Tribute for a lost brother
and the lost country he served
Samuel Holmes Billington, 1981 - 2023, with his flag art
For Froddo’s faithful friend
Sam
What was plain
was the primal plaintive pain
that detained your jet plane
from lift off.
Ascension suspended
riveting you to the hangar
hanging on, never
fully pivoting
into flight, light, might.
In spite of all this
and with only a smattering of spite
you put up a fight,
raging, raging against
the dying of the light
and the human delight in shite.
To pilot your own craft
required such clearance
both afor and aft
that you had to be your own crew
for only you knew
the hell you’d been through,
and the weight
of your fraught freight.
So you tore the tv’s plastic
re-cognized the US flag as elastic
and sometimes went totally spastic
to make beauty from the bullshit,
to rework it from the pit
of tortured despair
into a salon en pleine air.
No more constrained
to the complexity of sane mechanics
the dramatics
coloured cut metal
in undulations not unlike Uluru,
because you truly knew
what the total and black lack of a view
could do
to stack a soul’s servitude.
Finally you flew,
piloting past any precautions
exhaust fuming beyond all exhaustions.
May you now know the only truth,
beyond all need for proof.
And poof!
Disappeared, has your little you
into the wide open boisterous boundless blue.
Although Sam and I were not raised together and only met twice in person—the same and only times I met our father—we share more than our paternal inheritance. We share this desire to make beauty from what (and who) has been tossed aside. We share a level of giving and humility that doesn’t always benefit us in a world so bent on avarice that only serves the individual.
“I’m very proud to know that my big sister is showing people a new journey in life in a very altruistic manner! Dad would be very proud too, he always was.”
Most people didn’t even know I had a brother until I lost him. I also have a sister Sarah, his full sister, who I met once when I was 12 and she was 5. From what I understand, indigenous folks don’t cut relations in half or step them down to make stepfathers and half-sisters. In fact it can be tricky to know where the actual blood ties lie when so many are called auntie or cuz or bro. It took me moving to Aotearoa New Zealand, where whānau seems to mean family that goes beyond bloodlines, to realize that family is what you make of it, whether genetically provable or not.
“Please understand, that my emotional outbursts and subdued reclusiveness is solely a factor of my own problems. They have and are being worked on. Work and music are two very therapeutic apparatuses to equalize these mood swings. They have absolutely nothing to do with you or anybody else for that matter. If my displacement flares, please just turn me off, but don’t block me. I love you, I miss you. My fondest memories I have are with you and Sarah building the red brick pumphouse for granddad at the farm. You were the engineer.”
In my blood family, “breaking relations” is not uncommon. Animosities, differences and grievances have been held in high accord and have dug schisms between individuals. I have been on both sides of the schisms. I have been cut off and ignored, and I have also had to block for my own sense of safe boundaries.
“I would love any correspondence you might have Melissa, whether it's yoga, writings, walking, I think you lead an incredible life and have always been proud to be your brother.”
As I reviewed our correspondence to write something (the poem above) to share at his memorial, I could clearly see how we were both aiming to be in a better place in our lives. To have stable home environments.
Maybe we’re just nomads, I said.
“Nomadic shapeshifting creatures with feline origins. Gypsies,” he said,
and smiled a little crazily.
My own lack of stability, security and place-hood got in the way of reaching out to him more, especially in the past few difficult years when I’ve been cocooning.
Which breaks my heart with regret to acknowledge.
So. If you have a brother, or even if you don’t and you have a sister or a father or a mother or a lover. Whoever it is, love them up. Let them know you love them, even if you’re not sure you do, or you’ve fallen out. Be brave and bridge the gap. You never know when it’ll widen beyond reach.
“Family is a fleeting spark of light careening down the tunnel
wherein photons and magic could happen.
Miss and love you sis.”
Sam and I also share a pride in our long-ago Powhatan ancestry - me as a 13th lineal descendant of Pocahontas and he as a 14th lineal descendant of her father, Powhatan Wahunsenacah. Whether influenced by this noble ancestry or the pride of heritage in more recent warrior relatives, neither of us wanted to be seen as less than self-sufficient, driven by that desire to be in a better place.
