“You’re right side up!”
There was never a reply. But that was Wayne Keezer’s style. He was a good Ojibwe Minnesotan who never directly expressed himself, unless he was embarrassed. He had a smile that didn’t light up a room, but it did make the sun come out.
Wayne’s Grindr profile photo was usually sideways or upside down. He’d show up as within a mile and a half away from me from time to time and sometimes over 100 miles away. It didn’t take me long to realize he was coming and going back to his reservation, most likely visiting family.
Then one day, his photo was right-side up and that was the first, last, and only message I ever sent him. He never replied.
Instead, I would see him in the rooms at meetings. He wouldn’t share very much but he kept coming back. Before too long, the other Two Spirits I was friends with at the time and I ended up bringing him to fellowship or inviting him on our little adventures. And for a time, it felt like we had knitted a good community or ersatz family.
One September weekend, we all piled in my car—a constant source of ridicule by everyone who rode because it was green, 1998 Ford Taurus, but they still rode for free—and went to the Makhato Wacipi in Mankato, Minn. That trip was less memorable for what happened and more for the fact that it did happen. As a small group of queer Indigenous folks in early recovery, there was something that felt good and central to our lives being able to take part in cultural celebrations. In fact, it was the first time I danced in the hocoka since my mother had died. I’d observed a year of mourning by staying away from public celebrations, but being able to dance was a healing moment, as if my reservoir of care had been replenished.
I’d need that resevoir for what came.
In December of 2015, Wayne began missing meetings, going off on his own for days and returning to meetings without much word. It wouldn’t be too long into the winter before he checked himself back into rehab. He stayed in rehab for almost three months that winter and we’d see him whenever his facility would bring people to one of our regular meetings.
By February, he found sober housing—what used to be called a “halfway house”—and was back on the road to recovery. He had a plan and was working the steps with a sponsor, but he continued to pop onto Grindr from time to time. I would later learn that his then-boyfriend would find him there, and they’d get back together in secret.
In step-based recovery, we’re encouraged to focus on ourselves as much as possible. Newcomers or people who aren’t ready for the message tend to interpret this as a ban on relationships. No such hard and fast rules exist in step-based recovery, just the hard-loving experience of everyone who’s gone before us on this path. It’s not easy. The first year of my own recovery, I was in a weird pseudo-relationship with this guy who had almost a decade in recovery when I came along. We never even kissed, much less had sex, but he was very much—in retrospect—into me on every level but I wanted to be with him so badly. I wanted it not because I liked who he was, but because I liked who he could be … for me.
That is all the memory I need of why relationships for me aren’t a good idea. They’re not mutual caring propositions, but a sensible self-centeredness about what someone else could do for me. It ended torridly without any hard feelings but several unreturned texts from me.
Wayne would go on to this lesson more explicitly in his own way as the months went on.
By the end of his time in sober housing, he didn’t have a job or prospects lined up and was at a desperate end. Ultimately, I volunteered my spare room to him as a place to live while he got back on his feet.
I never used to be good at accepting things as they are, I thought things could be improved, deconstructed, built upon, reconfigured. Everything. It was hold-over either from having demanding parents who never had the time to deconstruct their own colonization or a holdover from my own indoctrination by white supervisors who missed the shelter and comfort of graduate school.
But that practice permeated much of my life in early recovery. Way too much.
It’s why on my 34th birthday, I found myself in Kohl’s agonizing over my outfit for dinner later that evening. A June birthday, especially growing up on the hot prairie, means that any cooking is an act of devotion. My mother shaved months and years off her life with the amount of chicken she’d fry, potatoes she’d boil, or cakes she’d bake in the dry, South Dakota heat.
But I am not my mother’s son in that regard, so I insisted my friends celebrate my birthday at a local restaurant rather than coerce someone to cook for me or to cook for myself in the two-bedroom apartment I shared with Wayne.
By that point, he’d gone from his disciplined approach of looking for work in the morning, meetings in the afternoon, and returning for dinner or when he found meals elsewhere, he’d find his way back before midnight. I thought it was comical, given that I really wasn’t that worried about his sobriety.
But by June 24, 2016, it was clear that I should have been. From the beginning.
Wayne’s routine was familiar to me. It’s the routine of good intentions. Even now, I extend the grace of love for my little, adopted, Ojibwe brother because after the first two weeks of living with me, he was clearly in relapse. When he’d return the next morning after a night away, he’d be overly apologetic, always with some story of a sober adventure he’d had with a friend or cousin, but I trusted in the god of my understanding that he would find his way back, just like he had twice before. I told myself that the only reason why this time felt different was because I was the one living with him.
I would ask the Two Spirits who we knew at the time what I should do. The answers ranged from doing nothing to kicking him out. Neither end of that binary felt right, and I was nowhere near as damaged and personally hurt by anyone enough to entertain the notion of making someone homeless that I cared about. That response from one of the Two Spirits felt especially telling of the damage she refused to repair and heal from in her own life, she said it so instinctively that she almost spat it out, “KICK HIM OUT.”
But we don’t do that in the house I was raised in.
My mother would tell me that I must have had a happy childhood because I couldn’t remember most of that. And for the most part, she was right, I mostly felt warm, loved, and secure. My brother would bring a parade of cousins and adopted cousins and their friends around the house to be fed, work in my father’s garage, or hunt for spare parts in his junkyard. Having a huge, ad hoc family always felt like we were doing the responsible thing by our relatives because if we weren’t there to provide a meal or shelter, no one else would.
