All Soul's Day and my brother, Ron

My brother has left this world and is now a saint in heaven. I woke suddenly in the night and was up for a while. I learned next day this time coincided with his death.  I remember  years before hearing my mother’s voice and seeing my mother and father reunited when I closed my eyes in the taxi,  on the way to the plane. I'd been called to come to Ottawa as my father was on his last legs.  When I had  arrived  there, I learned then that the time of my ‘vision?’ and “hallucination?”, in the taxi on the way to the airport, was the exact time that he ‘passed’.
I remember long ago my ex  wife,  an identical twin,  collapsing with pain at the same instant her sister took ill thousands of miles away.
My brother was a believer,  all his life, once a powerful Christian involved Baptist youth groups and   the Billy Graham movement. Later he rejected organized religion because of church politics. He nonetheless maintained a faith in something more.  Today, he would be called ‘spiritual but not religious’.  Before he died he did not know what awaited him. Yet when I spoke to him of my transcendent dreams of our father at a river leaning against a tree waiting for him to cross, he said that he too had many dreams like that of Dad  these last few days.
I loved reading the neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander’s recent book, Proof of Heaven.  Dr. Moody’s studies of people who had near death experiences was particularly illuminating.  I’ve always liked the bardot idea of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with a cast of characters agreeing to play a life together each of us taking different roles, explaining that uncanny sense of deja due and the feeling sometimes that I’ve known a person before but in a different role.  Reincarnation is the norm of the Old Testament and remains present in the New Testament of the Holy Bible. When Constantine made Christianity a state religion the references to reincarnation were played down but they still remain, not in a backwards sense but in a forward developmental way.  Life seems to have this learning aspect for me like the kindergarten analogy so poignantly made by Dr. Scott Peck
My native friends believe that their relatives are living alongside them in a parallel world. Certainly String Theory allows for both God and the Multiverse.  I have no sense of finite.  My consciousness is dynamic.  I might well be ‘saving the appearances’ but its equally consistent to posit infinity.  I loved Hamlet’s soliloquy in which he says “To Dream that is the Rub”.  For death seems to the external observer little different from sleep yet the questions arise in the subjective sense.  It comforts me to know my brother has not ‘ended’ but rather ‘passed’.
He remains alive in the fondest memories I have of him. He was my protector as a child , my best friend and through out his life my greatest inspiration.  As a child I remember him making me grilled cheese sandwiches, I thought him so very smart and wise and mature being able to manage the magic of hot food.  He was like my mother and father when I was young.  I couldn't even operate the stove. Later I watched as my brother faced and surmounted the greatest of challenges.   Always he kept his sense of humor.
He had an amazing curiosity about the world around him. He was a scientist too and a businessman. His eye for nature and sense of timing was unsurpassed. I will always cherish that about him as it helped him capture the best of  birds and animals and flowers and outdoor scenes in photographs.  He was happiest with his family and next to that with forest, lakes and streams.
I feel him near as I ‘ve so often felt the nearness of those I’ve loved and lost. They are lost to me for now but I pray and hope that we will be reunited in heaven. I loved the Robin Williams movie," What Dreams May Come" and Mark Twain's,"Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven."  My mother taught my brother and I to pray on our knees to Jesus.  As we slept in the same room as children,  I heard his prayers to Jesus as he heard mine.
Loving my pets who have died, wonderful dogs and cats, I believe too in Rainbow Bridge. I imagine my brothers dogs, Tartan and Rain, bounding towards him as Dad takes him in his arms and hugs the great man his son has become. My mother, humble and kind hearted would wait for Ron to turn to her and then the two would hug, mom's eyes tearing as they did when she was brimming over with joy.  Mom and Dad and Ron and dogs barking and bounding around them in circles.That's what I see.  It’s what I have to look forward to too.  That, and the glowing brighter than bright light of Jesus.
And we walk to the light.  My aunt and grandmother and grandfather and uncles and friends and all of us reunited moving as a family and community into the arms of the Great Shepherd.
Today is All Soul’s Day.  Samhein is the time of Celtic Festival when the harvest is done and the cattle are brought down from the summer pastures.  It’s a liminal time when the worlds of this life and the after life are closest and souls pass easily between.
We thought my brother would die earlier this fall as family gathered a couple of times in uncertainty. Now I know my very smart brother uncannily chose the easiest passage.  Canoeing together he’d time the crossing for the safest shortest passage.  Other canoes would be floundering in wind and waves but he’d bring us to shore safely.  He was a consumate boatman as my father was before him.  No wonder I ended up a blue water sailor with such examples.  I have no doubt he will journey across the space between.  Alternatively the time was chosen for him.  This meeting of letting go and coming together.