Because I didn’t reach out beyond a birthday blessing last May, I didn’t know his addictions had worsened and his employment had lessened to the extent of making him not a romantic gypsy, but embarrassingly homeless. Luckily he found a loving whānau with the remarkable folks at Housing Veterans And Families in Indianapolis.
I was relieved to hear that perhaps why I hadn’t heard back from him was that, “Sam was in hard solitude for the past 2-3 years…He desperately wanted to reconcile and heal from his childhood trauma…But he was deeply ashamed and was working hard to shake the addictions and find a way to live in the world free from the torture of his thoughts, emotions, and social awkwardness, as he called it.”
I am deeply grateful to them, especially April, featured in this video, for their love, support and understanding. And sense of humour, for karaoke night was the place he was encouraged to steer his need to yell!
Sam was an airplane mechanic for the Air Force. He would have loved to have been a pilot like our grandfather, the Colonel - a bombardier in WWII with 44 successful missions dropping bombs. Mass killing. While our father went AWOL from the military where his maths and physics mind was being turned to calculating missile trajectories. He refused to kill, which is why I was conceived in a conscientious objector’s community in Nova Scotia.
This was also Sam’s inheritance—the confusion of virtue mixed with venomous exile, of care and kindness mixed with the ability to annihilate. All amplified by addiction.
So much of what he relayed to me about his work went over my head and I wish now I’d taken the time to learn more about his world and how he had applied his wide-ranging mind. We shared a connection to Japan as I had studied Japanese Buddhism, theatre, the language, and also had a partner from Osaka for a while. While he’d suffered the trauma of nearly being sucked into the fuselage of an F15 fighter jet at the US Air Force base in Okinawa. And when the tsunami sped towards us in New Zealand in 2016 he wrote, concerned for my safety,
“I was in 2004 tsunami when in Okinawa but we didn't feel anything except strange new creatures being washed up on the beach from deep ocean.”
Stumbling upon a fighter jet plane museum in Australia just days after learning of his death, I looked closely at the joinery of the skins. I was riveted by the rivets. I tried to imagine his work with King Airs, Cessna Conquests, Blackhawk Helos, F15’s, Beechcrafts and converting passenger planes into freight carriers for animals.
“I'm not happy unless I shoot a rivet here or there.”
Sam finally found a village but even with the amazing humans there, and his own desire to be free of his self-medicating addictions, fentanyl found him and took him before he (or anyone) knew what happened. A friend of mine, and a family counsellor, who is seeing more and more trauma-related behaviour emerge in his community said:
“Fentanyl is the latest and most potent means being used to derail empowered engagement and mask collective trauma with “personal” addiction. Almost as potent as Facebook.”
He and I walked through a street corner in Chinatown of Vancouver, BC that felt like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. In fact I should say I ran. It wasn’t just the people shooting up and swerving into me with sores and bloody knuckles and slurred speech and soiled clothes and sallow faces, it was the hordes of invisible hungry ghosts that swarmed around them. The streets were teeming with entities that most cannot see.
Sam had a home in the end, but he also lived with hungry ghosts. He didn’t mean to but there were times he raged at me. He sent me tormented writings and drawings. They were his attempts at exorcising the demons thrust upon him in early childhood. How does a sensitive soul ever come back from being taken from his addict parents and locked in his foster family’s dark, rodent-infested basement?
Capitalism and colonization have created clear, incontrovertible collateral damage. It’s evident in our children. In our climates. In our cells.
There is no easy answer here. There is no happy ending. There is no one person who can shoulder the blame, or who we should shame. There is only the reminder, yet again, of how far, as the whole of humanity, we have to go to be what we feign to be.
Civilized. Humane. Kind, even.
“Hi my favorite Buddhist in the world!! Sometimes you have to break the rules a little to find out that everything is going to work out. Perhaps a Buddhists’ sentiment, but truly, pain brings happiness. And Karma smiles as it makes its best effort to be on time for you.”
Below is an excerpt from some of his creative writing that I have edited slightly for better comprehension. But please note I am positive he meant precess, not process. In physics, which our father taught, precess is to undergo precession, which is ‘a change in the orientation of the rotational axis of a rotating body’.
