Perspective

It’s been three years since my brother, David-Ross Boyer (b. September 26, 1974), left us on February 23^rd, 2013. As time passes, it’s getting both easier and harder, with all kinds of contradictory feelings and insights. For those who loved David and for those who have experienced a similar loss, here are my reflections on what I have learned so far.

Cycles of grief: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross famously wrote about the five stages of grief, which have provided guidance and comfort to many. For me, her work has not provided either, only a source of irritation when that well-meaning person tries to categorize my stage. “Oh, still angry are you?” the judgmental tone thinly disguised. Instead, I have found grief to come in unpredictable waves, with many feelings at once—acceptance, anger, fearful, compassion, sadness, inwardly focused, outwardly focused—and never in the linear way Kubler-Ross’s theory describes.  Though I am no expert in her work, nor am I in any work about grieving for that matter.

A more helpful construct was what my mother learned from her counselor.  Namely,  we will never “get over this” (as one wicked person asked my mother after church, just months later). Rather, the task is to adapt to our new reality without David. We are no longer a family of four, but now a family of three, with a whole new set of dynamics that we have to relearn.  After disruption, a reordering occurs, but it will never be the same.  My daughter, almost four now, will never know her uncle, nor mercifully know the sadness of not knowing him, but will grow up hearing stories about him. I need to adapt to that new reality in the most positive way possible. As the wonderful novelist Neil Gaiman argues, stories are the longest lived of our human creations, the closest vector to secular immortality that we have, so I will select these stories carefully and intentionally. When I am ready. I’m not, yet. This gives me some low level anxiety, to be honest, the “not being ready.”  When will I ever ?  I don’t want her to see the pain in my eyes, in my heart, but last night she demolished these assumptions when she cheerfully said,  “It’s OK mummy, Uncle David is in my heart.”  I’m rendered speechless.  Clearly, what these cycles of grief are doing is helping me integrate these new realities in a sequence and speed I can handle.  And my daughter can handle a lot more than I know.

Confusion then clarity: These cycles of grief are confusing. Because one minute you are fine and fully functioning, and then the next minute you bawling out the window of an airplane as it ascends to altitude, baffling the poor man sitting next to you, making him extremely uncomfortable. Because there are days now when I don’t think of David, and then when I do, I feel a tonne of guilt come crushing down for not thinking of him. The voices of judgment and recrimination rain down: Am I a bad sister? Did I really love him? Am I going to forget him… his voice, his hands, his handsome face? Why am I am making this about me when it was he who suffered? Is it because I’m afraid of dying? And so on. Most people feel these irrational, recursively maddening thoughts. A death triggers heady existential questions which we can spend a lifetime avoiding. But this confusion and questioning, I’ve learned, is part and parcel of any transformative process, the precursor to clarity. And I am so so so much clearer now about what I want in life, where I prioritize my time and energy, and what matters the most. This is the true gift of grieving. If you let it, grief can transform you and others around you— and for the better. It burns like a wild fire but the gnarly underbrush is cleared out. Grief’s gifts include a sense of grace and gratitude, words which had little meaning, only the neutered spiritual pap I picked up from catechism class. For me, grace is a transformative attribute now, a super power.  Indeed, if you can find it in you to reframe grief as providing you unexpected gifts, a hard task I know, this will get you through the roughest of waters.

Contracting and connecting: In the first two years, I contracted, retreated, and rationed out my emotional self for sheer survival. My daughter was nine months years old when David died so I had to prioritize what left I had inside for her. My husband was skyrocketed into senior management and needed my support as well. My poor parents got the emotional dredges, if that.  I still feel gutted by not being there for them. My close friends, same deal.  This set up some impossible tradeoffs in terms what I could give people around me, which I never had to do before. I usually had energy and time for all. No longer.  Trauma is exhausting, a surprising discovery for those like me blessed with an abundance of stamina and many many protective privileges.

The good thing is that this period forced me to simplify and stop doing many things that were no longer serving me well. I shut down the consulting business I was running, something that was a clear burden. I started taking better care of myself: Yin yoga, somatic therapy, and long walks. I stepped back to rethink how I was living my life and what work I  wanted to do in the world that really mattered.

