It’s been a whole year now and you would think things should have changed, yet somehow they haven’t. When I hear footsteps moving slowly down the hallway outside my office, something inside me fully expects to see Brendan’s face pop up in my window, eyes bright, smile beaming and despite all my best efforts to gesture that I’m on a call or in a zoom meeting the door will still open and he’ll lean in and tell me what he’s up to (usually off to grind coffee in the kitchen) and how things are going downstairs and what new role or responsibility Aimee has imparted to him today. Oh how I miss those interruptions. I’ve realised most of my zoom calls are deadly dull without the possibility of a Brendan interlude and a quick dash to mute my mic.

Brendan was neither a saint nor a scoundrel. To treat him as either was to miss the fullness of who he really was. The former was too full of pressure, too denying of his pain and his past, of his wrestles and struggles; it was setup for failure. Some tried to treat him this way, as a story to be paraded. The latter was far too harsh, too judgemental, too quick to see the brokenness and the anger and miss the reasons for both. Some treated him this way, written off as beyond help and shown the door but the Brendan we knew lay, like all of us, somewhere in the middle. A confusing blend of saint and scoundrel. One day lost in the terror of a bad hallucination, past pain flooding in, and the next arms raised in worship, lost in a much more holy high. The wrestle was real. Some days it was all we could do to keep him in our space, knowing, at least for now, that drink wasn’t available to him and there were other days where he would be lost for hours in a piece of art he was working on. No amount of calling his name would break his concentration and a physical hand on the shoulder was required just to stir his attention away from his peaceful intoxication by the masterpiece he was creating.

I’ll never, no matter how hard I try, forget this morning a year ago. Arriving to paramedics doing all they could is an image that is seared in my mind and one I desperately hope to never relive but equally burned in my mind is the next few hours as many of our Friday Church and Storehouse community gathered in shock and grief. It was a room filled with people who on paper don’t belong together. People who, the world would expect, shouldn’t overly care but I watched as the next few hours were full of true community. Of folks from radically different backgrounds and stories processing grief and loss together. We laughed and we wept, we shared stories and memories, we drank coffee (not brewed to Brendan’s high standards), we asked questions no one knew the answer too and wrestled with our deepest doubts and fears. We prayed, we hugged, we invited the comforting presence of Jesus to hold us and we were, in grief, as one.

It’s a moment, a final gift from Brendan, that has deeply impacted me. In our combined loss we were pulled together in a way that we, maybe, had never been before. He had woven himself so deeply into our community in small and often unseen ways. He had impacted each of our lives in tiny increments and here we sat, not with just our individual pain but with communal loss. It was a stark and painful reminder to me that this thing works. That despite what culture and society might scream at us it is possible to truly love one another across all our differences and all the things that “should” make us other. There are days that I forget this is the point. There are days I think we’re here to fix people or sort people out or somehow make them better. Those days when I’ve “lost the run of myself”, when I’ve drifted into saint or saviour mode, it is people like Brendan who pull me back from the edge of self-delusion. I can’t fix anyone, I’m just as in need of fixing as anyone else, and that was never actually the point.

We loved Brendan as he was and he loved us, as we were, in return. There were days I held out hope for something more, like when he burst into my office excited because someone in our community had offered to spend time helping him with his reading, not as a project or a new programme but one on one, as a friend. There were other days I held my head in despair when pain or grief or anger had got the better of him and drink seemed like the only escape route but in the midst of both extremes were so many days where Brendan helped me remember that the whole point was to be the kind of community that simply holds each other, whatever kind of day it might be.

Brendan was neither a saint nor a scoundrel, like us all he was a confusing blend of both. He was ferociously protective of those he loved, sometime to his own undoing and he was deeply faithful to our Storehouse community. We all feel his loss greatly, not just today but every day and we are so thankful of the many many lessons he taught us and ways he shaped us to be one.