Chapter Three

The Brother Who Came And Went

“ The mind is like a thief.

It has spent eons mastering the art of robbing you

 of this very moment.”

JC Mac

When I was four years old my family left England to set up a new life in Canada. It was 1957 and the British Empire was looking for people who were interested in beginning a new life in this far off British colony. My father had finished his career in football and decided that a new start meant a new life. So we sailed off to this new land and ended up moving into a little square wooden box of a house in Toronto. I remember a distinct sense of possibility in the air, not only for us, but also for the many others who had made the journey to this distant land.

Brian was the firstborn, followed by my sister Teresa. Then I came along and so did Peter, Jane and Katie. We had just a couple of bedrooms, a coal fire and a small backyard that my brothers and I used to turn into an ice rink during the cold Canadian winter months. Though we never had much we were all very happy.

There were times when all six of us would have to share a bedroom, which meant it took forever for our worn out parents to get us off to sleep. I can still hear my dad screaming: “Go to bed!” It never worked though. We just laughed and kept on playing. The summers were hot and the winters were cold, but that never mattered as we all loved running around outside, no matter what the temperature. I can remember walking home from school in the blistering cold with my older brother Brian, our clothes soaking wet from playing in the snow banks.

We would come home and warm ourselves by the coal fire while watching the little black and white TV we had at the time. Wow, how that has all changed. I now struggle to drag my kids away from their Game Boys, PlayStations, computers and the 150 digital TV channels they now have. In those days there were no Starbucks, Costa Coffee, mobile phones, wireless internet connection and all the other modern day conveniences we have today. No. My mom would throw us outside in the morning and we would pile back home in the afternoon, worn out from playing with our friends throughout the neighborhood.

Brian was the oldest and we all looked up to him. As the firstborn he held high rank in the family food chain and was adored by both my parents. As we all got a little older we began finding our own friends, but would still run into each other as we all hung out in the same neighborhood. In those days, you could walk in and out of anyone’s home on our street and be guaranteed a free meal. At times you could even be disciplined by other parents who lived on the block. I can recall stepping out of line one day and being yelled at by a friend’s father. Upon telling my parents what happened they told me that I probably deserved it. And you know what? I did. Try that in this day and age of media-driven fear and paranoid parents. I can’t even take photos of my kids playing football in the school playground without a teacher running up to me, thinking I’m some kind of a perverted nut. Wow, God help us all.

The older we all got, the closer we became as a family. It was great having so many brothers and sisters in the house even if the house was small. There was always something to do or someone to play with. A few years ago an old buddy of mine posted me (not emailed – can you believe it?) a couple of photos of our old house. It was so tiny! I couldn’t get my head around how we all managed to squeeze ourselves into that little house – and live there so happily.

Just as things couldn’t get any better, Brian went up to my mom one day and complained of sores in his mouth. I don’t think my parents thought much about it at first but he continued to talk about how painful the sores were. Finally they took him to the doctor’s to see what the problem was. Us kids never heard much about what transpired during that visit. I think there was a period of waiting to hear what was going on. When the test results arrived, the doctor told my parents to take Brian straight to the hospital. So my mom packed up his things and off they went.

In my mind everything was going to be fine. Whatever the problem was the hospital would sort it out and he would be back to his old self in a flash. We would pick up where we left off and go back to having fun and living our lives. But that’s not how it worked out. After a week had passed and Brian still wasn’t home, I began to wonder what was going on.

I learned much later on that my mom and dad were up at the hospital every day sitting by his bed in support of what was happening. Just the look on their faces when they would walk through the door at night told me that something wasn’t right. But they said he was having more tests done and that he was fine. In fact, my mom would bring home drawings and pictures Brian had been making for us from his hospital bed to let us know he was doing OK.

Then one morning a few weeks into this ordeal, my dad sat us all down on the sofa. I could see my mom at the kitchen table, silent and pale. The look on their faces pretty much said it all. In disbelief I heard my dad say that my hero and big brother Brian had died that night of a blood disease called leukemia. From the day of his first check-up with the doctor to the day of his death, it had been a matter of a few weeks. One minute he was there, the next minute he was gone. Just like that.

As an adult many years later, I had the opportunity to read the nurses’ notes that were taken from Brian’s bedside. It broke my heart to learn just how fast and how devastating it must have been for my brother to die like that. His whole body was riddled with large growths and a lot of pain. There was continuous bleeding from his nose and mouth. This caused even more suffering; the lack of oxygen left him feeling like he was suffocating to death, and he was. He couldn’t eat or sleep and in those days, even though the doctors did their very best, there was little they could do apart from pain control.  One night the doctor came into Brian’s room and gave him his usual pain injection to try and help him out, then he left. Fifteen minutes later he returned and this time he administered the lethal dose that ended his suffering – and his life. Brian was fifteen. What an act of compassion and courage that must have been. If that doctor is still out there, and someday reads this book, thank you and God bless you.

Although I was only twelve at the time, I can to this day remember a sense of fear and darkness that came over me, a knowing that something had now gone very wrong with our lives. I thought these things only happened on TV or to someone else.

After my dad told us the terrible news, he got up and left the room. I don’t think he wanted us kids to see the level of grief and tears he was experiencing. We all looked at each other not knowing what to do. So we just went back to playing on the couch, trying to pretend that nothing had ever happened. But the unfathomable had happened, and as a result something inside our family froze that day. Things would never be the same again.

It wasn’t long before the whole neighborhood would hear the news and our doorstep would be covered with flowers, cards and baskets of fruit. Our little world had changed forever. To this day, the smell of roses reminds me of that time; and more specifically everyone’s inability to deal with the topic of death. The church service was overflowing with people from all over the area. I can still see my father helping my mother walk slowly down the church steps to the waiting car; the car that took us all to the cemetery where we said our final goodbyes.