A friend called me the night he died and invited us to attend Compline with her and her son. So there I was again in the most beautiful Christ Church Cathedral, where I was once baptized by Dean Peter and Bishop Michael and  where I had so many times prayed on my knees.  This time I listened to the chanting and recited the Lord’s Prayer in community.  To myself I  talked quietly to Jesus about my brother Ron.   I prayed for his peace.
His loving wife Adell, that day,  had told me that he was sleeping mostly.   He was taking more morphine for the pain.  We all knew the end  was very near. I’d been with him the week before when he told me all he wanted was his family near. I watched  hold the hand of his one true love, Adell. They had known and a life time of the deepest love.   Their love was a Song of Songs/   I remember when Ron met Adell he was transformed and the two together radiated.  His life took on meaning then.  I remember Adell as a beautiful but very strong girl and the two of them as inseparable from the beginning as they were at the end.
My nephews, his sons, Graeme, Andrew, and Alan,  are the very finest of  men.  I can only admire them.  I wonder at the power of genes seeing so much in them I've seen in cousins from Canada, the US and from Scotland.    They were born with this innateness but the love, education and examples of Ron and Adell have brought out the best. I love them dearly.  
When last I visitted brother and I talked for hours in the night of things we’d not spoken of since adolescence or younger.  Always woven through the fabric of his very existence was his love of Adell and his love of family.
It’s All Soul’s Day today.  How fitting.  Again, typical of my brother’s exquisite sense of timing, the skill that allowed him to capture just the right moment in a bird’s landing with his camera. All Soul’s Day is the Christian festival that commemorates the faithful departed.  I look forward to church tonight.  Tonight I will sing hymns of praise and give thanks for the greatest of gifts, my loving brother Ron who was so kind, so good, so wise.  Thank you Lord Jesus.

Gratitude, Resentment, Grief and Aging

I am thankful for my fingers, Lord.  The knife cut I did to my index finger did not severe a nerve.  The joint capsule may have been penetrated but there is no more infection.  Daily iodine  with hydrogen peroxides and bandaid changes has saved the finger.  How come I was not so careful initially when I was washing the knives.  But thank you Lord if there was any lesson I was to learn from my injured  ‘pointing finger’.  I have not had to at least have it removed. I’m grateful for that.  Help me always to see more my own faults than the faults of others, or the faults of the world.
Thank you Lord for the health of my dog.  I was so devastated when he was paralyzed that day. I was in fear all day as we drove back early from the north. Thank you for X-rays and Oak Animal Hospital and the lovely Indo Canadian veterinarian who did a thorough examination of him and found his nerves had not been injured, that he would walk again with medication. Thank you for his slow recovery. Thank you for science and medication.
Thank you for the end of elections. Help me to recover from all the hatred and shame I experienced again for standing up for what I believe in.  For years I have taught people ‘love the person’, don’t accept the behaviour.  I have taught that guilt was what we felt when we did something wrong but shame was what we felt when we felt we were wrong fundamentally as a person.  I have experienced so much shaming.  Throughout the election and even now I am told by so many that I am not a Canadian because I do not believe as the victors do.   Always shaming. Always ‘ad hominem’. I have never been ‘good enough’.  I have always been ridiculed and condemned.  Meanwhile I serve like an untouchable, treating unclean bodies and unclean minds.  Men and women get rich off the sales of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, poor lifestyle, unsafe practices, yet I am there serving, healing and helping and I am told I am not worthy to live here.  I am unwanted.
I treat many old men like me.  Some old ladies too.  There is sadness in aging. There is sadness in a whole variety of poverties yet some poverty takes precedence.  The single mothers go to the front of the line while us men whose children were aborted are shunned.  We stand in lonely groups sometimes touched by the men and women whose children were killed in crime.  I huddle next to them.  Their sons and daughters murdered or killed in war or by accident Somehow we face dying together in the greatest of loneliness. I have no tie to this world, no illusion of immortality.
