Death of a Marine
Brendon Patrick Landry came into this world to be a soldier, and a father and a husband. It is strange to say those things, since most of us don’t know what we want to be when we grow up. I’m 44 and I’m still working on it. But I think it is a blessing to be remembered and described by the things that made you truly come alive, and epitomized your humanity, and made you a better person. The moments in Brendon’s life when I truly felt he had a shot to beat his addictions were when he served his country in the Marines, and when he became a husband to July, and eventually a father to Elza. But alas, like many fathers and husbands before him who were also soldiers, Brendon was at war.
Some soldiers go into war knowing they’ll never return. Others are seemingly sucked into the maelstrom unwillingly, almost surprisingly, but once they acclimate to that reality, they bootstrap up and give it their all. My brother Brendon was both of those: he fought willingly, he knew he would perish, but he fought valiantly anyway, simply because, like most addicts, he was ambushed into battle by drugs and alcohol.
When a war is won, the soldiers who died during the war are never talked about as having “lost” the war. They were simply soldiers, doing their duty. Brendon will go down in history as a soldier who died in the victory over heroin, because my brother Brendon is loved by so many. Even when addiction “wins”, it loses. He didn’t lose the war, he expired, like many soldiers do for their contribution to wars that are won by love. Perhaps it’s even fair to say he lost a battle -his personal battle against a daunting foe, addiction, and its powerful foot soldier, heroin. The philosopher in me says he lost the battle of himself, everyone’s deadliest battle. For a Marine like Brendon, it would be an insult to say his mind or his spirit gave out-that doesn’t happen to Marines. But heroin is formidable, and it wore his body down. His body expired, because it knew his mind and his spirt never would, in the great complexity that is the checks and balances of the human condition.
That is always how I’ll remember my brother Brendon: a soldier who fought many wars on many fronts. In elementary school, Brendon performed in a speech contest. He orated, with great dramatic flair, I might add…to the point where me and many others thought he was robbed of first place-Patrick Henry’s great speech from the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, which, as anyone who loves history as much as Brendon did knows, it ends with the famous “Give me liberty or give me death!”. Brendon could not have freedom from drugs, so death instead chose him in order to fulfill his self-promise. Those words resonated down through history into my brain as I contemplated Brendon’s death. He could not want death, nor would he take his own life, but Like a true soldier, his life had to be taken from him-since on this earth, as a drug user, there would be no liberty.
Of course, he wasn’t just a soldier. He was a lover of art, poetry, history, music, symphonies (One of my favorite memories is taking him to see Beethoven’s 9th performed by the Salem Philharmonic. he leaned over during the second movement, which i think was his favorite, and said “this part coming up is fuckin’ sick”). Also, because of some small influence of his dad and big brother, he loved opera. He had brothers, a sister, a wife, a child, nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, lovers. He spoke fluent Brazilian Portuguese, which was mostly self-taught with an assist from immersion into the Brazilian community, and worked on his Spanish and, through his love of opera, Italian. Like his big brother and father, he loved and studied Latin as well.
To my parents, I offer the sweetest, hardiest condolences I can. My brother and sister and I hurt, yes, we grieve also, and feel the loss of a sibling. When you lose a parent, or both parents, you are an orphan. When you lose a spouse, you are a widower or a widow. But, there is no word for losing a child.
When I laid my my eyes on my brother for the last time until he welcomes me into heaven, my final words gave me comfort and solace: his fight is over. He is at peace. There’s nothing so brave and courageous as a soldier at war, and there’s nothing so peaceful and beautiful as a soldier in peacetime. Rest in peace, mi irmao, mi hermano, mio fratello, frater meus.
