Once the plane started to ascend from that Nova Scotian peninsula, headed back home to Alberta, I felt my stomach drop as the grapefruit in my throat started to dislodge in a deluge of sobs. My poor faceless-voiceless neighbor beside me tried to offer words of comfort throughout that first couple hours but I couldn’t manage to form a sentence. By the time we landed, there were no more tears left to cry and so buried the rest of that heartbreak for another later, more appropriate time.

This was the first time in the past week since I had received the news that this thing that happened became real. In a practical sense it had always been real in terms of planning logistics and organizing people. That week was so messy, but I will try to recount the details here.

I had just got back to our apartment on Morris Street, it was a lovely place in downtown Halifax on the third floor above a Mediation space that later turned out to be a cult! I was living with Kate there, we went back to visit her there a few years later, you might not remember but I have pictures. There was a business card from a detective lodged in the door when I returned with a note to call ASAP which immediately made me think something had happened to my stepdad, Dave. I rushed in and called him right away (from a landline) to make sure he was ok, but the conversation went a bit like this:

Me: hey is everything ok??? I got this note from the Halifax police!

Him: (throat clears) no, it’s not.

Me: what happened??

Him: did you call the detective back?

Me: no, I just walked in and called you!

Him: oh…you should call him

Me: can you just tell me what happened?

Him: (long pause) Justin’s body was found at the bottom of the coulee where the bridge crosses. 

At this point the phone slipped out of my hand and my knees buckled so I’m not sure what has said next. My boyfriend at the time was with me and put his hand on my shoulder which immediately reminded me that people were present and I should pull myself together and figure out what to do next.

Me: sorry, what did you say after that? I dropped the phone.

Him: I am going to ID the body tomorrow so I will update you and book your flight.

Me: ok, thank you. I will contact my bosses and professors to take a week off. It’s final exam time before I graduate. Does mom know?

Him: I sent the police to tell her in PEI but I’m not sure…

Me: of course, right. Ok I guess I better call her then and figure out how to get her back to Alberta

Him: thank you.

I had to sit for a minute before I made that call to my mother.  The call didn’t consist of much talking anyway, just her bawling while I tried to explain that I would rent a car and come see her in rural PEI where she now lived to sort out her flight. When I hung up the phone both Kate and the bf were looking at me teary and what seemed to be fearful or I guess worried (if you think I’m bad at reading emotions – I was even worse back then) and asked what I wanted to do now and what could they do? I said let’s make these blintzes and watch Sopranos like we had planned to! Really? Yeah, I need the distraction. Keep in mind that back in those days we had to rent a series and really binge it before we had to get the DVDs back to the movie store. So that’s what we did.

I don’t remember traveling to PEI or talking to my supervisors at my two jobs (Pete’s Frootique where I had a disciplinary note over the hue of red in my hair and Curry Village, where my boss would swoop in and swipe our tips from the table since our ‘tip’ was the leftover curry that he served us at shift’s end). I know I did get to PEI, where my mom was living with her new younger boyfriend who she insisted I also book a flight to Calgary for. The rest of the time was me comforting her and asking her about funeral arrangements, which she declined to discuss until after the funeral arrangements had finished.

There is a lot of time between Sopranos and Blintzes and that flight to Calgary that I can’t account for. I know I didn’t sleep. Dave did positively ID Justin’s body so there was official confirmation and every time I would close my eyes all I would see was his beat-up body on a medical table, decomposing after sitting for three days at the bottom of a dry river bed. He had been missing for 2 days, so when a dogwalker discovered his body and told police, they had to show a photo of it(him?) to people on the university and college campuses for an ID. A girl in one of his classes recognized him. I was feeling so guilty for leaving him in Lethbridge to fend for himself and felt sick about it. This was my fault. Sure, Dave checked up on him but they didn’t get along great and I was on the other side of the country, shirking my responsibilities in order to selfishly better myself. I also felt guilty because a part of me felt relieved that I no longer had to vigilantly protect my crazy little brother from death anymore every time he picked a fight with someone at a bar, or a sports event or ate something weird off the ground or didn’t eat at all but just sipped on a 4l jug of chocolate milk for the weekend.  The worst had happened.

