There was an old photograph that surfaced during my brothers memorial. Sliding out of a noisy printer, here is the enlargement of it, in multiple tones of grey. A real photographer captured this moment, the perfect exposure with super white whites, deep black blacks, and all the colourless colours of grey in between. A remarkably candid moment full of story and pause, its a picture pleading for words.
There are two small children dressed as twins, sitting side by side on a mid-century upholstered chair, high back with wooden arms. The girl wears a skirt, the boy is in shorts. The girl holds a stuffy wrapped in a white blanket. The boy holds a toy horse, also white, with a rider. The stuffy and the blanket feel so soft, the horse and rider, so stiff. The children look so perfect, perfectly dressed.
The boy looks upward. By looking closely into the shades over his face, there is a dark saddle across his nose and cheeks. His eyes are lifted up on the diagonal. The aim of his sight isnt clear.
But lifted up his eyes are, looking. Lifted up is the phrase I most often repeat to myself nowadays, whenever I am thinking of my brother. I want to reassure myself, and others, too, that he was lifted up out of his body into a realm of nature that opens during states of shock, pulls consciousness right up and out of the body that is endangered. Some invisible thing, deep inside the life of someone, is lifted up into an out-of-body intelligence. Could be the intelligence of love.
I have heard this from first hand accounts. An accident in a theatre. A fall from a chair lift. An overdose on the beach in Goa. At that higher elevation, consciousness is open to everything on the scene, to what everyone is thinking, to what everyone is saying, and to every single reaction that is occurring, all of it is comprehended simultaneously. A preternatural awareness, it is consciousness blown so wide open it is able to perceive the whole situation and everyone in it all at once. Sensation and physical experience is mercifully left behind, and a question bursts free out of that lifted up intelligence. Is it now? Is now the time? Is it time to go?
Without trying to, the next thing I imagine is the attack. I feel it in my chest where the pain of discovering his death first ploughed into me. With no small distress, I wonder at what point the kill, and just exactly what was he lifted up out of. From memories, I hear the sounds from an unseen death in The Edge. A recording in Werner Herzogs Grizzly Man. The end of Tristan in Legends of the Fall. I try to imagine my brother in those scenes. I try to experience his fear but Ive never been that afraid to know. I wonder if he had. Ever been. So afraid.
In the photograph, one of his eyes is a bit too far upward, maybe pointing to something. One of his small hands is around the horses head, maybe sensing something, maybe the shape of it, maybe hard plastic, maybe wood.
The girl looks like the boy but for the skirt she is wearing. Someone combed her pixie cut to make her look like a boy. Oh, if only she had been a boy, this might not be happening. Maybe she combed it herself, hoping she might blend in to the boyness of her brother, the apple of her mothers eye. Her fingers are closed into her palms, holding nothing but holding on. One corner of her mouth turns down and her gaze is far away. Not all there, some would say.
Two children sitting side by side on a single upholstered chair together. There is no space between them. They could be siamese.
Matching knee high socks, their skirt and shorts held up with straps reaching over their small shoulders, over matching white shirts. Could be lederhosen, could be Germany, but it looks like the apartment in New York, the curved corners of the entryways, the dark furniture that grandmother had.
She stands monolithic in the foreground, looking down on the children, kind of twinkling. Her hands are open. Her face is kind, her body substantial, her bosom softer than a stuffy. Those shoes of hers that never varied, always black, and thick and tied up tight. Substanced to carry her substance. She wore stockings under a print dress, a print apron over that. She was always cooking something up. There are smells to remember, and the repeating question, what shall we eat? That same relentless question of bears, living mostly alone in adulthood, as if they were homeless.
Behind the children and leaning to rest on the back of the chair, the upholstery rough under her forearms, someone else is looking to grandma with a captivating smile. Her face is shiny and pretty, perfectly pretty. Shes young, maybe thirty, her dark hair is pulled back and shes wearing round white clip on earrings to cover just her earlobes.
I want to love her. I want to feel her loving me.
I hear her speaking to the older woman. She says,
I cant
Raise them.
Please take them.
It was from that moment forth, she sent her two perfect children off into the world, with a wish and a smile, toward multiple mazes and lengthy labyrinths of I cant. I cant became the mantra. It was the safest place to hang out in the overwhelming feelings of not wanted by the very being who brought us into this world, suddenly a new world of confusion and contraries. Before very long, making sense of it meant not wanting her anymore either. Meanwhile, I cant became the fuel for doing whatever we damn well pleased.