And so much I gave in taxes, taken from me, voluntarily though, I had no choice, to pay for education and children and I supported the children of others knowing my own were killed.  I am a laughing stock.  Worse than a cuckold.  The women jeer at us men whose lovers killed our being and say ‘you deserved it’. Man. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
I am shamed for being a man. And I’m not even a very good one.  The heterosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a man and the homosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a woman. I’m divorced and divorced men are the scourge of the earth.  Divorced women were obviously done wrong by men but divorced men get what they deserve.  They’re contemptible.  I was punished and condemned in the courts, laughed at by the judge whose eyes did not look at me but instead focused on the loosely covered breasts of the one who had once said she loved me.  As I once said I loved her.  In the end I paid her all I had financially. She was smug in profit.  The courts made their money too. The judge looked like he wanted to have a tryst with her.  He ogled her. She looked coy.   I was thrust aside. Loser. Fool.  Shame and humiliation.
50 shades of grey.  The billionaires are worshiped.  The women read with lust what girls are willing to do for the monetary winner. Eva Braun ruled all of Germany.  Only her man is condemned.


My mother is dead.  She didn’t do drugs or drink.  She insisted we go to school. She loved education.  She insisted we go to Sunday school and church. She loved the Lord.  She insisted we play hockey. She and my father loved hockey.  So I fished with Dad and hunted and fixed cars with my brother and my father. I learned cooking from mom and mixing cement from Dad and I helped him build buildings and boats.  My parents had lost so many friends in WWII.  Dad had served in the RCAF. A spitfire mechanic and a bombardier.  My parents met in the war.  Dad and Mom weren’t racists. I didn’t know racists till the government began dividing and conquering the people by calling everyone racists.  My black doctor didn’t even know he was black in those days like I didn’t know I was white.
Dad didn’t know that being a man and being white was wrong.  He didn’t think of himself as coloured.  My mother and her sister had black friends.  They were Baptist.  She didn’t have Catholic friends.  Dad had Catholic friends and Jewish friends and Buddhist friends and Hindu friends and secular friends.  Our family were as coloured as everyone. Mom joked about us having freckles.  My brother and her had red hair.  
Dad liked smart people, people who did things, ‘made something of themselves’.  Always growing up I heard my parents say, “It doesn’t matter where a person has been it’s where they’re going and are they building things up.”  Mom and dad most admired people who were working and taking care of their children.  They didn’t like people who were ‘living off of the government because they were too good to do a honest day’s labour’.  They didn’t like people who weren’t willing to ‘get their hands dirty’.  They especially didn’t like people who stole and criminals.
 “I didn’t fight for this country so I had to put a lock on my own doors,” my father told me.  The judge who lived a couple of houses over was a rip roaring falling down drunk and my parents didn’t have any time for drunks. They especially didn’t like drugs.  “Wasting their lives.  Caring for their own pleasures when they should be caring for others.  Not caring how much their behaviour hurt others. That’s their problem."
They both said, “You always were too smart for your britches.”  “I don’t care if the teacher is wrong, you’ve got to learn to not tell them that because they’re hurt you for it. The more wrong they are the more they hurt people who are right.” My aunt was Indian. My Baptist aunt was the executive assistant (we called her his ’secretary’ back then) to Canada’s ambassador in Washington DC during WWII. My grandfather arrived as a poor immigrant from Scotland and homesteaded northern Canada to become a great rancher and lumber man.  My other grandfather arrived from Ireland. Both poor, the “made something of themselves.’  They “didn’t take handouts’.
My aunts and mother told me the history of things.  The teachers told me lies. I was strapped by the principal for correcting them. The same occurred in chemistry when the teacher had the equations wrong.  But he didn’t have me strapped. He corrected his equation and thanked me.  That’s probably why I liked science.   We were caned in gym class, our buttocks bared.  I got my first ruler in kindergarten.  The female teacher undressed me in front of the class and held me across her knees smacking me hard over and over again on my naked bottom.
Much later I was punished for stopping men and women killing people. The people whose job it was to ensure the safety of the children hated and shamed me for stopping the killing. The provincial enquiry years later vindicated me but a half dozen babies more were killed before that occurred.  I never received an apology. I was never returned the money and time I lost for doing the right thing. I was suspect then. I didn’t keep quiet and mind my own business when I saw people being killed and raped.  I wasn’t a ‘team player’ they said in the government.  There is no “truth and reconciliation” for ‘whistleblowers’.
I’m surprised I don’t like S and M.  So many boys have come out of school spanked so many times like me that they at least got some pleasure sexually later from their twisted education.  I just got this twisted idea I’d stop people being abused. I try mostly to stop people from ‘turning anger inward’.  They continue to hurt themselves after being hurt so much by others.
