My name is Bliss, I was friends with Ben and incredibly sad for his loss. Despite the distance of him in Canada and me in Texas I am raising money for a donation in his name to a Canadian mental health charity. Once we’ve reached our goal and I withdraw the funds I will be sending them directly to the charity myself. I am running this charity but our dear friend Kelty has provided a beautiful statement I have included bellow. Thank you and stay safe. 

Hello, all. If you may take a moment to hear me out for this fundraiser I’m collecting for the CAMH Rainbow Services program. This program supports and promotes mental health services for the LGBTQ+ community. This is to honour the very recent loss of an incredibly close friend of mine. 


Early Saturday morning, September 26th, Benjamin Doerkson ended his life on his own terms. He was twenty-three. I have only known Ben since 2017, which makes it hard to explain how much this person meant to me without getting a little personal, so here goes.


When I was very young, my mother had and lost a second child, a son, named Noah. I was not even four at the time, but this deeply affected the kind of person I grew up to be. In adulthood, I learned to cope with this missing part of myself by "adopting" younger male friends that I would make, as if they were the brother I had lost. I treat them as part of my family, am there for them in all the ways I can be, and help them when they're down. I've lost and made a few of these friends over the years. Sometimes they move away, sometimes they get married, sometimes we just grew apart.


Many of the friends I had who I treated this way were understanding but also reasonably somewhat uncomfortable with the trauma attached to it, so they didn’t particularly like me talking about it. I don’t hold it against them, of course. Trauma is an awkward thing. But Ben was different, and was right from the start. I remember worrying, when I admitted it to him why I was so affectionate toward him, that he would tease me. Ben was a little shit sometimes, after all. It’d be speaking ill of the dead to say otherwise. But instead he just grinned at me and went “YAY! This means I get away with anything!”


And Ben was really the first friend of mine to take this weird trauma response of mine in stride, so it turned out he was right. I remember once he teased me about something ridiculous while we were out with some friends at the bar, and I just laughed. Another friend said with a mock gasp, “Kelty if any other man said that to you, you’d rip his face off.” Grinning that shit-eating grin of his, he took my hand and said jokingly, “Yeah, but I’m her brother.”


And so that’s who Ben was. My brother. I hadn’t known him his whole life, I hadn’t even known him for a lot of it. But it never really felt that way. He was my brother. He just was. Not by blood, but he was.


My infant brother, tragic as it was, is not someone I ever met. The idea of him has been a blank slate my whole life. One that I projected other friends onto throughout the years, and now and then one stuck for a while, but the one who really fit in the spot I wanted filled was Ben, and so I replaced that blank slate with Ben. But I will never be able to replace Ben. And I’ll never be the same because of that, but I will say: it’s worth the pain of loss to have known him at all. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.


But please. If you are feeling helpless, if you think all is lost, reach out. Please. Someone always loves you, whether you know it or not, there are people in your life who will change forever, once you are gone.