He was my brother

The strange thing about losing someone is that eventually you get back to your normal life.  At some point in the grieving process, when you think about them you understand, even though you hate understanding it, that they are no longer here.

It’s an uncomfortable acceptance.

On the one hand because you are no longer gripped by the ignorance of shock, like we were with Matthew’s sudden passing, you realize that it’s true, he really is gone. But because it is a cold and horrific truth, you exhale slowly through the reality of it each time it hits you, because ultimately you hate that it’s true.

A flash of Matthew at age five still instantly projects itself on the white screen of my mind whenever I’m in another room and I can hear Deaglan laughing. It’s a strange phenomenon, because they aren’t related by blood. Matthew was my adoptive brother after all; which hurts me to have to clarify because in so many of the most important ways we were true siblings.

He was my brother.

When you lose someone significant, even when you’ve accepted that they’re gone from here, you never stop noticing the hole their absence has left. If you’re like me, you find yourself sometimes desperately trying to fill that hole. There’s a guy at work I’m constantly trying to win favour with. He’s charismatic, funny, smart.

And he’s gay.

I find myself longing for his friendship. I try to be my most entertaining, cool self when he’s around, save some of my best material for those times when we happen to be leaving work together. He’s likeable in general but I also feel oddly envious of his life. He is in his mid forties and lives with his long-time partner, who is equally lovely.

He’s comfortable in his skin, I can tell.

They live in a quiet little town outside of the city with their two dogs. They have a pool and go on vacation twice a year. And for an openly gay couple they are extremely well received in our work community. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like and respect them.

It’s the kind of life I always wanted for my brother. 

I’ve been thinking about Matthew so much lately. He’ll be gone for three years as of next Tuesday, May 21. 

His friend Libby has set up a charity run in his honor. She chose World Vision because up until his death Matthew was sponsoring a little girl from Bangladesh. She and some of her family and friends are going to run a half marathon to let the world know that Matt lives on in their memories. You can read her tribute here.

This past Saturday I pushed myself to run an extra five kilometres as a first step to get myself ready to join them. 

I think he'd like us raising money to help children in need. He never experienced poverty like that; he grew up in a middle class family here in Canada. And he often told me that he loved nice things. I can attest to this - he always looked and smelled wonderful. But I know in his heart he understood that this was not all there was. 

He really got it. 

And it had more to do with the fact that he had three adopted sisters and one adopted brother who had first-hand experience with the wretched poverty of the third world, although I'm sure this helped shape who he was.

No. 

I think he was born with that kind of heart. The kind that felt things just a little more than the rest of us. The kind of heart that understood pain he wasn't living himself. It's one of the reasons I connected so well with him. 

It's one of the things I miss the most.

 These photos, these precious few that I have of him with Deaglan, well they are my absolute favourite.

 Here he is at our wedding, with my niece Kelly. God he was gorgeous.

My brown skin

I'm aware of my skin colour almost every minute of every day. When I told a friend this recently she was genuinely surprised. She said that it was something she never thought about. When you are not a visible minority, it probably isn't on your mind.

Being brown is something I've had to grow into accepting.

When I was seven I left Bangladesh and quickly began the process of adapting to life in Canada - life in white Canada. Because my sister and I were adopted by a caucasian family, we lost our language, our customs, our religion - our ethnicity so that eventually the only trace of that other place you could see on us was our brown skin. Slowly we learned the new ways so we could function in our new family and society.

There was no one to teach us how to make a scrumptious daal or tuck in a gorgeous sari. No passages from the Koran were read to us, no Tagore ever quoted. Even our names were replaced by new more acceptable ones. I remember thinking years after it happened that the kids were simply wrong when they used to taunt us with Hey Paki you stink! We were clean and curry-free. We smelled the same as they did.

