Rest in Peace - My Brother, John Reed

I have not written on this for ages
As most of us with HIV say - '

'we just want to get on with our lives'

But today I learned my older brother killed himself??

Of course he did not have HIV - I am yet to hear if he had any other physical illness. I talked to only him last week on the phone. He did not mention anything then although I know he always worried about his health since having bad tosolitus and related infections severely as a child.

Apparently he left a note I have been told went something like this ..........


'I love you all'

I know he did - but my initial reaction was anger that he did this to his family

As once you kill yourself you are out of it - it is the rest of us that have to cope with what you did .

Given my own situation I can not say I have not considered it - but I will NEVER do this as it is NOT about me

It is about those you leave behind

But I know this is probably easy for me to say - I think of all of us John had it harder in many ways - and yet he achieved so much


Why you may ask does it happen to me and my family ? Well it just does!!

What follows are disjointed memories of my brother which I will edit at a later date when I have got over the shock
______________________
In his memory here is his web site where he stored our family pictures and videos of him and his children and their life: http://www.reedfamilyalbums.co.uk/ReedFamilyAlbums/videoalbums/index.html

I am trying to download the videos as fast as I can as he is not now around to maintain it so I fear it will go down soon

Here is a video of my older brother with my dad in the 1970s: http://www.reedfamilyalbums.co.uk/ReedFamilyAlbums/videoalbums/1970/Cine1.wmv

My dad was VERY small and my brother VERY tall.

Ironically John was always regarded as the OK one of the family!!!!

A very successful computer scientist, businessman and a 'man of means' in fact if you add together all the property he owned in Cornwall and Windsor and London, it must have amounted to a lot more than I realised , so to my mind he must have been failrly well off compared to me and most I know .

But obviously your financial situation this is not everything

And as far as I knew he had reasonably good physical health for someone in his 60s ( although I know we share a very traumatic childhood and that probably I know more than most why he did this very final act.

Whatever his life has been since I know his reasons are in the past
A past I partly shared

He has two birth children who each recently had children, his grandchildren and his foster daughter that he later adopted has children that he loved.

So this has been a complete and utter shock to us all.