The Man Who Made Everyone Laugh

About an hour into his bachelor party my brother John handed his wallet, shoes, and glasses to my then husband with the words ‘when they throw us out, you’re in charge of these’. Sure enough, two hours later they were thrown out after John started dancing and singing with the performers at the venue. Nothing lewd or unseemly, just John being the life of the party as he had been for most of his life.

 

Despite, or maybe because of his over the top antics John was insanely likable. He was vivacious, intelligent, creative, loving and so damn funny could be difficult being his sibling. As the oldest child, I was responsible, eager to please and mature, John was irrepressible, eager to play, and perpetually youthful.

 

Twenty years after his bachelor party, after sparkling dinner parties, animated family gatherings and overall antics and adventures, I read this at his memorial:

 

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
-W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues

 

To say John was brilliant, or merely complex would be an understatement. He was so many, many things, a brilliant creator and solver of puzzles, a talented player and lover of music, a gifted conceiver and expresser of visual arts – be they paint, pencil, wood, clay, or words, and an inspired and – sometimes overly – creative chef. There were things he tried with cheese that should never, ever be repeated. I kept to my cooking classes and books and he painted with food – metaphorically and sometimes literally. If I had a recipe flop I would be mortified, John’s flops were spectacular, and he laughed about them.

 

He created. He was outrageous, unafraid and messy. I would self-consciously draw small, precise, detailed pen and ink pictures that I would shyly show to select people hoping for approval, he and daughters created enormous canvases with every imaginable media.

 

He made everyone laugh. Now, I do Improv, and to those who never knew my brother, I might seem quick-witted, irreverent and amusing, but I’m always in control, never letting go completely, that could be messy. John went there, and it was messy, and also hilarious.

 

When my son first started struggling with mental illness and addiction John sent him homemade ‘Hero cards’, featuring Greek and Roman Gods, with points and skills assigned. Each and every one said, “Kicks Butt” and Hercules “Occasionally goes BESERK” The last card he sent was the Uncle John card. The Uncle John Hero was described as “The Sharpest Spoon in the drawer, fancified dancer, can kick his own butt, plus that of Uncle Ruth’s”, yep, that’s what he called me when he wasn’t calling me Big Nose (to be fair, my retort was to call him No Chin – this was our love language). His Attack number was 42, a Douglas Adams reference, His Thoughts were listed as “Not Often”, his Symbol was “Messy Hair and Stinky Socks”. His special skills were “Sarcasm and Burping”. The card was quintessentially John, from the cartoon caricature of himself to the stinky socks and the self-deprecating humour.

 

He was open and generous. With his love, with his art, food, music, with everything he gave openly and freely. I am more guarded, responsible always prepared for the sky to fall or the other shoe to drop. I worry about what people think of me, John appeared unconcerned with such nonsense.

 

When our father, who also cared little about what others thought and could be described as a gregarious drinker, died at 47years old of pancreatic cancer from alcoholism, John was with him and John was the one who called and told me. John was also the life of the party at our father’s, very lively wake.

 

 

Six months later, at my wedding, John gave a toast to the bride that had people crying and doubled over in laughter. He wove together his parody of Ode to a Grecian Urn with my ability to apply lipstick while driving a stick shift in rush hour traffic among other things. Later he had a brief but vigorous entanglement with a friend’s plus one in the cloakroom after convincing the bartender to open that special extra expensive bottle of what I can’t remember. When the DJ played the song Mony Mony, which at that time generally had the dance floor yelling something rude during the chorus that I really didn’t want yelled at my wedding, John dived into the dance floor and at the appropriate moment his deep voice bellowed out and over all others singing ‘RELAX AND READ A BOOK’ thus, saving the moment.

 

By now it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was described as feisty, stubborn, and as ‘Little Miss Splendid’ by my family, and John was the sweet, charismatic, sucky second child, the one who charmed his way through everything. Where I would dig my heals in and cross my arms and talk about what was ‘fair’ and use the word should a bit too often, John used charm. Wanna guess who was more successful?  It made me crazy, as I’m sure anyone with an extra charming younger sibling can understand. Everyone loved him, and he seemed to embrace life in a way that often left me feeling less than. He was more easily loved than I was.

 

 

The thing about alcoholism, the disease that killed our father, is currently kicking my son’s ass and that I have survived through sobriety for the last 14years is that it takes away the personality, and then it takes away the person that you knew and loved. We lost John, but before that he lost himself. The guy, who made everyone laugh till they cried, who sang to us, read to us, who made wonderful art and delicious food, that beautiful person, was lost to a disease that affected and distorted the way he thought, the way he saw the world, and mostly the way he saw himself. In his last decade of life, the messy, funny, carefree person we thought we knew slowly disappeared into a bottle. Eventually, he stopped leaving his tiny apartment which was where he was found dead, curled up into a ball on a dirty bit of carpet.

 

As it turned out, John felt things deeply, too deeply, he just never let on. I knew, in that way you know something but do not want to believe it.  John’s behaviour for the last several years of his life was heartbreaking. He pushed everyone away. His brain, his thinking was so distorted by this disease that the only way he could cope was to continue to try and numb his thoughts and feelings. He was in tremendous, unrelenting pain. And I knew. And I stood by and watched him die. I knew because I had hit my own bottom with alcohol and had stopped drinking years before. I was the responsible, mature, dependable sibling and that’s what we do.

 

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t protect him or save him. He was 47years old, the same age as our father when he died.

 

When a family loses someone it is heartbreaking, when my mother lost her favourite child it left a hole in our family that I simply cannot fill. For all those decades I felt in his shadow, the years since without him have made me yearn for his bright light.