Exactly one year and one month before I sit down to write these words, my cousin Dustin died. His body was found in the handicap bathroom stall of a McDonald’s in Surrey. Overdose. Through tears, my mother notified me. The text from my uncle simply read, “Dustin has been found deceased.” After a year of living on the streets of Vancouver, what we feared would happen, happened. He was gone.

———

Eulogy: an act of speech or writing praising someone who has died; an exercise in futility.

Six months after his death, family and friends gather at my uncle Warner’s house, to remember him. The last time I was here was a couple years prior, for Dustin’s annual Christmas party. He spends hours slowly roasting a pig, invites everyone over, fills our bellies with pork. On the drive to his memorial, I rehearse the outlines of a eulogy. But I never say any of it that day. To my shock, nobody says anything about Dustin—we do not explicitly acknowledge the reason we are there. Uncles and aunts, grey-haired heads and stooped backs: all would’ve preferred a different order to the family funerals. Standing around in his yard, we talk around him.

…

As an attempt to capture someone’s life, eulogies cannot but fail. When a life ends, especially young, it feels impossible to tie the threads—past and future—frayed by death. But that is why we perform these paeans of pain for those we loved: to show that we are willing to try, and fail, on their behalf. And what is love but the willingness to try, and fail, on behalf of another? Over a year after his death, I finally try.

———

Childhood: an act of imaginative recreation; a collection of memories.

I revere Dustin, in that way distinctive to young boys amongst each other. He is a year older—stronger, taller. He throws farther, and this is especially significant to me. He skates backwards faster, and can cross-over in both directions. His bicycle is more expensive. According to the standards most important, Dustin is a better version of me, and that’s how I see him.

A memory: stopping by the Marysville rink, saying hello to Dustin, Bets, Warner. They’re speed-skating. I’ve never seen anyone speed-skate before—nor have I since. I see Dustin, in a skintight suit, atop long slender blades of sharp steel. Making those graceful turns, he seems to be channeling some ethereal icy feminine force.

My mother holds up Dustin as the paragon of a tough, capable boy. I refuse to rake pine needles in the yard: it’s raining. She reminds me Dustin is in Northern BC, helping build a cabin: “turn off the cartoons, get outside.” A hammer is heavy in my hands; Dustin can wield a chainsaw. It’s too cold and the hike is long and steep; Dustin, impervious, forges ahead, daring me to keep up.

Another memory: the 2001 Wasa Olympics, four boys playing a series of sports. Dustin and me, against Cole and Cody—Dominican Republic vs. Canada. We play basketball, soccer, a sprint and bike relay; we find some old golf clubs, see who can hit the farthest. All day long, Cole and Cody can’t win a single game. We play until it’s clear to both participating nations that team Canada is no longer having fun.

…

It always felt good to be with Dustin—good in a way I can’t fully articulate, even now. It’s not just because he was bigger, stronger, louder; not just because he had a way of being ‘larger than life.’ (Still on my friend’s phone: a video of Dustin wrestling an antlered buck in a back alley.) It felt good to be with Dustin in an added sense that perhaps only visible minorities in small towns can fully appreciate: when I was with him, I was with the only other boy who looked like me. Furthermore, we had a familial and Caribbean connection. When with him, it felt like two things that ought to be together, were. I never told him that. I wish I had.

———

Adolescence: an act of stage setting and performance; a search for affirmation.

As high schoolers, we’re not as close as we could be. In the same class, I often sit beside him, but we don’t eat together at lunch. In classes, Dustin plays the clown, talking, joking. Teachers have favourites, and those kids get away with murder in their class. But Dustin is nobody’s favourite. Mostly, he’s tolerated. I sense the teachers don’t want to risk trading barbs with him—he’s too quick. To reprimand him is to make oneself vulnerable.

“Dustin, can you please keep it down back there?” / “I’m sorry Mr. Brennan, I didn’t realize you had your hearing-aids in today!” / “I don’t need hearing aids to hear you being so disruptive…” / “I guess not once you’ve trimmed those ear-hairs!” Laughter erupts, the teacher retreats; if not wounded, then wary. I sit beside him, horrified, proud.

The teachers ultimately have their revenge. Senior year, at a school dance, Dustin and a few other boys get caught drinking in the washroom. Three-day suspensions. But it is only Dustin who, at the end of the year, is prohibited from attending prom. The other seniors giddily arrange dates, solemnly costume ourselves in oversized suits, preen for photos with family and friends. Dustin is barred from the marquee moment of the drama of high school—on the outside looking in. He plays the role of nonchalant tough guy. But as the curtains close on school, I know that every smiling photo we snap sends a small stab through his heart.