In my dating years I often had to do the asking out. Guys (the ones I wanted to go out with) simply were not all that interested in me because I looked like I was from a different culture. The complicated thing for me was that they looked like they were from my culture, the culture I had spent the past ten years acclimating to. I wasn't interested in dating Asian Hispanic or African men only because they weren't familiar to me.There were lots of years spent feeling envious of the attention my white friends received from boys. It's not that I was ostracized because of my skin tone - not at all. But it seemed to me that blondes really did have more fun, that a peaches and cream complexion came with it the freedom to never have to prove how smart and fun you were.

And it always made me wonder how I would treat my heritage, my background, and my skin colour with my kids. What could I offer them that they couldn't read in a book or online themselves? After all, it was how I learned about the country of my origin. I read about the war which forced my parents to carry two tiny babies (my sister and me) through rice fields, hiding by day and fleeing by night until the issue of territory was forcibly decided. I read about the ceremonies and practices, the language and art, the authors and poets and I even read the holiest book of that place in the quest to know what I might have known had I stayed.

For years I felt disconnected - looking a certain way but sounding and acting another. Even though there are thousands and most likely millions of immigrants who are forced to get Canadianized, most still have ties to their cultures through family and friends. What would I give to my children of where I'd come from, who I was?

The answer came to me after I lost Matthew. I thought about his life, how difficult it was for him as a gay teen, how after coming out he felt the need to move to Toronto to be around people of the same culture. I remember some of the things people said - even people in our own family - some of the terrible hurtful things. And I always felt the pain of it as if it was being said to me. I realized that I always felt the hurt when others were being condemned for their race, creed, colour, size or orientation. I became conscious of the fact that I could not tolerate intolerance! And this was what I must give to my boys.

An intolerance of intolerance.

An oasis of freedom and justice

A friend of mine went to a family function a few weeks ago where her mother-in-law in describing someone else said to my friend..."well she's like you, she doesn't cook or clean either."

When she told me this story we both rolled our eyes and laughed because this was her mother-in-law's way of saying..."my precious son does everything around the house you lazy good-for-nothing."

But it made me think about how things have changed and also about how there will always be a generation or a group of people who will resist those changes.

Because if you think about it, no one even bats an eye lash when they hear that the woman of the house does all the cooking and the cleaning. It's as it should be they all think. But often when I tell people that Shaune does most of the cooking in our house they are truly impressed and can't believe my fortune to have found such a rare man. This always makes me wonder - how far has the woman's movement really come???

And this lead me to consider all of the other developments we've seen in the last few years. While we can certainly look at them and say - yes the world has really come a long way - it's just as easy to say - what the hell took so long?!!

Take Obama for instance. Even though I'm not an American, I can sincerely say that we have seen a new day and one that I am thrilled that Deaglan has been witness to. But not because I am so grateful that a black person was given the job but because it's about time a person was elected based on his abilities regardless of skin colour. I feel relieved that Deaglan's generation might not have to continue to evaluate a person's worth based on the colour of their skin but the content of their character.

And I also mulled over the legalization of gay marriage in Canada, the fourth country (after The Netherlands, Belgium and Spain) in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. Although July 20, 2005 is the official date that parliament passed the Civil Marriage Act, many parts of Canada (almost 90 %) had already legalized gay marriage since 1999.

My reaction to giving people in committed same-sex relationships the same benefits commonly associated with committed heterosexual relationships is - it's about f*#@ing time! Maybe it's because I have been a visible minority all my life, or maybe it's because I'm a woman, or maybe it's because I've had to sit helplessly by and watch gay friends and family get treated like less-than-second class citizens because we live in a society that has little to no tolerance for anyone that even remotely deviates from the narrowly defined view of what's 'normal'. Or maybe my reaction is based on a combination of all of it.

All I know is that these changes certainly make my job of raising a child a bit easier. I mean really, how were we supposed to tell our brown-skinned children to dream about being the kings and queens of the world when they had no kings and queens to follow? And how were we to teach our children to be proud of who God created them to be if our world and our society didn't support them in their individual splendours as full citizens? And how could we tell our girls that they were just as capable as boys in whatever they pursued if we were also busy telling them that anything to do with family and home was also solely their job??