A song for Quentin

On April 30, 2025, the overhead lights in my bedroom flicked on at full brightness, so bright it looked like morning, but when I rolled over and tapped my alarm clock it read 11:45pm. 

I stumbled out of bed and switched the lights off, completely freaked out. I locked the front door and tried to go back to sleep, but my nervous system was wired for a bear attack. By the time I left for The Newsletter Conference at 10am, my brain was so fried from lack of sleep that I took two wrong turns and parked my Honda in the wrong lot at Buffalo Airport. 

In New York I got on the B train instead of the E train, and rode for forty-five minutes in the wrong direction. A formidable woman in a fabulous mahogany wig sat down next to me on the subway and started talking at a speed and volume that commanded all my attention. 

“These words aren’t coming from me,” she said. “God told me to come and sit next to you because he has a message for you.”

I leaned in, not one to turn away from a message from God. 

“You’re not trusting him,” she kept saying. “You’re gripping too tight. You gotta let go and let God. He wants to help you. When you stand before the throne of God, there you will find mercy and he will help you,” she said, with all the authority of a Baptist preacher.

Hebrews 4:16, I looked it up. 

She got off the train, telling me that she’d missed her stop but it was okay because this message was too important. By then I was all the way in Brooklyn, not noticing even as the subway car clanged over the bridge across the East River. A man boarded and sat across from me wearing a hat that said, “May the bridges I burn light the way.” I took his picture, not realizing yet that I was missing the event I flew out early to attend. Some greater force seemed to be orchestrating a different kind of event, just for me.

The day passed in a blur. I fell into bed exhausted but laid awake for almost the entire night, again, listening to the birds and the garbage trucks. In the morning, drunk from lack of sleep, I asked myself, “What would it look like to let go and let God?” I booked into a Korean sauna and made a bargain with myself: attend my conference for a couple of hours, then get thee to the sauna. 

Laying on a bench in the steam room later that day, I willed the heat to burn off the grime of sleeplessness. By the time my number was called to be escorted to the treatment room, I was nearly asleep. An attendant took the numbered bracelet off my wrist and pointed to the table where I laid down to be scrubbed down and massaged for the next hour, after which she tied up my hair and sent me on my way. 

In the ladies’ locker room, I peeked at my phone, where a text from Tracy was waiting. “Tarzan, please check your folder in the inbox. An important message I didn’t want to leave there without notifying you.”

I flipped open my mail app to see an email from my uncle Dan. The subject line read deepest sympathies. “So, so sorry to hear about Quentin’s death,” the first line said.

Dropping my phone, I sat down on the bench and took slow deep breaths. I texted my mom, “I just got an email from Dan,” hoping she would fill in the blanks. Did she know? Did everyone know? I didn’t know then that no one could reach me because I was using an eSIM.

I sat there half-naked and crying, towel in hand wondering what to do. “Are you okay?,” a voice came from beside me. “I’m Raven. Would you like a hug?” 

I flung my arms around her, opening up a round of great heaving sobs into her soft shoulder. “I just got some really bad news,” I said, and sweet Raven held me tighter, whispering kind things into my ear, encouraging me to cry as long and hard as I needed to. “My brother died,” I finally said. 

When the first round of crying subsided, Raven sat at my feet, held both my hands in her hands, and looked up at me with tears streaking her face. “Do you know what happened?,” she asked. 

“Not yet,” I said. “But he was a drug user all his life so I can guess.” That’s when 

Raven’s mother came and sat with us. “The Lord will guide you,” she kept saying. “You are not alone.”

This pattern of strangers and loved ones caring for me in strange and miraculous ways has continued since my brother’s death. It feels beyond mere chance. None of these kind strangers slipped a tract into my hand, asked me to repent or invited me to their church. These were not missionaries with an agenda. They were everyday angels on a mission of service. 

This sounds like a story about Tarzan, but really it’s a story about my brother Quentin, and the many ways I’ve felt him carrying me since he received, to use his own words, “the big promotion.” He loved me with such a ferocity that not even the heavy hand of death could hold him back.

Quentin is the second of my five siblings, and the darling of our family. I have four pictures of him in my fridge, more even than my own children. 

He was extremely photographable, almost always in a sports jacket and hat, and some other jaunty accessory, like a bow-tie or even a cane. He often wore a kilt and could’ve told you about the tartan, and some history of the clan it belonged to. He once called me to verify whether our Scottish ancestors were McDonalds or Macdonalds, so he could select the right tartan. Soon after he renamed himself Quentin Macdonald. 

A more intelligent man you could not imagine, and certainly not a more original. He could speak at length on random subjects, from diamond mining practices in Zaire in the late 1970s, to the particular care needs and habits of domesticated canaries. He was extremely well read but almost never read bestsellers. I was not surprised to find several bibles in his apartment, among other devotional books. Once he called me up way after bedtime and barked into the phone, “The New King James Version is a war manual!” 

He was prone to profundity, my brother, but also he was wonderfully playful. 

When he would go out to smoke he would say, “Excuse me, I need to go check the air quality.” If a waiter gave him bad service, he’d wait until they left the table and joke, “It’ll be reflected in your tip!” I’ve used this Quentin-ism for years when friends who are hosting me apologize for some minor imperfection in their hospitality. 