My work didn’t come without cost, however. When Wayne was in relapse, he could be as mean and spiteful as any of us on our worst days. The text messages were harsh but were followed with such loving regret that it erased the spite. With Wayne’s struggle, I could see him trying so hard but I knew that if I tried to save him, I would have been taken down in the process.
Recovery tells us that the only requirement for “membership” is a desire to stay sober. I’ve been to meetings where someone was clearly still drunk or high. But they were welcomed to return at the end of the meeting. Sometimes they did, most of the times, they didn’t. But their sobriety is never our responsibility. By keeping the doors open and a chair warm, we tell newcomers and returning people who struggle every day that they have a home if they want it.
If they want it.
What I regret most is that I wasn’t there for him when he clearly needed someone. My birthday dinner could have started a little later while I at least made the attempt to convince him that I wasn’t mad at him. But a part of me was mad at him and rather than yell or shout, I said curtly, “You know where you can sleep if you need it. I’ll be home later.”
What I also have regret about is that Wayne died in relapse and away from the people who loved him. I still have a hard time finding grace and forgiveness over the fact that I never told him that I wanted him back in the rooms. Everyone—himself included—gave up on him before the miracle happened. I feel so profoundly heartbroken because, like the cousin he wrote about, I’ll never see him grow old.
Time mercifully blunts the sharp pain of the memory, but I remember I was at work and making myself coffee when I received the call asking if I’d seen the post on Facebook. I immediately scrolled through and saw one of his cousins tagged him in a post, memorializing.
The next week was a blur.
No one ever prepares you for being on the other end of a lifeline that’s been cut by the person on the other end. There’s a moment of shock when the weight releases and you’re just untethered on the edge of the crisis. You know you’re not going over, but the person you were holding onto for dear life isn’t there anymore. Even today, the regret and responsibility I feel for his death comes and goes, but when it comes, it’s a full wave of sorrow. And I want to bury myself in a hole and not come out for days.
“We need you,” is what someone texted me.
Wayne’s mother invited those of us who knew him in Minneapolis to his funeral in Ball Club, Minn. It wasn’t until we were en route that I was told they were waiting for us, specifically for me, to come and speak before they buried him. The weight was back but instead of a struggling back-and-forth, it just hung around me for the three-and-a-half hour drive.
In the red notebook I think of as the book of care that I bought to write down every note about my late mother as she was in and out of hospitals over the last years of her life, I scribbled my notes. During the service, I gave my eulogy to his relatives and sang the Four Directions Song in Lakota to honor my friend.
Afterward, an older white gay man in recovery who had also come up from Minneapolis came up to me and vigorously shook my hand and said, “That was beautiful, would you sing that song for me at my funeral?” The rage in me eventually abated.
The day I heard about Wayne’s passing, I transcribed the A.A. Thought and Prayer for the Day in my book of care:
“I must forget the past as much as possible. The past is over and gone forever. Nothing can be done about the past, except to make what restitution I can. I must not carry the burden of my past failures. I must go on in faith. The clouds will clear and the way will lighten. The path will become less stony with every forward step I take. God has no reproach for anything that He has healed. I can be made whole and free, even though I have wrecked my life in the past. Remember the saying: “Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.”
“I pray that I may not carry the burden of the past. I pray that I may cast it off and press on in faith.”
I don’t ever want to forget about Wayne Keezer. And he was never a burden that I carried.
During that time in my life, I was in Spiritual Direction in my mother’s Catholic church. The day we buried her, one of the priests took me aside and complimented me on arranging a beautiful funeral mass for her. Then he said the best punchline to the best set-up in my life, “If you’re not in a committed relationship, I’d encourage you—when you get back to the Twin Cities—to talk to someone about joining the priesthood.” I smiled and thanked him for the compliment and chuckled at my mother, “Good one,” I whispered. But I did as my mother instructed and began meeting monthly with a Jesuit priest at a downtown church.
That July meeting, I came and told him all about my experience with Wayne and expected some contrived truism that most pastors have in stock to share.
Instead, he told me, “The word ‘compassion’ has a Latin root that means, ‘to suffer with.’ And you suffered with Wayne through it all. Like Jesus, you took on your own wounds for him.” By this point, the tears were like lava burning their way down my face. This is just what I was asked to do for someone I considered my family. It never occured to me that we were both in the struggle together until I realized there was nothing more I could have done; I had done everything I could short of going over the edge with him.
That’s when the weight releases you entirely from the edge and throws you back onto firmer footing. And a great gasp of exhausted relief comes out as you lose consciousness.
After all the dust had cleared and I was alone in my apartment, I noticed a little blue notebook on the coffee table that had escaped my attention. I opened it and began reading and my heart was broken all over again. He had left his recovery story for me to find.
A few pages after that, he left his final message for everyone.
In the perfect life, Wayne and I are able to fully enjoy life without addiction.
In the perfect life, Wayne survived his addiction, came home, went back to meetings and celebrates a decade in recovery.
In the perfect life, I had enough time and money to save my mother, to save my little brother in recovery.
In the perfect life, he had a good death without fear, isolation, and loneliness and we were all there to sing him to sleep.
In this perfect life, all I can do is remember my little brother in recovery and share as much of my part of his story as I can so that others know they’re suffering with their loved ones in the struggle, too.
In this perfect life, we are all holding on with grace, care, and love; letting go when we need to, instead of when we have to.
