Lloyd - On National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

My writing group gathered today and wrote from prompts that were to help us think about Indigenous folk on this National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. One prompt I had offered was “The First Time I Ever Met an Indian.” I chose to phrase it that way because we are all on the old side, and when we were young that is the word we used for First Nations people, so it might trigger memories. This is what I wrote. 

I'm not sure what was the first time I ever met an Indian, but I think probably my first native friend was Lloyd Gladstone. He was certainly the first gay Indian I met, and although I was not yet out of the closet as a bisexual woman, I was very grateful for that attribute in him. 

Lloyd was a lovely man. Soft-spoken, soft, self-deprecating smile, kind and gentle. Also very smart. I was 14 when I met him, and he was somewhere around twenty (with a much older man as his boyfriend). I ran away at 13 and had returned to very different circumstances than the ones I left. I had much more freedom, and I stayed over at my boyfriend's house in the West End frequently, a recently condemned house with mushrooms growing on the walls in the kitchen from the leakage down from the toilet. We were a band of hippies, only one of us working, until Lloyd appeared. I was madly in love with the beautiful Peter, his long flowing hair and his wide knowledge of literature and civilisation, his deep intelligence and terribly broken self, his habit of getting addicted to heroin. 

Lloyd told me one day that I was smarter than Peter, that I could have a better life, could value myself more deeply than I had ever guessed I might.

Many years later when a friend of mine was in rehab I visited him and to my astonishment, there was Lloyd, his mentor. Lloyd himself had suffered greatly in his youth and struggled with alcohol addiction all his life. At the time, he was several years clean and working for Together We Can. It was such a joy to reconnect with him and to see him doing so well.

I was talking with Lloyd in a park one day a few years later, when he had taken back to drink, and a First Nations woman came over to speak with him. She was much younger than him and was reverent in her approach, seeing him not just as gay and hurt and wonderful Lloyd, but a well respected and deeply loved elder.

The last time I saw Lloyd, he was living in the Downtown Eastside above the Ovaltine café. He wasn't drinking at the time, but he was wretchedly poor and his health was not good. He wasn't receiving enough money every month to feed himself, and he was ill and fragile. I bought him lunch, a bit worried about offering because I didn't want to offend him. He allowed me to give that to him, and I was very grateful. We ate at the Ovaltine and talked a long time. He could only eat half of his sandwich, and wrapped up the other half to take home. 

Lloyd was an anchor in my life, one of the very few people who had known me over so many periods of my sleeping and awakening. He never stopped being a gentle and brilliant and beautiful man and although I don't like ending on a down note, I say shame on us, shame on us for putting so little value on that man's life, on any one's life, that when they are hurt or ill and can't support themselves, we give them so little that all we are doing is letting them slowly die. Not our fault. We supported him. Where was his family? Why didn’t he work? 

For shame. For shame.

I love you, Lloyd. You are my well respected and deeply loved elder. Rest in peace.