Like our father, he always carried a book with him. The last time I saw him he was reading a fat volume called The Stories of English, which looked dreadfully boring but obviously fascinated him. Quentin had a passion for words bigger than anyone I know. My brother Oliver reminded me that he had many poems memorized and would recite them if given the chance. It was one of many party tricks he delighted in sharing—for a brief period of his life, he even worked as a professional clown. 

Quentin was a great connoisseur of work gloves, headlamps and fine tools, as my eldest brother Thomas reminded me. He had an eye for quality, and for several years read the Canadian Tire flyer every week, waiting patiently for certain items to go on sale. He once told me that if you waited long enough, any item you wanted would eventually be offered at 50% off. 

He had old world manners and always took his hat off at the table, a gentleman to the core. Last Christmas he got a home science project going at my dining room table with my son Mo, which left a puddle of chemicals that ruined the finish. “A bit of vinegar will get that off,” he assured me, though that turned out to be wrong. Now I have a wonderful chemical burn to remember him by, which happens to be right at my place at the head of the table. 

Every time I saw him, I wanted to take his picture. I tried to be covert, sensing he might know he was being prematurely eulogized. That day in the spa is a day that has loomed large in my subconscious for many years. Perhaps without knowing exactly what I was doing, I have spent years collecting the songs and images that would see me through when his number was finally called. 

Quentin spent much of his adult life living in the streets, in forests and parks. He chose a difficult path, but his path was always a choice, and one he walked with a dignity you could only fully understand if you’d met him personally. He laughed easily and had a natural charisma few could resist. He was a great friend to the police officers, doctors, social workers and various harm reduction workers with whom he interacted daily, and they were friends to him.

There was no one quite like Quentin. One of his workers told me that she once arrived for a visit and found he’d painted his entire apartment blue, including the appliances. “I’m grateful he taught my children that worlds exist outside our comfort zone,” my sister Zion said. It was one of his greatest lessons, and it was for all of us. 

The Ontario Safer Supply program brought stability to my brother during a period of his life when he was moving back indoors after several difficult years in the streets. He shared with me that this program allowed him twenty Dilaudids per day—a seemingly enormous dosage that was really only enough to keep him out of withdrawal, and had a side effect of flooding the aftermarket with an opioid much less potent but infinitely safer than the contaminated fentanyl that is so widely available, and that would eventually claim my brother’s life. 

You could tell a lot about people by the way they treated my brother. He had serious main character energy. Anyone willing to look could see that they might never meet a more interesting person in all their lives. And yet many would become inexplicably angry or uncomfortable around him, refusing to make eye contact with Quentin, or talking to you like he wasn’t there. 

“How I honour those who were able to look past their own fears and see his soul,” said Pashana, our mother. 

The time I spent with Quentin became even richer once I accepted that he was not going to make a U-turn down the straight and narrow path. He was not going to join the fine-living people, as he called us. Much as he prized the time he spent with his family above all else, his life was a dance in darker realms. My brother wandered deeper into the underworld than most would dare to explore. “It did not break him,” my mother said. “It made him whole.”

Quentin must have had his share of enemies but to some of us he was our golden boy. “I feel like we lost our champion,” my brother Caleb said, which, in my darker moments since his death, has felt true. But our mother would disagree. 

“Quentin is making sure each one of us is looked after,” she told me. “He transitioned so he could help us more, not less.”

At the airport on my way home from New York, a young Black man in khaki hiking shorts followed me through the airport repeating, “Jesus loves you! Jesus is King!” That happens to be the name of my favourite Kanye album, so I leaned in. “May I say a blessing over you?,” the man asked. I said okay and he took my hands in his. Minutes later I was crying in his arms while words poured from his mouth that could not possibly have been the product of mere human thoughts. When he finished he gave me a wonderfully inappropriate kiss on the neck, turned his back and walked away.

“This speaks to the divine orchestration of our lives in times during hardship,” my mother said. 

It is not hard to imagine Quentin had some hand in this, reaching out a protective arm from the Great Beyond. He loved me so much. Either way, these experiences have strengthened my belief in benevolent forces far beyond human understanding that are watching over me and caring for me, a belief that has long been in need of shoring up. 

And what a gift that is. 

Back home, my siblings and I have been muddling our way through. My eldest brother Thomas is caring for our family with the same love and practicality he always has, but the depth of our grief is unfathomable.

As Khalil Gibran wrote of his late father, “I know that he rests in the bosom of God, but I cannot help but feel the pains of sorrow and regret. I cannot help but feel the heavy hand of death on my forehead. I cannot help but see the dim, sad shadows of bygone days.”

The angels who manage my calendar and business cleared everything off my plate for the time being, for which I am so grateful. I’ve never known a grief like this. It weighs heavily, like wearing leg irons. My mother, who anyone reading can see is the President in my assigned flock of angels, told me, “Stay in your pain as long as you need to. This is your gift to Quentin. But also let him heal you. This is for you, too.”

So that’s what I’m doing. 

Brother, please take these tears as a token of my unswerving love and devotion. I hope it will make up for all the Christmas and birthday presents I never gave you because we were just too blessed in the sibling department and it’s always someone’s birthday. 

Light the way for us, Quentin. 

We love you so much.