I have a friend who grew up on an Inuit reservation. All the cliches you can imagine about that, she said, are true. I listened while she spoke of the violence she experienced as a child, and then in her last job as a security guard in Chinatown. “Apocalyptic, soulless humanity” she said, not about the Chinese, but the drug dealers and their customers who haunted that older part of town. Knowing this woman could handle it, she is one of the few I shared the news with. From her ancestry and their traditions she said, He died a warriors death. Instantly I saw the athlete he was, the captain, the coach, the trainer, the goalie, all the masterful warrior roles he played throughout his lifetime. He is in the small pool of people that ever beat Notre Dame, said one long time friend. When I told her the bear was also killed, she said, it is our belief that they will travel in the spirit world together. He will always have the spirit of a bear guiding him through the next world.
In natures book, so closely lived by in ancient cultures, animals traveled alongside us in life, so why not in the afterlife? Nowadays we share urban spaces with squirrels and corvids, dogs, coyotes and mice, cats and insects, horses if youre lucky, but not the great big mammals that once had a place in the world, in natures book, alongside humans. I dont know about spirit worlds and I dont believe anything Ive ever heard about an afterlife, but I am in awe that he died of natures hunger, and the bear died of gunshot. Both. So close. Together.
By some unwelcome design, we are evermore distanced from the wild. The story of my brothers death spread far and wide, went round the world, and I wondered, was it an advantageous piece of fear porn to influence for the 15 minute city agenda? Save yourselves! Stay out of the woods! Climb on top of each other in the ever growing in-fill of the city. Stevie Wonder is there, singing. Jump to, what do we even need the United Nations for anymore? Peace, dignity and equality has not been manifested. For what do we need their controlling agendas? We seriously do not need to be distanced any further from the natural world. People are dying from that distance, surrounded by evermore products and pills, we have been hoodwinked with fear porn into believing a badly manufactured product is going to save humanity from the very means nature uses to move us toward our bright future. Viruses, baby! Find out what they mean to human adaptation! A virus is the oppositional no to our lived in yes. It calls on our immunity to rally just like some oppositional influences in life strengthen our personal motivation.
My brother and I started off this life together. We adapted to our mothers narcissism and never fully made it past the opposition we had with her, nor her with us. We had to become, in the ways we became, because of her. We oriented our lives in ways she had carved into us, as if we were wood, and she the hard-hearted whittler. Now with my brothers departure, I cant mount the anger and opposition I learned from her, not in the face of lifes sure completion. I cant be hard and unfeeling in the face of losing my comrade-in-arms from childhood. I cant not be that child again, living alongside him while he is lifted up. I cant not feel all of it.
Now I am drifting on waves of something new, a different meaning to the waters of life, thrilling through my body in a more potent stream, here in the last quarter in my game. Im running with this ball of words and writing into new ways of I cant. What I cant not do.
Cant never did anything, mom liked to say.
Sometimes cant does it better.
This morning as I lie in bed to keep warm while the daylight began to illuminate, my thoughts were not going to let me go back to sleep, so I focused on my loved ones; one by one.
You were the first. And for the first time, I took the time to feel into the shock that rippled out of that violence, like a tsunami; round the world didn't you say?
I love what your Inuit friend said about them being together, because it keeps iterating itself in my mind that there was an agreement between them. As there must be an agreement among all life on this planet to be here and suffer the extreams that are dealt out between us all. I prefer to think it is by choice rather than by randomness or punishment and reward. I thought of the intensity of your grief, my friend.
I ended the morning with a podcast from Banyon Books in Vancouver called Branches of Wisdom.
I chose an interview with Lon Milo DuQuette (#147). An interesting character and author. About half way through the interview, he talks about the Tree of Life, and about the way it represents the evolution of human consciousness, in a fascinating way.
It reminded me of the question of aloneness and thought it a profound explaination.
Your friend’s belief of the bear guiding your brother forevermore is beautiful. I gravitate to this view since so much of the world is spiralling in negativity and fear. I choose the light as my teacher with the shadow as its partner to reach all depths and breadths of evolving. The pure authenticity of each being, the bear and your brother, is united in intense completion. Their shadows and their light as one. Yes, I am removed from the direct heart connection that you dearly shared with your brother. Yet, what I know of you from these past years, you equally delve into the meaning and mystery of such events to transform anew. Heart cracking and crushing and renewing for everyone involved.
Biblical meanings of a bear reveal stories of punishment and foreboding. From what I know, there is lack in this viewpoint: it is one-sided, surface oriented, and egotistically judgemental. The bible does not refer to bears in a wholistic way. Other sources, psychology/astrology/native american, recognize the entire energy of a bear. Your brother received all the bear energy - strength, courage, confidence, independence, love.
Your article inspires me to watch The Bear Whisperer with Blaine Anthony. He has spent countless hours with bears and can provide more realistic insight into our relationships with bears and with each other. I’ll watch it and see what comes next.
Much love to you, my friend.