By year three, I feel more like myself than I have in decades. While still grieving in waves, I find I can heal best by connecting with others, by reaching out and sharing what I need but also what I have to offer.  All of sudden I am sending Holiday Cards to all 175 people in my friends and family network, something I have never done before because I considered the whole card thing a waste of time, money and too gendered, one of those vestigial housewivey practices.  All of sudden, I’m volunteering on Boards and helping others with their life’s work without any of the conditionality I had before. As a result, I feel more alive, more fully human, more able to relate to others because of this experience. It’s as if a dormant store of resources has been opened inside, which I now have access to. (Soon my husband will be asking how these resources translate into remuneration. One thing at a time…)

Reading this now, I feel a little embarrassed. I feel like I’m being interviewed by Oprah. But I suppose there are worse comparisons and scenarios.  Suffering is the great leveler, the great connector, for no matter your status in life we all suffer at some point.  Buddha, who I thought was a total downer in my 20s, was onto something.  Jesus too. List all of the spiritual greats and they have a response to human suffering, because we all have to negotiate the facts of death.

Complex causes: Searching for the single answer to why David ended his life— the tormenting why, why, why!??? —will surely drive one mad and do nothing to advance our understanding of his path or others like him. So far, it’s been so easy for us to explain his suicide away when we say, “he was suffering from depression.” Nothing further needs to be said, nor do people press any further. Given that mental health is still taboo, the case is closed. Because why would someone choose to end their lives if they were of sound mind?  Research and data into suicide suggest otherwise.

The truth is, like many suicides, David left us for many complex reasons. He left us because he was ashamed by a series of bad choices, stretching back decades. He felt a burden on his family, deeply unworthy as an adopted son, incredibly stressed out by ensuing legal battles and bankruptcy, and because he was so darn loyal and loved us so, he felt his exit would protect us from any nasty fall out, perceived or real, from his ill-conceived deeds.  Increasingly isolated and misunderstood by his peers, he chose a less conventional path in life—for example, living in an RV in the BC bush near a forestry camp in the dead of winter to write his follow-up to Tolkien.  Towards the end, he felt abandoned and betrayed by his closest friends, which to their credit were unwavering in their support, exhausted by decades of events, and were present when it mattered… except when they weren’t.  None of us were.  Again, it’s complicated.  I want to blame, I have blamed, and will likely blame myself and others in the future for things said and done or not done.  But this accomplishes very little.

So, no one cause explains David’s final choice.  But this is best understood is a series of interacting causes and choices  over time.  This is hard to acknowledge because our brains love simple answers, and because this causal list in its  truthfulness implicates us and challenges us to consider our role in how he shaped his choices. Perhaps that’s why we hide behind the black box called “mental health” when discussing his suicide?  We don’t have to ask hard questions of ourselves as individuals and as a community. Whatever the case, if we are going to prevent further tragedies, we need to face up these complex realities. As recent studies on the startling rise of Boomer suicides show, mental health is rarely the proximate cause but often an amplifying factor, an enabling force. I think that is true for my brother as well. It wasn’t just his depression.  He just used that in the end to get the courage to exit.  It was everything else.  Those bad choices; the bad luck of his near-fatal biking accident (that probably triggered CET in his brain); the feeling of being stuck with no better future, railroaded on a collision course that he thought would hurt those he loved the most.

The bitter irony is that I’m a professional foresight expert, someone who helps leaders adapt to disruptive changes and find those better futures ahead.  My very last in-person conversation with him just weeks before was “I can help you think about your future once all this crap has passed.”  This offer was too little, too late.  He was already committed to no future.  For many reasons, I neglected to bring this unique capacity I have home, to where it could really have counted in his life.

Compassionate appreciation: At the end of the day, there is nothing we can do to change the past. The only we can do is appreciate the best parts of it—including my amazing, open hearted, quick-witted baby brother and the stories he brought life to— let go of the bits we cannot learn from, and take forward what we can learn from as honestly and compassionately as possible.

