Alan Bruce Gilbert

Tributes Leave your tribute

1. To Bruce’s Family and those who honored him upon his passing.

   I’m sorry I’m so late. My name is Shayna, I was an American backpacker in 2012 who lived with Bruce for a time as his friend, farm hand and driver cause he lost his license for a month. He took me in after the grape picking season had ended and got me another job on a near by broccoli farm. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Over the 6 weeks or so, we became friends, and we spent every day together. I drove him around, back and forth to work, around Swan Hill and even on a trip once to NSW to visit some friends. He let me stay on the fold out couch in his living room. We would sit outside the front of his home and share stories about our very different lives. I was friendly with his neighbors. He would tell me about his beloved children, and I would answer his curious questions about my life back home in New York. Sometimes he would astonish me with wisdom so causally spoken through a puff of cigarette smoke, or a sip of milk and liquor, that I would nearly fall of my chair. His boyish smile and bright blue eyes are images that after many years are one of the most revisited sights of Australia in my memory. The smell of the dusty road on the way to our perspective farms jobs, the first time I saw a full rainbow was with him. He laughed at me as I freaked out with glee, “what they don’t have rainbows in New York?” No, they don’t really… The CD I made him of music I thought he would like, watching American sitcoms together eating dinner together. Friday nights taking me to the pokies for fancy dinners. He was insecure about eating specifically fish because of the surgery he had underwent years prior, but one night towards the end of our time together, he felt comfortable enough with me to order some barramundi and we chowed down like children. He was gentle and honest with me. He was a gentlemen. For a while after I left Swan Hill, we would call each other. He wanted to check in on me, see where I had ended up on my strange vagabonding adventure. He shared in my ambitions and looked forward to my adventures and subsequent stories I could tell him. He felt like a loving family member, and for me, who had no family in the entire hemisphere, he was.

   The last time I spoke to him was the year he died, I told him I was heading to New Zealand. I sent a letter but I never heard back, and since then I have always been afraid to look up to see if he has passed. When I finally returned home to America, my mom shared a letter she had received from Bruce while I was away from home for so many years. His letter assured her that I was safe, and smart and brave. That he was happy to call me a friend, that he hoped to see me again one day. He spoke of me the way I didn’t see myself. He spoke to my mother, as a parent does another parent about their wild wayward children; with reassurance and compassion. I have spent the day sobbing at this notice, a google search I finally willed myself to seek. I knew he had passed at some point, but was too afraid to confirm.

   The reason I am writing here is because it is said that people have two deaths; the first, when they die and the second is when their name spoken for the last time. Bruce survives by his sons and daughter, who must know, he was immensely proud of and spoke about often and beamingly. He survives by what I see is the beautiful legacy of his life. But I want to humbling share, that his name survives in my heart too. And I am not done speaking about his deeds and memories of him, not until the end of my own days.

   To Bruce, with love. Your American Yank friend, “Shawnee”

   Shayna LevineOctober 16 2020 1:58 am