It was a clear day in June last year when the woman came to my door. The flowers in our garden were turned into miniature lamps by the strong sunlight, and the plum lip gloss that the nurse had applied to her lips glistened as she spoke.

With a kind of measured sadness in her voice, she told me that my brother had died. He was 35. Cancer, you see, first localized in the bowel, then spreading like a roused nest of fire ants, raging through his body so that, while his death was not painless, his descent was quick. I had not spoken to him in nearly seven years. She asked, was I okay? Did I need to sit down? But what could sitting down do to mend a wound now put beyond my ability to repair?

It started with a small incident, the crack in our worlds that separated my brother and I. During my childhood I was frequently ill, and, due to the odd shifts my brother worked as a doorman at various nightclubs, it happened that he would often be charged with sitting with me through the day and keeping me entertained. He made this a pleasant experience, helping me do my schoolwork and playing computer games with me, and even sitting and just watching television when my medication rendered me little more than a zombie.

The day of the incident, we were watching the eponymous Jerry Springer Show. That particular edition dealt with a gay couple and their homophobic families. As I sipped a soda and scribbled through a few math problems, my brother laughed at something the overtly effeminate man on television had said. Out of the blue, he turned to face me, still laughing, and he said without hesitation: “If I ever find out you’re a shirt-lifter…” The rest of the threat remained unsaid, but the implication was clear.

You must know something about my brother. He was not a bad man. In fact, he was perhaps one of the truest people I have ever known. He was generous with both his time and money, was incredibly gifted and, with a memory that most would call photographic, was capable of drawing anything that was put in front of him in all but exact detail, tone and hue. When I was small, he would draw me pictures of fairytale characters and we would, together, construct elaborate stories as he would help me put them up on my bedroom wall.

But my brother was homophobic and like the rest of his convictions he was unyielding in his faith. Do not misunderstand, my brother was an atheist, and believed God to be a fantasy. No, his faith was in himself and that he was always, unfailingly right.

The small incidents continued. When having invited his friends over to the family home, for instance, they would talk and make jokes about gays and “queers” and would howl with laughter until one of the particularly motley crew had the ill-fortune to have cheap cider pour out of his nose. Although they seemed to like me, my brother’s friends would sometimes point out that I was, to put it politely, a little limp of wrist, either by imitating the way I moved or the way that I spoke. As though this were a personal slight, it caused one of my brother’s furious tempers. I was summarily banned from hanging out with him when his friends came around.

Then things came to a head. One day we were play fighting, as we usually did. He was uncommonly tall at six foot seven inches with a love of bodybuilding that had given him a wide and muscular frame, and, at fourteen, I was barely filling a small size t-shirt with arms and legs that looked like matchsticks. While it was obviously a loosing battle for me, I would fight valiantly and this would seem to please him. At least I wasn’t a coward.

On that one particular occasion he had been in a fight at work with a rowdy nightclub drunk who had severely bruised his ribs. Why he chose to wrestle with me that day is one of life’s unanswerable mysteries, though I can guess that it was mainly because he was used to being the alpha male and I, as the runt, could not be allowed to throw my slight weight around, especially when he was feeling sorry for himself due to his injury.

It came to pass that I accidentally kicked him in the ribs as he pinned me to the floor. He swore and hit me in the chest. Fair enough. We both had bruised and aching ribs now. And then his anger, an anger that, to be fair, he did well to contain most of the time, flared: “Faggot!” he spat, and there was a cool hatred in his eyes as he loomed over me.

He must have seen my hurt. He let me up immediately, and apologized abjectly, which was uncharacteristic. I could not hear it, though. The damage was done. I was reminded of his threat years earlier. But of this, too, we did not speak. Our relationship was never the same after that and we began to drift apart.

By the time I eventually told him that I was gay years later, he had moved out to live with his girlfriend. He didn’t say much that day. In fact, he carried on like I’d not really said anything at all, a little awkward, a little quiet. But the invite to his wedding that we received a few weeks later betrayed his feelings. In a silver, scrawling font it was addressed to my dad and “guest”. The message was distinct, the wording clear. I could attend if I wished, but I was not invited as his brother. I did not go. We did not speak.

When he got divorced two years later and moved further away still, to start his own business in a nearby county, our silence grew. He had fallen out with my older brother by this point over something quite ridiculous, as siblings do, so I had no phone-number to call, no address to write to, and no immediate way to get such details either, but I was certainly not blameless in this rift; friends in our village regularly spoke to him, I knew, but I would not suffer the embarrassment of having to ask for his number if he could not bring himself to give it to me in the first place. So this went on, months became years and we did not speak.

Then, six months before the woman came to my door, I’d heard a rumor. Friends of the family had commented to my father that they’d seen my brother, and that he had looked unwell. We made surreptitious inquiries, phoning distant cousins and cousins of cousins with whom we knew he was close, and we were told that, yes, he was unwell, and that the illness was serious but that my brother was baring up nicely and responding to medication. The outlook was good. No specifics were given but we were expressly told that he was not taking visitors. Although sounding unusual, this wasn’t totally uncharacteristic of my brother who could never allow himself to appear vulnerable. However, I later learned that my older brother, who by this time had moved to China to pursue a new imports business, had been contacted and asked to attend his bedside. Again, the message was rather explicit. He did not want to see me. We did not speak.

On that day last year in June, when the sun was full and the afternoon was offensively bright, while I stood there smiling as best I could and shaking my head like it was on a rusty spring, the woman lied. She said to me, “Near the end, he asked for [my older brother]…” and she looked at me after a long moment in which the gears in her brain turned and squealed an alarm, before adding in a small, apologetic voice, “and you.”

I hugged her, grateful for the lie, and she gave me the details of the funeral. True to form, it would be a humanist funeral, one devoid of any kind of reference to God or the afterlife. I laughed a little. She must have thought that strange but this was my brother, even after his death, having us obey his iron will.

And so, because of that sentiment, I did not go. He had not wanted me there in life, so in death there seemed a sacred mandate against my attending. This was unspoken, of course, but then again, so many things between us were.

I have never cried for the loss of my brother. Although I have felt, and continue to feel, a deep sadness, it has never been a recognizable grief. Rather, it has always stayed a blistering kind of regret.

I regret that his homophobia kept us apart all those years. But in terms of blame, there was plenty to portion out. I regret that I could not see past his prejudice to try and forge a relationship. The ironic thing is, of all my siblings, we probably had the most to share given his artistic leanings. There was an acre of common ground between us but one brick wall that I could not punch through. Correction: That I did not try hard enough to punch through.

As we approach the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, my message is to not let a prejudice, whether it is your own or someone else’s, become larger than all the things that you share. Time marches on, as does life, and to waste either on small, insignificant things as my brother and I did, is a deep tragedy that I would not wish on anyone. So do what I could not: Speak. Try to keep a dialog. Point to shared experience, to the good that outweighs whatever bad-blood is felt between you and be more generous with your love than you are with your fear. You’ll be glad that, if nothing else, you tried all that you could to stay in touch.