Instead of judging how my memory of David is changing, how the poignancy of loss is lessening, how I don’t think of him daily, I am now appreciative of how our brains and hearts protect us from such suffering and loss.  We have co-evolved to do so. Compassion is a social evolutionary trait, like cooperation and competition.  This seems like an obvious observation given how much suffering we have endured and inflicted over the millenia.  But with so many normative judgments in our heads, it remains counter-intuitive—even morally repugnant.  About two years ago I ran into this research surveying just how many of us rebound and adapt, even in the face of the most terrible loss. My first reaction: these guys are totally wrong and complete assholes!  Clearly, some information too early  is not helpful.  When the initial shock hits, the idea that we will feel better is ridiculous, inconceivable, a fairy tale. But my curiosity in neuroscience and human adaptability won out in the end.  Today I marvel in our human capacity to adapt and grow in the face of adversity.  Not everyone is resilient, of course.  But most of us are.  Even with the biggest of heart aches.  That’s amazing.

That word “compassion” is bandied about a lot by Yogis and New Agers, discounted and dismissed as something soft by others not familiar with the concept.  To the contrary, I learned how compassion is both highly practical in coping with loss and the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.  Just try a “loving kindness” exercise  towards something you abhor to your core— like a terrible death of a loved one or someone you believe wronged him and triggered his demise— and you see what I mean. But I have learned compassion is one of the only ways to really perceive the truths of things, especially hard truths, which if served up in their natural state, gritty and grim, are too hard to swallow. Compassion also gives us new eyes and access to so more information, a more holistic picture, about what is going on in any given interaction or system. It’s also emotionally costly and thus not to expended lightly.

On a final note, one only learns compassion through practice and falling down in the process.  For the first six months, I used I have vivid, ghastly nightmares where I was with my brother in his final hours, minute by minute, watching and bearing witness to his penultimate pain. It was a full-on sensory horror show, down to the smallest detail.  Not even Hollywood would screen these images.  When I shared this with my psychologist, the one helpful thing she said (before I fired her) was that I was trying to connect to my brother’s suffering in a way I didn’t when he was alive. She was dead right, no pun intended. That evening, the dreams stopped never to recur.

I may not have connected to my brother’s suffering when he was alive, but I have learned to be compassionate with myself for not doing so, and this sensibility has rippled out to others in my orbit, however inconsistently, and I hope for the better.   Let’s not forget David and others on this railroad, nor forget to honestly talk about the causes of his leaving us with clear-eyed compassion.

Xxoxoxo

Nicole-Anne Boyer, San Francisco, CA

February 23, 2016

OBITUARY (FOR REFERENCE)

One of my first new responsibilities was writing this obituary and then delivering his eulogy, a reality shock to say the least. 

September 26, 1974 – February 22, 2013 David- Ross Boyer Jr. passed away February 22nd aged 38 after years battling depression. He will always be remembered for his handsome ear-to-ear grin, dry wit, warm heart, wide-ranging intelligence and interests, down-to-earth nature, and most of all, for the tremendous loyalty and love he had for his friends, family, and colleagues. Born in Vancouver, David attended Vancouver College and graduated from Brentwood College (1992) where he rowed and found his tribe of life-long friends. He studied at UBC, became an air conditioning and refrigeration specialist, playing an integral role within the family company. David loved to travel, cook, was an avid outdoorsman and deeply connected to Woodlands and Indian Arm where he grew up. He is survived by his loving parents David and Eltie Boyer, his sister Nicole-Anne Boyer, his brother-in-law Toby Paterson, his baby niece Jacqueline Paterson, his grandmother Joan Germiquet, and many aunts, uncles, cousins and beloved friends. He was predeceased by his grandparents, Doug and Jane MacKay-Dunn and G. Ross Boyer. Thank you to Dr. T.C. Gibson for his help during David’s life. Friday prayers will be held on March 8th at 8pm. Funeral service, Saturday, March 9th, 11am, at Sts. Peter & Paul Catholic Parish, 1425 W. 39 Ave., Vancouver, reception to follow at The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club at 1pm. In memory of his gentle, genius soul and to make the world he left behind a better place, please donate to Lions Gate Hospital Foundation for the Hope Centre (lghfoundation.com) or BC Mental Health Foundation (bcmhf.ca). Condolences: respectance.com/DRBJr –