MAITLAND, COLCHESTER COUNTY: After living through too many painful holiday seasons, one former Strait area resident wants to turn tragedy into positive action.
Days before he returned to the Truro mall to hand-out gifts to children in need, Auld’s Cove native Kyle Andrews recalled that his 12-year-old brother Bruce died in a motor vehicle collision on Dec. 23, 1981. He recounted that he stayed with his godparents that holiday season.
“We rolled about 16 times,” Kyle noted. “Despite everything else that was happening around there, I do remember getting into somebody’s car after the accident, and going to my grandmother’s house, spending the night there, and then picking up my brother up on the way home because he was in the hospital, the one that survived. And coming home, and the tree’s gone, and all the decorations.”
Then on Dec. 23, 2012, his brother-in-law Frank died.
“Every Christmas was a rough Christmas. I don’t remember a Christmas that wasn’t rough,” Kyle told The Reporter.
After his brother’s death, Kyle believes his father, Art, a former local businessman, developed post-traumatic stress disorder. He believes it was because his father could not save his own son, even though he was a first responder.
“He had the post-traumatic stress so it was hard to communicate. He was very smart and intelligent, and him bossing you around, or telling you what to do, or doing it for you was his way of showing that he cared for you, and he didn’t want you to be out of time, or money, or effort,” he explained. “The last few years of his life, he was so emotional. He pent up all this pain from the things he saw, and the things he did, as far as my brother, and how he just fell on his sword constantly.”
Art was the Auld’s Cove Volunteer Fire Department Chief for approximately 40 years. After attending a fire at the Cove Motel years ago, he suffered a series of strokes, this was while Kyle was living in Toronto, approximately eight years ago.
“He had 23 blood transfusions after that. He had issues with hemoglobin,” Kyle said. “After the stroke, he quit drinking and smoking. He used to smoke a pipe. He quit drinking, and he and I connected, and he started to deal with his real feelings about what happened with my brother.”
Not just his brother’s death, Art was dealing with trauma from other emergency calls.
“There was a young child that died in a fire there across from the Cove Motel in Auld’s Cove. There used to be a house in the woods,” Kyle recalled. “He opened up to me about other calls he went on where he just couldn’t do nothing. Then it all came back down to my brother. He was trained to save people and he couldn’t save his own child.”
Kyle graduated high school in the late 1990s, left home and went to university, becoming an electronic engineer. Working in a good career, he eventually bought a house in downtown Toronto, then became addicted to crack cocaine.
“I wasn’t dealing with what was wrong with me. I got clean and sober, and I came out as being gay, which was hard because we were such a religious family,” he recounted. “I started to come home more, and I was on disability because I’ve been HIV positive a long time. That’s what happened with the drug addiction, and high-risk behaviour. I started coming home a couple of weeks at a time.”
Recalling that he attempted suicide at age nine, Kyle had to come to terms with what happened to him when he was young.
“I was molested on a few occasions, me and my brother,” he stated.
Kyle met his husband Jim Harman after writing a book on surviving childhood sexual abuse.
“My husband is a pretty good support system,” he noted.
Kyle returned to Nova Scotia, and in April, 2020, Art died after bouts with several different types of cancer and being diagnosed with dementia. He said this happened just two weeks after public health measures were introduced in the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was just such a crazy time with the lockdown and pandemic. As he was dying, I had to go down to the house and take care of them. Within five days, I had to have adult protection come in and convince him to go to the hospital, and then tell them to say goodbye to each other. That was extremely hard to me to do,” he recalled. “I had to scoop him up, drop him off at the hospital, and never see him again.”
While his father was in the hospital, Andrews said the family stayed in constant contact.
“He didn’t quite know who we were when we called him,” he stated.
As a result of public health restrictions, Kyle said his father’s funeral was by invitation only with a limited number at graveside. He was hoping to give his father a fitting send off last summer, but he was unable to organize anything.
“I was hoping to get more of a response from the community as things opened up,” he said. “We don’t have him anymore because of the choices he made for other people, and that’s not fair to us.”
Rather than wallow in frustration, Kyle is devoting himself to a good cause.
Kyle’s husband Jim is a member of the Truro Rotary Club, and together they volunteer with the Christmas Index in Colchester County for children in need. Realizing there were no batteries for some toys, and no gifts for teenagers last year, Kyle asked his mother Janice and brother Robbie to match the amount he spent on gifts this year. Together, Kyle said they were able to purchase clothes, headphones, microphones, touch screen gloves, wallets, purses, and LED lights.
“A lot of hats, mitts, and gloves. Some are new to Canada so they don’t have coats,” Kyle stated. “When we get the ages and their identifying number, there’s a little bit of what they want. The younger kids are Barbie-this, Tonka-that, and spaceships, or dinosaurs, but a lot of the older kids, and some of the younger kids, want boots, coats. The older kids, they don’t always get their list filled out. They’re so hard to buy for, teenagers.”
After going to the mall in Truro on Dec. 8, Kyle said they returned on Dec. 15. He added that over 100 families, and a few hundred children and teens, were helped by their efforts.
“That year that my brother died, I was only three years old, and I can remember three Christmas gifts I got that year, vividly. I still remember my dad coming on Christmas day and opening up gifts with me… I treasure that,” he added. “This is what’s great about Christmas. I’m hoping that this story will encourage other people to take note, not just at Christmas, but to do like my father did and put other people first once in a while… and be their own hero because sometimes it doesn’t cost a lot. If you have no money, you can donate your time.”