brian maurice died today.

brian maurice is a guy who lived at the washington whom i got to know very well over my tour of duty there. people who read this blog who knew brian know full well that he was one of the warmest, kindest and most back-you-up-till-death kinda bros you'd ever know.

we used to go for beers and talk. he'd talk about his days as a bank robber... maybe the stories were real, maybe they weren't but the dude did a lot of time in jail, so i'm assuming they were. they were fascinating stories. he made them sound downright heroic. maybe he wasn't a hero, but the stories were awesome.

over time it became clear as mud that he had few real friends. alot of his waking hours were spent laboring over the facts that 1. he was about to get a pardon for his past criminal activity, 2. his estranged family on vancouver island, and 3. the fact that he lived in a place where the easiest option is sinking back into a life of drugs and crime. it was a shitty world for such a good guy to be stuck in, he was surrounded by snakes who wanted to take him for whatever little he had and then forget about him.

we became good friends. he was happy to have a friend who didn't judge him for his fairly regular lapses into fact 3 (above) and took him seriously for his attempts to deal with facts 1 and 2 that he started calling me 'brother' and 'son' rather simultaneously. they were titles i took seriously and still do.

working in the downtown east side, you meet hundreds of people. some are generally good but can't get out of their cycles of bad shit; some folks are genuinely bad. however, some are genuinely good people who, while maybe they do bad things to themselves... would never do a bad thing to someone else. brian was the third. i doubt i'd be his friend if he wasn't.

he died peacefully in his sleep at St. Paul's hospital last night. cancer was the only thing besides his conscience that could possibly have kicked his ass.

goodnight brian. you are probably more able to come visit me now, so do.