My Brother's Yahrzeit
- Lindsey Johnson
- Aug 28
- 2 min read
Four years ago, a toxic drug supply took my brother. Writing about him resists neatness. His life held many contradictions: intense joy alongside real pain. The grief of losing him to fentanyl is chronic rather than episodic.
My eldest brother was creative, funny, rebellious, and sharp minded, the kind of older brother who could break a bad day open with one line. He also carried the inherited weight of our family: sheltered, conflicted, silent, and the long reach of intergenerational trauma. Those realities shaped his lifelong living conditions, and they shaped mine.
I remember the first psychiatric admission when his mental health strains became visible. I remember his apartment later, the signs of substance use accumulating, his brightness dimming by degrees, and I only recognize clearly in hindsight. I read it now as part of a wider pattern in which trauma, untreated illness, and an increasingly poisoned drug supply converge to cut lives short.
Losing him fractured something in me. Yet his humour, wit, deep capacity for care, and refusal to bow to authority remain as real as the pain he carried. I hold those parts now, perhaps more insistently.
Substance use is not reducible to private choice. It is produced within histories, families, survival strategies, and policy environments that make some paths perilous and others scarce. My brother’s life belonged to those confines, and it was also singular: a life of laughter, rebellion, warmth, and deep complexity.
Today I honour him with love as well as grief. May his memory be a blessing, not only for what was lost, but for what was unmistakably and beautifully his.
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