The Whole of a Person

John didn’t take up much room in the conventional sense. He didn’t hold court.

He watched,weighed things quietly, and then — when he was ready — he acted.

Completely, and on his own terms.

He was my little brother. And for most of my life, I didn’t fully understand what that

had cost him, or how much it had made him.

He was a person of enormous range. He just didn’t announce it.

He could pick up an instrument — any instrument — and find his way into it with a kind of

natural fluency that seemed almost unfair. He competed at the Gay Games, where the body he

had trained and looked after carried him through the water with the kind of purpose I’ve always

associated with him. He held degrees in surgery, law, and public health. He volunteered time at

an HIV clinic. He sang in the Melbourne Gay and Lesbian Chorus. He marched, gloriously and

defiantly, in the Sydney Mardi Gras. He adored his eleven nieces and nephews with a warmth

and attentiveness that I think surprised people who only knew the dry, observational version of

him — the one who had Monty Python lines ready at the right moment, the one who watched

the absurdities of the world with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had always known it was

a bit ridiculous.

He was a contradiction, and he wore it easily. Quiet reflection and rowdy participation. Cynicism

and deep care. An observer who was also, when the occasion called for it, the most present

person in the room.

I know now that the schoolyard wasn’t kind to him. I knew it then, in the way an older sibling

knows things without fully seeing them. Words do that — they isolate before you have the

language to name what’s happening, before you have the armour or the community or the

understanding of yourself that might soften the blow. He had none of those things yet. And still

he moved forward, and sideways, and into every corner of a life that I don’t think anyone who

knew him as a boy could have predicted.

He built that life himself, without complaint and without much explanation.

When the cancer came, it came fiercely during COVID. And so we couldn’t be there in the way

families are supposed to be there — the showing up, the meals, the physical presence that

means you are not alone in this. He would not have allowed it anyway. That’s the truth of it. A

staircase that took thirty minutes to navigate, pain that would have broken most people’s

composure entirely — and not a word of complaint. Not to us. He had always done things his

way, and he wasn’t about to renegotiate that at the end.

There is something I keep returning to, five years on. It’s not the degrees or the medals or the

stages he stood on, though all of those things were real and hard-won and his. It’s the quiet

dignity. In the schoolyard, when words were being used as weapons. In the clinic, giving time to

people who needed it. In the final months, when the body he had always pushed so hard finally

couldn’t keep up with him.

He did all of it the same way.

I’ve been wanting to say it out loud — that he was brilliant, and funny, and principled, and

complicated, and that being his sister was one of the better things that happened to me. That

his eleven nieces and nephews carry something of him, even the ones too young to hold the full

shape of who he was.

Near the end, he asked me to be the executor of his will. I have thought about that a great deal.

It was a practical request, of course — but from a man who did nothing carelessly, it was also

something else. A form of trust. A quiet acknowledgement of the thing between us that didn’t

need to be said.

When I wrote my debut novel, The Space Between, I dedicated it to him. It felt like the only

honest thing to do. He was, in so many ways, what the book is about — identity found the hard

way, belonging built rather than given, the cost and the worth of becoming fully yourself.

I think he would be proud.