Now the government tells me I can’t touch people.  Standing helpless in my office men and women cling to me and their tears run down my suit.  I cannot hug them.  All over the province men and women physicians are being publicly threatened fines and loss of license if they touch a patient, especially if they hug a patient.   I eventually push them away and tell them the government says that doctors can’t touch their patients even when they are grieving. There are so many laws today.  I am afraid of everyone and everything.

Thank you Lord for these moments of peace. Thank you Lord for bringing me safety this far. Thank you for the light. Thank you for the coffee and the cream and the porridge. Thank you for this computer. Thank you for letters and language. Thank you for the opportunity to learn. Thank you for the chances I’ve been given to make something of myself.  I am still walking upright. I’m still able to help others.  I am so thankful that my finger still works. I am always in pain, Lord.  I am just so thankful that it’s not as bad as it has been. I am so thankful that I can get out of bed and get to work and have some work.  I look back and remember the abject poverty of those years of being a student, giving blood for books, not having food because I paid the rent, eating at family and friends because I had no money. We were in love then. We lived so simply.  Years and years of hand me down clothing, hand me down furniture.  We pooled our resources for a party. I studied from 6 am to 12 pm and saw formulas in my sleep.  I lived in hospitals.  I went for years without sleep.  Plane crash. Polar bear chasing me.  Deadly diseases.  Old people dying in my arms alone in the night giving me their last words as gifts.  I thought I’d never get clean. The lice, the bacteria, the virus, the sickness. I was sick for so many many years.  Tuberculosis. I was treated for a year.  She condemned me for going where no one else would go. “You’re not a Christian, you’re a fool.” she told me when I wanted her nakedness and she was angry that I flew away to serve the aboriginals because, “no one else would’.  Now no one cares.  The government regulator sneered at me and said, “It’s just a job.”  I’ve never got my back pay. There never was a bonus.  Everyone said I had status but ever shopkeeper raised the price and stole from me.  All the while the government took in taxes and paid themselves fat salaries and froze my income.  Among ourselves we laugh if we make minimum wage.  7 days a week for how many years is it I worked and was on call. No overtime. No on call. No danger pay.  I fell asleep in an operation.  I wet myself too.  An adult man peeing dribbling unable to hold it. all night with an unforgettable bowel after a shot gun wound.  I wake with nightmares screaming lost in guts that are perforated seeing faces of suicides. It’s a good week when I don’t remember, when I get a full nights sleep.  This morning I woke at 5 am.  Now I know it’s just the rain.  It’s the darkness and the rain. It’s that season. I remember the rains coming and the palm trees flying over my car, my windows knocked out.  The rains and the darkness. I’ll get used to it again.

Thank you Lord for the memories. When I smoked pot and drank wine I forgot.  I don’t remember my holidays. Those brief weeks when we’d get away from the ‘front’ and escape to beaches.  I drank wine and smoked weed and now don’t much remember those days while the horrors of guns in offices and knives and the angry faces fresh from jail in withdrawal demanding valium and more valium or narcotics and more narcotics threatening shouting.
She said I ’sexually harassed her’ when I asked her to leave because she was stealing and smoking crack. She ‘d been raging and shouting at the Indo canadians in wheelchairs.  She hated Indo Canadians.  I didn’t know when I hired her. I didn’t even know she was a drug addict. I didn’t know she prostituted. I took others words. She lied. I didn’t know her johns had been her references. I didn’t know that her minister was her bisexual lover. I’ve never known anything when the shit hits the fan. I’ve been so focussed on saving a life that I didn’t know that I was being stolen from. Only when the bank balance didn’t match did I know something was wrong.  Only when I saw the receipts from the store did I realize that she was a thief.    Everything she said and wrote didn’t match. Lawyers showed that.  A hundred lies but it was never about truth.  I told the truth and was condemned for it.  Government’s don’t want the truth.
The government woman said, “Women don’t lie about sex.”
I learned there was no ‘justice’ and went to work pro bono with my friend who was killed when he said that only the rich could afford justice in Canada.  I still think it was a hit.
Thank you Lord for the lifting me up. These moments come and go. The set backs. Reflecting on people saying I’m not a Canadian.  People telling me to leave Canada and that I’m not wanted here.  It took me back to the time when I was getting death threats, when my windows were shot out by 22’s, when my cars was keyed over and over.  I had been diagnosing alcoholism and addiction and saying that people were unfit for work. The management thanked me for halving the accidents on the job. Men and women thanked me for making their workplaces safe but the cost was high. Drug addiction changes a person.  The pot heads were just as violent as the alcoholics and cokeheads when it came to wanting revenge.  Here there were having this good thing, the doctor before me saying they were depressed and giving them a week or two in hospital to dry out before they went back to work to wreck havoc on management and their fellow workers.  He was the loved doctor.
