Positive Outcomes

 

I haven't been home all that long from attending my brother Marks funeral in Mackay, Queensland. I am extremely reluctant to let the death of my brother pass without some navel gazing.
One of the most irritating things I was told repeatedly by people who had no real idea of what they were talking about during the 4 days I was in Mackay was "You're just like your brother".  I found this deeply irritating because I am nothing like my brother, I didn't look like him and he and I couldn't have inhabited head spaces with less in common if we had tried.

My brother functionally committed suicide. I was told by my sister that whilst he had wet himself when he died....which we all do due to muscles relaxing....he hadn't shat himself. This means that he wasn't about to have a bowel motion....nothing in or near the rectum to expel. When I was helping clean my brothers flat out shortly after arrival on Tuesday December 16, I noticed that his pantry had a number of sweet biscuits, there was chocolate, there was Cola...the high fibre foods I had encouraged him to eat...were closed. This suggests that in his final weeks that my brother had abandoned a healthy diet and returned to one consisting solely of refined carbohydrates, sugars, caffeine and red meat. Precisely the type of diet that he had been eating prior to his first heart attack in March and cardiac unit at Mackay Base Hospital had told him not to eat. This decision to return to a diet that had nearly killed him at the start of the year was a conscious one. My brother had stopped making an effort at returning to health.

Mark's life was dominated by laziness and an unwillingness to take responsibility for his life. He took easily multiples of his own body weight in medications so that he wouldn't have to get to the messy business of dealing with his mental health issues. There was always going to be a magic tablet or new psychiatrist that would fix things for him.  Mark displayed a pathological aversion to what he needed to do and I have done. He never wanted to get his hands dirty dealing with the past and character flaws that handicapped him so clearly.

Mark wanted the positive results without the effort. The simple truth is that the world doesn't work this way. He once asked me: "What do you need to do Honours?"

I replied: "You need and passion. How fucking badly do you want it and how fucking passionate are you about it?"
This is true of life itself. The best lived lives have been those that have displayed deep passion for what they were living be it their loved ones, mountain climbing, literature, or research. The best lived lives are passionate events.
What also defines the best lived lives is responsbility.  We who live properly also take responsibility for who and what we are. We accept and admit our failures both as people and in the choices we make. You cannot rejoice in your success and passion without accepting your failures.
With my brothers life as an example of how not to live and die firmly in my mind, I have made the decision to deepen my commitment to the life changes I had begun implementing before he died. I will use my brothers failure to generate the motivation to seize the positive outcomes that he never did. My changes and decisions are permanent....just like my brothers were.