This is what personal blogs are for, rly

Monday the 13th of August is the 20th anniversary of my brother's death, a fact that takes my breath away at odd moments. I have mentioned him obliquely over the years, as his memory bobs up and down. Today I will go full frontal. Ish.

Twenty years is a significant anniversary, and aside from the usual feelings of loss, grief and helplessness, I feel an urge to know what some of his friends are doing now, and since I have this first-person narrative thing chugging along on teh interwebs, I thought I would put some feelers out there in case any of you know anyone who knew him.

So rather than attempt to say all this in an personal notice in a newspaper, I have placed an abridged In Memoriam notice in a couple of large newspapers for today, and at the end of the notice I have placed my blog address, and that is why I am posting about this today and not Monday. No doubt the newspaper typesetters will set up my notice in a rather ugly fashion and the blog address will blend together with the personal message completely illegibly, but those who are interweb savvy will hopefully get the gist. Maybe others will think it is poor taste to promote a blog in a death notice, but it is 2007, for goodness sake, so get jiggy wiv it.

This is the ad I placed (or how I would like it to look):

FLORANCE, Jamie Andrew
1/12/69 - 13/8/87

You were wrong: life isn’t better without you.
You are loved and missed.

www.ampersandduck.blogspot.com



I didn't include the photo, of course. It's a very old and battered photo, and the only one I could find. I get so used to seeing images of him at my parents' house that I forget that I have none around my own house apart from this so-very-alive one. Yes, his t-shirt says 'adildos'. He was a teenager :)

I would also have liked to expand that line a bit to: You are loved and missed, especially by those who would like to have known you. By that, of course, I mean Bumblebee, and Best Beloved.

Bumblebee thinks and talks about Uncle Jamie constantly, and is very concerned that we don't visit his grave enough. I've tried to explain that I don't feel the need to visit his grave site often because I don't feel J's presence there, but B likes the formality of a graveside visit. And I think he was deeply impressed by the year we went to a florist to get a flower to lay on the grave, and 5-yo Bumblebee was asked by the shop assistant if this pretty flower was for his mum or grandma. 'No,' he replied seriously. 'It's for my uncle, he's dead. He killed himself.' The shop assistant went to pieces and gave him the flower for free. I'd never really made a fuss about visiting a cemetery with him before that (it was a bit like visiting a playground), and it was his first taste of someone treating such a subject seriously.

Best Beloved finds the topic poignant, probably he is a little bit younger than Jamie and can see it on a peer level. He wishes he could have met him, especially after viewing Jamie's Good News Bible, his school's religious textbook of choice, altered during many long boring Religious Ed classes, with every line drawing adapted and captioned in a hilarious Monty-Python-meet-The Goons fashion. I think that Bible is my family's most precious possession, a capsule of my brother's taste and ability in comedy. Always look on the dark side of laugh.

And my parents and I just miss him, like a gaping hole in our lives, slightly patched by the inclusion of B and BB, but something that will never, ever be filled properly.

Here's a few things about my brother, just in case it jogs anyone's memory or social set:

He went to Cranbrook School, in Sydney, Class of 1987.
(No, we weren't/aren't rich, he had a full scholarship that is only given once every 6 years to a Defence Services child. Just in case you were wondering.)

Yes, Class of 1987 means that he died the year of his HSC exams. Just before his trial exams, actually. And his friends were NOT given permission to delay an exam to be able to attend his funeral. But they came anyway.

His story is quite similar to the film of Looking for Alibrandi, especially the area of Sydney used in the film, and the schools the characters went to. So similar that when I saw the movie, I couldn't see the credits for tears, and I wondered if the author, Melina Marchetta, had known my brother and his girlfriend. I don't think so, but I don't think I can ever watch the movie again. The book was published only 5 years after his death. It's too close to home, literally, or at least the home we were in at the time. Except that my dad wasn't a bullying perfectionist lawyer-type that drove his son to his death, or whatever it was.

When he died (he gassed himself, on our kitchen stovetop, BTW) his friends tossed some ideas around on how to commemorate him at the school. One idea was a plaque on one of the toilet cubicle doors. He would have loved the silliness of it, but the school thought it was undignified and refused, missing the point completely.

Names of friends I can remember without ringing my parents (who will probably find this post excruciating): JJ, Sam, Gaby, Justin, Julia, Rod, and Kathi. I hope you're all doing really well, and having happy lives. I'd love any of you (and any others) to get in touch, by commenting or by email (mentioned in the sidebar of this blog).

I wasn't, to my eternal regret, around a lot at the time, but that's not anyone's fault. By the time we got past that whole 'my sibling is dumb' phase, I was at university having a big sister life, and although we wrote and visited and got on extremely well, I mostly got long-distant reports about what my family were going through for the 9 months (there's that irony again) between his nervous breakdown and his death. Nine very hard months for my parents, who tried everything they could think of to keep him alive. And we had plans for him to come and live with me while we both went to uni, so I guess I was counting on a bit of quality time then. But no, it was not to be.