Then, as if nothing had ever happened, we never spoke about my brother again. Life just went on, but not without that deep silent wound that comes with the loss of a family member. My family’s inability to accept what had happened changed everyone and everything from that moment on.

DEBRIEF

I now have children of my own. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my parents to sit there next to their firstborn child and have to watch him suffer and die in that way.

Buddha said: “All life is illusion and children are the biggest illusion of all.” This is why I wanted this story to be the first one told in the second part of this book. It is my earliest memory of suffering and having to come to terms with the loss of someone so close to me.

As an adult, I can see now that life is always giving us the opportunity to let go. It’s just that most of us do not see it like that. As a result we learn the hard way, if we ever learn at all. I was young and too inexperienced at the time. I had no idea about the truth of how life works. It is only through a lifetime of hard knocks that I have become friendly with having to let go. Remember, we can only see what our understanding and level of consciousness will allow us to see. It is ignorance of the truth that leads to suffering in life.

I lived for years with a deep hole in my chest from the loss of my brother. I am sure the rest of my family did too. None of us had any idea of how to heal such a deep wound. We were uneducated when it came to the topic of death, yet we were all suddenly confronted with this thing that we feared the most. Fear makes us act in funny ways. The reaction for most of us is to avoid the truth and just hope that it will somehow go away and leave us alone. But it doesn’t. It hangs around in the background and haunts us. In fact, it digs deeper into our bodies and emotions and stays there until we have suffered enough to confront our fears about the impermanence of life.

At the time of writing this book, I have spent over thirty years meditating and working on my spiritual development. Although it has helped me in many ways, it still, at times, seems a long way from mastering the art of letting go and living in the moment. Even after my experience of transcending duality in 2005, the writing of this story has brought up a lot of sadness in me. Maybe we never get over it. Maybe this is as good as it gets, even when we can finally accept the way life works.

I mean if you can lose a brother, sister, mother or father and still allow whatever you feel to just be there, without the story you make up about it, you have done a much better job than me on this path. I have learned to let go only through the sheer pain of holding on, when I had no choice, when I was backed into a corner like a cut rattlesnake fighting for its life. Then, and only then, would I cave into reality. The art of letting go for most of us, is a tough lesson. Only through the relentless agony of our painful experiences do we begin to relinquish our attachments. In the final analysis there is no textbook or bulletproof way of surrendering and allowing things to be the way they are. There are many ways up a mountain and there are just as many ways to develop the skill of letting go. All are valid if it gets you through the night.

Letting go of my brother was a slow process. I don’t think my parents ever got over what seemed like a punishment from God. You see, the conceptual mind works in concepts and stories. So when something happens in life, it takes that experience and begins to add its own spin on it. The problem is that we think the story we make up about what happens in life is real. But it is not. It is only a story we invent about what happens, it is not the facts.

When this happens, life then becomes what I call a ‘real illusion.’ When we are not dealing with reality we sooner or later suffer. But when we do deal with reality, there is choice: freedom and power. We mourn the illusions of our life, always ignorant of the truth that lies in front of our very eyes.

In my business life, I often tell the story about the time I was ten and went to my first party. We were in a church basement, with all the boys on one side of the room and all the girls on the other. From what I can recall the boys were terrified of making the first move; we were all pushed up against the wall trying to look cool. My friend kept telling me to go over and ask one of the girls to dance. I finally bucked up the courage and walked across what seemed like the biggest yawning chasm in the universe. As I got to the other side, I looked one of the girls in the eye and asked if she was up for the challenge. Guess what she said? You got it. “No!” The moment she said that, my conceptual mind convinced me it was all because I had big ears, a big nose and skinny legs.

The truth is, she didn’t say anything of the sort. But that’s what I ‘heard’ and that experience influenced my behavior well into adulthood. In time, the story I made up about what happened became real and began creating my perception of life when it came to dancing with girls.

So things happen and then we make up a story about why those things happen. This is how the conceptual mind works. When it came to the death of my brother there were some pretty big stories going around. Things like: ‘God is punishing us’ and ‘God always takes the best people first and it should never have happened.’ One thing was clear: we were unable to deal with that ‘real illusion.’ My guess is if we had been able to do that, we may have been able to let go and accept what had happened sooner. My mother swallowed her grief, never spoke of it again and many years later died, I believe, of a broken heart. My father drank away his sorrows and died a few years later of the same thing.

So what did I learn from this experience? Well I can see now that no one is exempt when it comes to dying. We are all on the guest list. It happens to millions every day. Looking back, I can see that from a young age, the universe was teaching me about the power of impermanence. All things are coming and going. The more you can let everything in your life just pass through, the more freedom and peace you experience.

I have gotten better at seeing things for what they are without the story. I can report that there is a lot less suffering when we live in reality and let go of the fantasy of how we want life to be.  I have tried in vain to live out some of my fantasies of fame and glory, but if the truth were told, fantasy is not reality or we would not be calling it a fantasy. But for some crazy reason, most of us are running around thinking our fantasies are real. In fact, we are so nuts on this planet, we will even kill in the name of fantasy and delusion over the way we perceive things to be. There is no perception or fantasy in reality. Things just are what they are. In fact from a non-dual view, not only are things just what they are, nothing in existence has any real meaning, label or individual identity to it. In the presence of reality there is no story to tell. Why? Because there is no mind to tell a story. No mind, no story.

There is enormous power inherent in being able to distinguish reality from fantasy. It allows us to be with things just as they are, unfiltered and untainted by the conceptual mind. A state commonly known by many as ‘enlightenment.’

JCMac

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Author House Publishing