty, love, rage, desire, joy, and humour within his paintings, wood prints and sculptures.

Peter wanted a purposeful life that had love in it. In many ways, he got that life. In 1999, he married his girlfriend, and they moved into an artist co-op housing complex in Toronto. During those first years of marriage, Pete was an artist mentor for people with mental health issues at Ontario's Clarke Institute. His artwork was on display at notable galleries in Toronto. My brother was gaining recognition for his talents and being written up in art magazines as well as winning juried art competitions.

After decades in the wilderness, Peter was on the cusp of being discovered again by the art world. But life isn't fair. At forty-eight, he developed a cough he could not shake. He blamed it on cheap cigarettes, bought on the black market. It was not the cigarettes. It was something worse; his lungs had become fibrotic.

When he turned forty-nine, Peter’s breathing grew worse. Peter spent that year in his studio trying to nail down more of his story onto canvas or wood carvings. He had a premonition of his death because many of Peter’s works show him on a hospital bed with a tube coming out of his throat.

Peter said when near death about his life, “It’s been a fucking blast.”

Peter died in the hospital 20 days after his 50th birthday.

I wish Peter could have lived to have celebrated his sixty-filth birthday because he had so much more to say as an artist and live as a human being. My brother made my life less lonely and I suspect I did the same for him because I could make him laugh. 

He was my big brother, protective, irritating, loving, and generous.

His premature ending always makes me feel that I failed him when he needed me most.

Some of Pete's artwork 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 for the remainder of my life. I am here to preserve my family's working-class legacy of socialism, art and literature. They endured and loved in the harshest of conditions and gave back more to this world than they took..

Ah, Pete, here ends another year you are dead except in my heart and memory. Three cheers for the days when you lived and when mum and dad were also alive. Those long-ago days had so much sunshine and storms.

My rent is soon due, and it always seems I most spend those days leading up to the first of the month like a desperate character from the novel Berlin Alexander Platz on a mad pursuit to keep a roof over my head. It’s the times we live in because they aren’t lucky for many of us.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can please subscribe and if you can’t it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide. So many of us lose so much time on the important work that must be done because of the mad scramble to pay the rent and feed oneself during an economic crisis not seen since the 1930.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these times. October rent is approaching and I need 6 yearly subscribers to make it. Take care, John PS. Tomorrow, I will post a large collection of my brother’s paintings.