I find an eery coincidence here that I did not realize until now. In a cast glass course I took in Wellington, about 2006, the only thing I made is a single glass eye…
A black hole is located in the center of Earth with two doors, allowing access to it. One is located in the Bermuda Triangle and the other at Okinawa, on the opposite side of the Earth. Tapered conical flutes center in towards an infinite point in the center of Earth. A crystal skull amulet is created on the beaches of the Ryuku Islands. Lightning crashes to vitrify the sand of the beach, creating a sculpture of glass. On the flipside, in the Bermuda Triangle, the eye is formed through the same precess, fitting the orbital socket of a skull. Quite cycloptic.
Once connection is made, doors open up.
Instead of missing planes and ships, we get parallel universes, unloading unwanted creatures from their worlds. It takes eons for enough erosion to occur to uncover the sand sculptures.
Jimmy stubs his toe on the elongated forehead of the crystal skull formation in Florida. Kenji, a boy living in Ginowan City, Okinawa, Japan, searches for bonsai on the coasts of the Ryuku Island chain. He does exactly as Jimmy does and stubs his toe on the jagged eye. The eye needs progressively less rough sandpaper, in sequence, to reach the right fit into the skull. Micro mesh is used to beautify the eye, to make it indistinguishable from any other sand sculpture ever created in Earth’s 4.5 billion years.
Kenji knows this object to be of supernatural design, simply because it glows with multicolored aura. The boys are clairvoyant after the encounter with such sacred objects of the Universe, created by God himself, leading them along a path to come to, together. The boys already know what the other one is doing at all times; what he looks like, what he himself is thinking.
They know exactly what must be done, and are guided by the Angels associated with the Creator to accomplish this next phase of human progression into the heavens.
The black hole in the center of the Earth is the way out, but also a way for “others” to come in. On our way out, we are given the choice to stay in the netherworld of paradise, or to be driven back, to say, take care of unfinished business here. Only a fool would stay on Earth to die in five million years when the Sun ‘red giants’ and envelops it. Just like ghosts in the in-between realm might.
Human evolution directs us to flee the planet to procreate elsewhere.
Otherwise suffer extinction.
“Stay cool my big sis and pray us earthlings aren't on our way to doomsday due to the stupid people in our Government. I wish I had time for Yoga, I notice you are always centered and cosmically happy.
Talk again soon, Luv Sam.”
We don’t know what we don’t share. He didn’t know I wasn’t always centered and cosmically happy. And I didn’t know I wouldn’t get to hear our father’s voice in his voice ever again.
Sam, my brother, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.
Connection has been made. The doors are open. The precess is in process.
ArohaNui dear M,
I have just recieved the news of your brother Sam's death, there has been no power and sparse internet here as we got hit hard by the cyclone. I began to write to you about the last few days and this came out. In my closeness to you as friend lover and friend, we have lived much. Sharing with you how we were nearly a casualty of the cyclone seemed relevant to what you will be feeling over the death of Sam.
Today the sun is back in the sky, haven't seen it for a while.
Winter came in the middle of summer, so I made a fire to keep warm.
Now summer has comeback and I have no idea why.
Looking out over a cyclone charged landscape, that brought our Awa to her knees we watched helplessly, Freddie, Boo, Lucille and I.
The authorities wanted to take us away, evacuating into a dark sky. But the sky could not help us that day, leaving us to fate, casualty or survivor.
Winter came in the middle of summer, scouring the living from the land, we stayed to make one last stand. Kia Kaha Kia Kaha all the Whenua called out together stay strong. The Taniwha is with her Awa, together we faced a darkness that wanted us gone.
I don't know why.
I'm surrounded with death and devastation, it's taking all my will to just look at the casualty of this war, my legs are stuck in knee deep mud unable to move I'm lost in grief.
I'm don't know how long I stayed in the mud.
But summer is back today and here we are standing sided by side the Taniwha, Awa, Whenua and I There is no victory parade or hero just survival.
This is most stingingly potent love story I have ever read. There is so much richness and pain here, it must be revisited time and time again. What an equally catastrophic and ethereal contemplation: what a just tribute to our Sam.
If this were a movie it would be far more than a beautifully sad tear-jerker - it would be a lives-changer.