I’m the only one left

On Tuesday evening I was about to settle down on my bed and watch some Netflix before going to bed.

As I was about to lay down there was a rapid knock at the door. I walked over to the door and opened the peephole but I couldn’t see anyone so I said “Hello?”

A voice answered back ” Hi, this is the Vancouver Police Department, we’d like to talk to you, you’re not in any trouble”

I opened the door.

The one constable introduced himself and he asked me if I knew why they were here.

I invited them in.

I told the one constable that I was pretty sure that it had something to do with my brother as just about everyone else in my family was dead.

He asked me what my brother’s name was and I told him.

He said that beforehe could tell me anything more that he’d need to check my ID. So I provided him with my ID. He said that the name on my ID card didn’t match what they had on record. So I told him my birth name.

He then said that he was sorry to inform me that Scott had been found deceased in his apartment. The last he had been seen was on August the 8th and the police had been asked to do a welfare check on the 13th. And Scott was found on the floor of his apartment.

I told the constable that I wasn’t surprised. Scott did suffer from Grand Mal Epilepsy and he also had five stents in his heart.

He asked me if I was going to be okay. I told him that I’d be fine. And I guess the way that I said this took him by surprise a little. So I gave him an extremely brief “Reader’s Digest” version of my dysfunctional family and how my brother and I only started talking in 2013 after I went to Federal Court for judicial review. I said that prior to that Scott and I really had no use for each other, and that was the way that Richard raised us.

Currently the Alberta coroner is conducting the autopsies and toxicology testing and once they’re finished they’ll give me Scott’s death certificate. The only thing the medical examiner has said so far is that Scott’s heart was pretty well plugged solid.

Once I have his death certificate I can go to Edmonton and check out his apartment to see what I want to keep, what can be donated, and what can go to the trash.

It also looks like I’ll have to figure out what to do with his body. Creamation is probably what I’ll end up giving him.

Then I guess I have to settle out his finances. I’ve never had to look after anyone’s affairs before so this ought to be interesting.

I’ll have to check to see if he had a will. If he’s like me, he probably lived day to day without any longterm plans for the future as quite honestly we never expected to have a future.

It’s just too bad that he doesn’t get to find out if we prevail against the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence. That’s one thing that he had been looking forward to.

Growing up as nothing more than glorified trailer trash living on Canadian Armed Forces bases in the hidden squalor of the PMQ patches with out of control alcoholism and angry men with untreated PTSD and other issues meant that life sucked for a lot of kids.

Sure, there were the good families on base, but more often than not they’d turn a blind eye to the dysfunction that was going on all around them.

When we lived on Canadian Forces Base Downview in Ontario, my father Richard pretty well abandoned Scott to the little thugs, wannbe gangsters, and outright shitheads that ran riot in the civie houses around the base.

As such, Scott was involved with the juvenile justice system in Ontario.

But, Richard just didn’t give a fuck.

As I said previously, Richard didn’t keep my brother and I because he loved us. Richard kept my brother and I because, as he told his friend Jacques one evening, “As long I they live under my roof, I control the costs. If I send to live with the bitch mother of theirs I may as well sign my paycheque right over to that cunt. And that’s not about to happen”.

The Canadian Armed Forces knew that they had a problem with spousal abuse. But the Canadian Forces turned a blind eye to it. When it came to child abuse and child neglect on the bases, the military did everything it could to pretend it didn’t happen.

Scott had tried to get on the right path over the years, but he always ran into the same ghosts from the past that I had. I think that once Scott realized just how horrible of a father Richard really was and how defective Scott’s childhood had been becuase of Richard, he started to change.

And so it goes, with Scott’s death I’m the last of the Gill / Waniandy clan.