Farewell My Best Friend

Near the end of my drinking days, my mental health went for a hiatus due in part to my morbid reflection over nearly killing someone in their house with my car.

My mind is swirling and shifting over my foul disposition due to my lack of positive options. I am mentally ill and I know it...

My younger brother, now eighteen to my twenty-seven, and I had rented a condo together in Clearbrook, near W.J.Mouat Secondary.

I didn't know what to do with myself, I stopped going to work and spent my days tramping around Clearbrook in the rainy season, hatless, soaking wet, runners squishing with each step I took, directionless, fighting demons in my head.

I had lost my keys to the condo and took to sleeping in my car with no brakes and no insurance.

Whenever I made it back to the condo, my brother wasn't home to let me in. So I continued sleeping fitfully in my car by night and tramping about aimlessly by day.

One day I ended up in Abbotsford at my Doctor's office, quite a trek from my usual around Clearbrook. We talked at length and my Doctor determined I was in mental distress and took me across the street to the hospital and checked me into the psych ward.

A few days later my brother came to see me and showed me a couple of Karate moves which I stumblingly mimicked and he told me I was going to be OK and I believed him. That night I slept well for the first time in months.

And that was the last time I saw my brother alive.

As I started fitting into the psych ward way of life, my mind kept racing, debilitated by heavy doses of medication, and unsteady on my feet. At least I was safe. I had a warm bed, three square meals a day, and all the attention I could stand from the nurses who were trying to help me regain my faculties.

One early morning, when I saw the psychiatrist he asked me "what would you say if I told you your brother was dead?" I said, "I would say you're full of shit, I just saw him the other day and he looked fine to me." "He said no I'm afraid to tell you it's true".

That was how I found out David had been killed in a workplace accident the evening before.

Later that day our mother came to see me and I took one look at her anguished face and I realized before she said anything that it was true my little brother was in fact dead.

As my mother filled in the details: that my brother had been working late and it was dark and rainy and he was cleaning out the shoot on the rock crusher's conveyor belt, because he hadn't shut the machine off before attempting to clean it the pulley nearest him caught his coveralls by his chest and had twisted the air out of his lungs and he promptly died.

Later when he was found, the machine still running, he was kneeling, hardhat under him with his fingers intertwined in front of him as if in one last prayer before he died. Although the pain of his loss was acute, there was some comfort in the fact that he seemed to have braced himself for the hereafter.

In the weeks and months to come, I imagined where he had shut the machine off and someone unknowingly turned it on again not realizing my brother was cleaning the shoot. Most likely he was in a hurry to get out of the rain and cold and he took a shortcut that cost him his life.

Each scenario I imagined culminated in the early demise of a smart, funny, tall, handsome young man losing his life far before it was his natural time, just about a month before his nineteenth birthday.

If you find value in my story please leave a tip so I can continue developing different scenarios. Thank you