Actually, the message I really wanted to print is:

BAD CALL.

If you know anyone who is showing suicidal tendencies, tell them it sucks. It sucks big time. It really does. For those who go (gee, you showed 'em), and for those left behind constantly wondering why (no matter how many reasons you give them) and if they could have done anything, or anything else to help. It's a lose-lose situation.

Anyway, that'll do, Pig. He was a good brother while I had him, and I hope he's happy where he is. I have a number of drafts of notes he tried to write, and the last line of one of them is:

I know you can live without me. Please do.

Smarmy bugger. As if we had any choice, bless him.

Scenes of illness, death and disarray

Dedded

Well, that went as well as might be expected. I didn't get any leads on friends, but I don't think my blog is a hub of national activity, so I'm happy in the knowledge that if anyone googles a combination of Jamie Florance, Cranbrook School and suicide,* they'll find me here.



Many thanks for all your warm comments and suggestions.

Yay!

One very happy outcome of all this was the discovery that Lord Sedgwick and I share a non-blood kinship that made the universe fall into place in a number of ways. One of my favorite family friends is one of his favorite friends, and thus this small beautiful world gets smaller and more beautiful. I wish we'd made this connection when I visited Melbourne earlier this year, but I'm sure it won't be too long before we can all get together over some wine and have a giggle.

I rang my parents and told them about this discovery and was startled to know that my dad has a lot of admiration and respect for LS and his activities, at least for the ones he was doing a few decades ago. I felt a bit young and out of the loop. It's nice to know there are still fun things to learn about your family!


Blerk

I drove a frigging long way to drop sent Bumblebee off to his dad's place on Friday, with stern warnings that B was to have a quiet weekend since he was committed to perform for two solid days at the impending Step into the Limelight extravaganza.

When I got him back on Sunday he was puking and coughing simultaneously, with a high fever. I know he would have picked up the bug a few days before, but his illnesses always manifest themselves on his dad's weekend, and his dad always dismisses them as less than they are. 'It's just a cold', he said. At 10.20pm (the earliest we could get in), I was at the after-hours doctor at the hospital, getting antibiotics and being warned to keep a close eye on him.

This being the night before the 20th anniversary of my bro's death, and almost exactly 10 years after Bumblebee almost died on the operating table with open heart surgery, I got a bit stressed. My life is full of neat little patterns, and I was terrified that this might be one of them.

Don't get me wrong, Bumblebee was nowhere near Death's door, I was just exercising my right as a novel reader, film watcher and paranoid mother to imagine the worst. So I had a fretful night's sleep, going out occasionally and feeling his forehead, checking to see him breathe. And in the morning, there he was, pale but alive. Of course.

He's fine now, and the upside is that we don't have to go to that horrid performance. He was going to be singing and waiting and singing and waiting for two solid days. And we were going to have to be there the whole time. He's NEVER going to have a chance to be a child star because I don't have the patience to allow him to be. Bleck.

Kitty disarray

To add to the 'fun', the cats caught a bird on friday and dragged it inside, where it proceeded to flap up and down the house, beating itself against windows and trying to escape the claws. When I got home from school pickup, there were feathers EVERYWHERE, especially in the bathroom where they seem to have plucked out most of its poor tail.



The loungeroom was covered in feathers, and there were scenes of disarray, like on the dining table where BB had just lined up a batch of freshly-filled jam jars, ready to be wiped and labelled.



The cats were sitting on the lounge, not looking terribly excited, so I thought all the action was over, but I couldn't see a body. Then Padge got up leisurely, sauntered over to the kitchen, and jumped up on the bench. It was then I noticed the bird wedged up behind my dishrack, trying to make itself invisible, panting and terrified.

Bumblebee freaked out, so I asked him to lock the cats outside while I caught the bird. Unfortunately, while he was herding them, the bird flapped away and landed on the floor, and they pounced again, which freaked him out even more. Lordy, it was chaos. Eventually I got the cats out, caught the bird, put the cats in, and took the bird outside. I didn't know what to do! My mother would have killed it; she possesses a calm practicality for these things that I can only take so far. I tried to make it comfortable and get it some water; it had only 3 tail feathers left, a bite in its side and a bite near its neck. But the wind buffeted it and it took the opportunity to use the last bit of its energy to flap up into the nearest tree, where I couldn't reach it. The next morning I went out to look and it was dead, cradled in the branches. I hope it didn't suffer too much.

Our cats are well belled, and they aren't allowed out at night; I can only think that Friday's freak winds (very hard, very fast, very loud) gave them an unfair advantage. We praise their mouse catching, but they know they have been bad when they catch a bird, and they've only done it twice in three years. They now have a new name: bird butcherers.

But I don't think it bothers them too much.







* welcome, if you have done that. The full story is the next post down.