That time in Calgary was a bit of a blur too as I stayed in my (now ex) stepdad’s new condo, calling friends and relatives who were like strangers and discussing details of the funeral, putting together a memorial and arranging a photo collage. Dave’s parents helped me with a lot with the funeral protocol and Joanne was of course at the funeral parlor with her 2 cents to add about why I needed to see his body while my mom and her boyfriend and Dave and his new girlfriend stood by looking awkward. I did not need to see his body for closure. That is a myth. He was cremated shortly after.

The funeral wasn’t much of a funeral at all, although that is a strange thing to say because this was the first funeral I had gone to in my entire life; but it was more of a wake held in the ball room of a hotel in NE Calgary near one of the Arby’s we’d pick up $5 roast beef sandwiches and the Earl’s where one of my friends in high school worked and down the street from a Denny’s we’d go to in the middle of the night to talk cause mom said our voices were too loud. He had so many friends and they told a lot of great stories; everyone was nervously laughing. I can’t remember if I told a story myself or even addressed the group. I do remember thanking and consoling a lot of people including Vanderheydens who had come and my boyfriend’s parents who lived in Calgary.

At some point I must have slept. At another point I went to Lethbridge or not, I’m actually not sure. I think Dave and some of Justin’s friends cleared out his dirty room in a shared college house and brought it back to my stepdad’s friend’s farmhouse. My mom refused to come because my stepdad was there. Then she eventually came after I negotiated with her and her dad and her loser boyfriend but then when she did arrive she refused to look through Justin’s stuff with me or to let my stepdad help. I was able to negotiate to have my step-grandpa, you know the scary prison guard one you’d meet in Kingston in couple of years. I didn’t know what to do, I’d obviously never been in a situation where I had to divide up my dead brother’s life between the people who loved him. There wasn’t even that much stuff, but grampa Doug told me to just take a breath and that whatever decision I made would be fine cause Justin didn’t care. He was right. Kind of. I split up clothes and achievements amongst the parents and took whatever garbage was leftover while giving some of his stuff to his besties who had been like family.

Meanwhile, the cause of death was undetermined. Because the Lethbridge police were notoriously inept, Det. Dave Jennings got permission to open another investigation led by Calgary Homicide and interviewed the train conductor who saw what happened. The way the day went was like this: Justin had his wisdom teeth pulled that week and was on some strong painkillers. I had spoken to him before and after the surgery, in fact the night of his disappearance. Now this was before texting, so we spoke on the phone whenever he was at home, he refused to take the bus and was way too cheap for a cab (no uber yet either) so he ended up couch surfing a lot. He went to a party and had a few drinks but left early, while on pain killers. At this point in his life Justin would occasionally quit drinking and just stick to slurpies to detoxify – yes I know that makes no sense. He had just ended one of those sober ‘detox’ periods and was debating taking the pain pills at all. Lethbridge is divided in half by this giant coulee I have mentioned before, there are 2 bridges that cross it, but one is a train bridge called the High Level Bridge, for trains only, with no place to pass as a pedestrian for 1.6 km. However, it is the bridge that is the shortest distance between downtown bars and the university side of neighborhoods so its not uncommon for people to try their luck on the short cut across the train bridge since most of the time there was no train coming. This time there was. The conductor of the train saw Justin on the bridge as he was approaching. In his statement he saw a person try to make space along the side for the train to pass but since there are not handrails he fell right off and died on impact, 314 feet later. It was so dumb and chaotic and that’s how I knew it was true. The investigation ruled his death accidental. I wished I had been there to talk him out of that stupid idea like I had done for the previous 23 years of his life, but I wasn’t.

By that time I had flown back to Halifax to write the final exams for my graduating year that I had postponed for this life altering event. I bought a dress with Kate and went on with my normal Halifax life of working and studying and hanging out with my boyfriend and friends in the last month of my undergraduate degree. I was soon going to be the first university graduate in my family.