…

Being an outsider was a theme of Dustin’s life. Through an adoption arranged by my mother, he was brought as an infant from Las Terrenas to Kimberley. Raised in a place where he didn’t look like anyone else. Even when I called him my cousin, I’d often clarify with, “well, not actually my cousin by blood…” Even as I claimed him, I held him apart.

Then when he was a teenager, his adoptive mother, Bets, died. And so Dustin lost that one person who was supposed to love him most, twice. The person who is supposed to protect you, and advocate for you, or worry about your questionable new friends. Precisely the kind of friends who fell upon Dustin in the wake of Bets’ death, gave him a semblance of the belonging he so desired, and forever altered the trajectory of his life. He got involved with drugs, violence, went to prison. In our small community, he became marked. Years later, he still felt that scarlet letter upon him. It kept him away from Kimberley, even when it was time for him to come home.

———

Adulthood: an act of spreading oneself through creation; a confrontation with the world.

Dustin has a way of dropping in. During summers, he shows up unannounced. We sit down for a coffee, visit. After a while, he gets up, drives to the pub, returns with too much food. He’s ordered the menu. We eat, continue visiting. Hours pass. Dusk sets, shadows stretch across the living room, before swallowing themselves. Mom gets up, goes to bed. Still, Dustin stays. He and I talk. But inevitably the conversation falters, and we sit together, in the dark, not entirely sure what’s going on, but happy to be together. An apt metaphor for life itself.

A few years before his death, my mother takes Dustin back to the Dominican. His birth mother, Christina, has recently crashed her motorcycle, lost her leg. Dustin sits with her for days, and late into the night, applying bandages, wiping away fluids as they weep from her wounds. He becomes tender caretaker to the mother he never knew. All week long he’s met by brothers, cousins, uncles, all of them bursting with love for him. To look at the photos from his trip is to see him surrounded by matching eyes, dimples, hairlines—he finally belongs. And yet, unable to speak Spanish, he’s still fundamentally apart. On the cusp of belonging, he’s outside.

…

Am I saying that Dustin died because he was adopted into a different culture? Because he had no black role-models? Or because he lost his adoptive mother? Not necessarily… Dustin died due to a whole host of complicated reasons: a calamitous war on drugs that has led to the spread of far more potent substances, less likely to be seized; punitive policing tactics that often mean other people present don’t call for help when there’s an overdose, out of fear of being thrown in jail themselves (was there someone else with him in that bathroom stall?); a prison system lacking sufficient rehabilitation and reintegration, which leaves ex-felons disproportionately more likely to die from over-dose; and even because of a housing crisis, particularly out of control in Vancouver, which has contributed to the disappearance of cheap, long-term motel rentals, once the last roofed-refuge for people who now find themselves sleeping on the streets. For Dustin, it took the combination of several factors, both personal and political, to conspire to put him in that stall, and end his life.

Our lives so often turn upon hinges affixed behind our backs and beyond our ken. Some people are adopted; some people grow up in a place where no one else looks like them; and some people lose their mothers at a formative age. I’ve met people to whom one of these things has happened, and it largely defined their life. Dustin is the only person I’ve known who experienced all three.

———

Death: an act of… ; a story others tell about you to each other and themselves.

My mother calls Christina to notify her of her son’s death. The baby she sent to Canada, to live a better life; the baby who returned a man, to care for her. I think of the sound she makes from the other side of the telephone. To call it crying is not appropriate. It is guttural, wheezing—a wounded animal struggling to breath. There should be a word for the crying of a mother who has lost her child. Perhaps there is, in some language more discerning than ours.

In dark moments, I see my big, strong, deer-wrestling cousin splayed out on a coroner’s table, where under a dispassionate gaze his tattoos are matched and catalogued in a database, before the state incinerates his body. His death a statistic in BC’s opioid epidemic. His discovery the anecdote of some fast-food employee—“you think your first job was hard! This one time I went to clean the bathrooms and…”

In lighter moments, I imagine Dustin using the money my sister sent him to buy a bus ticket home. I imagine him moving back to Las Terrenas, learning Spanish, a house by the sea, a wife, children; a pillar of the community, helping build homes by the beach, as he once built cabins in the woods. I imagine trips to visit him, his crocodile smile, as he shows me the place he finally feels he belongs.

…

A few months before Dustin died, Warner asked my mother to witness his will, leaving everything to his son. Dustin died unhoused and alone, but on the verge of becoming flush with cash, and with a family who desperately wanted him home.

Recently, Warner prepared to sell the house, and I helped him clear things out. Because I could not toss them, I’m now surrounded by Dustin’s possessions: some contraption, still in its box, which he bought to clean his carpets, but never got to use; his circular mirror, which I look into while shaving, and imagine him having done the same; his Carhartt jacket, which once fit his broad shoulders, now hangs loosely on my frame; his BBQ, which he used to so generously feed us, sits idly in my garage.