"The other psychiatrist  never asked about alcohol and drugs but this knew little shit doctor did and he fucked me up. The fuck cost me my job writing down what I told him I smoked and drank. It was supposed to be confidential. When the insurance company saw it they said that I had to go to treatment. I didn’t want to quit.  I just wanted the other psychiatrist to keep writing a note saying I was sick because of my bipolar disorder.  I didn’t want this fucking asshole to fuck me up.  I talked to everyone about him.  I didn’t think it was relevant to tell anyone how much weed I was smoking when I was working.  It’s medicine. It’s a herb.  It’s not like the pharmaceutical’s that little shit puts people on.  The boss is just like him. A fuckking shit. Keeps telling me I’m forgetting and not concentrating on the work.  Claimed I caused their multi million dollar machine to break down.  All the stress he was giving me made me do coke. I needed it to concentrate at work after I started the day with a few shots and a doozie or two.  Then I go to the hospital for my normal break, like we all did with the old doctor and this shit blows the whistle.  Of course I hate him.  Fucking boy scout.  Little do goober.  Of course my friends and I made his life miserable. After what he did to us he’s lucky he didn’t have an accident."

Now I’m just sad, now , alone.  Thinking how many lives I must have ruined drug testing.  If I’d just backed off, turned a blind eye like my colleague, these guys might have gone on to be Prime Minister or at very least headed the company. Instead they probably left regular work and went into growing dope full time and becoming part of the multi billion dollar BC industry that now has essentially been pardoned as well as getting to take the money and run.
I’ve never been “pardoned" in my work.  I’m just scrutinized, regulated, criticized,  shamed and threatened. They call the punishment different names like ‘re-education.’  It’s still punishment.  The hitters get paid and the victims get framed.  When I was doing so much pro bono work, about 20% of that years income, because the parents didn’t pay their premium they and their  kids couldn’t see private doctor and they were told to go to government clinics where they didn’t want to go because everyone their judged them and put them down, I saw them.  I didn’t get paid.  May e $20,000 loss of income a year. I thought like any business I should be able to declare it as a loss so I did.  Revenue Canada sent out three people to audit me. It wasn’t an audit. It was harassment. They went through all my books.  At the end of a week, this thug said, “No doctor sees patients for free. We haven’t caught you yet, but we’re watching you and we will.”  Every private doctor I know works for free but we’re not allowed to declare our ‘losses’.  Even today people miss appointments and I  don’t pay but I can’t declare my losses against my earnings like all other businesses can.  The reason is that psychopaths think others think like they do.  Lizards think other think like lizards.  So our government doesn’t do anything for free.  And they can’t understand a physician any more than an insect can understand a bird.
It’s not good to stew. It’s better to help someone. I am so thankful. When my mind wasn’t working I used my body to carry folk. When I couldn’t lead I followed. Today I know the people I’ll see are hurting more.  I have so many people with cancer and surgeries and all I do is provide relief.  The heroin addicts are far gone but here and there one awakes and wants to live.  I’m happy to provide solace. I love to see people cured. But now we’re all getting older and the only cure for life is death.
I think of that too much these days.  Kierkegaard, “Life is suffering unto death’. I think a lot about my buddhist days.  I’m praying and meditating.  I miss rejoicing.  I miss dancing.  I have to have a shower and get to work. Everyone is always angry that I’m late. Some days I’m afraid to leave my office. A day of my life has not gone by that someone hasn’t been angry with me. A year in my life has not gone by that some official hasn’t hated me and tried with all their power to destroy me.
 For so many years the friends of the man I stopped killing people haunted my life. They were in so many high places and their loyalty to their drunken dangerous friend was admirable.  They were more afraid than me.  I saw that but now a couple of them have died and the others are retired.  They’re rich and have young wives and their children visit them.  They tell war stories like we all do.  They’re victors.
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a victor. Maybe if I’d set my eyes higher. As long as I can remember I've just wanted to survive and help others survive.  .  Thank you God for letting me survive. Thank you for the easing up of my back pain and the healing of my finger and my dog. Thank you that I can type.  Please banish my anger, my self pity, my negativity, my comparison, my jealousy and envy and my resentments. Help me rid myself of these character flaws so I can better celebrate this new day and be grateful for all that you have given me.