GRIEVING IN THE TIME OF COVID 19

The grief monster got me again this morning, caught me unaware and gave me the old one-two punch in the gut. “Get out!” I shouted. But I didn’t hear the words I’d said. The noise sounded more like a wolf howl to me, a wolf howl, or a moan of abject pain. Perhaps I should have expected it, the sudden appearance of this sleeping giant. A pessimist might have observed some warnings that a storm might be brewing underground. There had been, for example, a considerable reduction of crying over the past couple of months. But I am not a pessimist. This drying up might have been caused by the passage of time, time spent in the warm Mexican sand, the gradual thawing of chilly relationships, the sprouting of new healthy relationships, the shedding of some failed experiments, the formation of new habits, the revival of my storytelling hobby, new volunteer opportunities, better eating, long daily walks outdoors, daily internet contact with people I love. Even in a time of pandemic, any of these might have boosted my mental health. Or it might simply have been that the focus required to thrive during a COVID 19 pandemic can distract you from just about everything you are used to. So perhaps I can be forgiven for failing to expect the monster. It was just after 7:30 AM when the monster struck. I was sitting on the edge of my bed celebrating the sunshine snaking along the wall from the closet door to the place beside the mirror. I was thinking that my neighbour and I might get a hamburger and fries from a drive-through window today, the first restaurant food we’ve had in five weeks of obeying the call to “Stay Home!” The people on the radio were telling me about a star-studded concert that would be playing on all the TV networks all over the world. Among the other stars, John Legend would be singing. “Let’s go out on this song,” said the radio people. “John Legend: All Of Me.: What’s that they said? Let’s go out? I went out all right. In one brief second I went all the way back to the winter of 2014. It was Saturday morning, every Saturday morning. We were at the west End Seniors Association, David and I, attending dance classes sponsored by the Parkinson Association. We were seated, doing the warm-up exercises. The nurse, Sharleen Heavener was leading us. John Legend was singing All of Me. Beside David I was stretching. I was singing to the gentle rhythm. I was pretending that everything would be all right. John sang: The world is beating you down, I'm around through every mood. You're my downfall, you're my muse My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues I can't stop singing, it's ringing, in my head for you [Pre-Chorus:] My head's under water But I'm breathing fine You're crazy and I'm out of my mind [Chorus:] 'Cause all of me Loves all of you Love your curves and all your edges All your perfect imperfections Give your all to me I'll give my all to you You're my end and my beginning Even when I lose I'm winning David could still walk back then. He could still drive. We could still learn new dance steps together. But his voice had slowed, and his signature had changed so much that people started checking to confirm its authenticity. Somehow he had forgotten how to shift his weight gracefully from one foot to the other. It was plain to both of us that everything would definitely not be all right. Still, we concentrated on burying the future by making everything all right at that moment, the moment before she asked us to stand, the final seconds of sitting down. So what if the task of burying the future required an avalanche of pretending? We were up for it. We were listening to popular songs. It might be the end of the world as we knew it, but we were learning to dance.

MOVIES

David and I spent 47 years together. During that time we saw very few movies. We were not much harmed by this lack, but it did stunt our capacity to participate in conversations about movies and to enjoy watching the Academy Awards. We might have watched more movies had it not been for the combination of two factors: David was a loud whisperer and a quiet sleeper. Had he been a quiet whisperer and a loud sleeper the situation might have been entirely different. But then, if I had been a sighted person rather than a blind person, none of it would have mattered. Movie theatres were fewer, larger and more crowded back in 1972 when our dating life began. We would wait in line for tickets and wedge into seats among strangers sitting beside, in front and behind. Things would be fine in this cozy environment until David would notice something happening on the screen and determine that I needed to know it. Then he would whisper a description—sort of whisper--more like a mutter really. “They’re walking across a street. Really tall buildings on both sides.” It suited me fine, but our fellow watchers didn’t like it much. If you listened carefully, you could hear them grumbling. “Quieter,” I’d whisper. It was my best advice, but he didn’t like it much. “I can’t be quieter,” he’d mutter. “Try harder,” I’d whisper—well, maybe it was more of a yelling whisper. Nobody liked it much. Not David. Not the people around us. Still we soldiered along for a while, searching every theatre for the least inhabited space where David could mutter descriptions. If there was one point, one single event that changed our behavior, it was likely the evening when we bumbled obliviously into a German movie with English sub-titles. Five minutes later we were back in the lobby, beging for a refund. “Other customers don’t like it when I read the subtitles to Wendy,” David sanctimoniously explained to the reluctant teen-ager behind the cash register. With no manager on site, he cut his losses and refunded our ticket price. It seemed that many people might be better off if David and I watched TV movies at home. Fortunately, he was a good-natured guy. If he regretted exchanging the big screen for our 13-inch black and white he did not complain. We would find a comfortable position, quite often lying on the couch together. The movie would start. He would describe the action in a normal voice. All would be well. As the movie progressed I would find it easier to follow, being familiar with the characters and what they might do. There was not so much need for help from David. But every silver lining has its cloud. While I was following the plot, he was falling asleep, only I wouldn’t know it, his being a quiet sleeper and all. “Bang bang!” a gun would shoot. “Who got shot?” I’d demand to know. “Shot? I don’t know,” David would reply sleepily. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” This is how a tiny spark of lovers’ quarrel blows into a raging blaze. “If you loved me you’d stay awake,” I’d shout. Neither of us liked it much. We were happily married, perhaps because we learned to reduce the possibility of those bang bang moments. They seldom occurred if we limited our movie watching to movies we’d already seen. Take, for example, The Sound of Music, or It’s A Wonderful Life. Now that David is gone, I find to my great surprise that I am watching a lot of movies, as many as one a day, sometimes two in a row, occasionally three. The stars have aligned to make it possible. Shaw channel 49 shows nothing but movies, I have plenty of spare time, and things have changed more than you might imagine. There’s no longer much need to whisper to blind people in theatres. Many movies now come with description for the visually impaired. You can ask the ticket clerk for a little machine with earphones to hear the extra information. At home you can push a few buttons and if they have recorded description you can hear it on your TV along with the movie sounds. There are many movies which have not yet been described. These are annoying, but now there are options that don’t require the participation of a spouse. If you need to know who shot who when a gun bangs, you can always get the anser in a full plot outline from Wikipedia. You don’t build up much movie history watching one or two new movies per year. The films I watch these days, so old to others, are new to me. You might recognize some of the names: To Kill a Mockingbird, Steel Magnolias, The bells of St. Mary’s, In The Heat Of The Night, Casablanca, Funny Girl, the Judy Garland version of A star Is Born. With great relish I drop their names in conversations with friends, mentioning plot details with such vivid intensity that I might have heard them only yesterday. Those who haven’t seen these movies in four decades are left with the impression that I am a remarkable movie enthusiast with a fabulous memory. Of course, when you discuss movies with friends, the topic inevitably turns to modern movies, to recent and future academy awards. In this realm I am no wiser than I used to be. But reputation is everything. Having already established myself in their eyes as a movie expert, I find it convenient to sit back with great interest and ask for their opinions.

MOURNING AT A WRITERS CLUB

“They tell you to keep busy or even to move out of your house. But in my experience, remembering the past makes hoping for the future possible.” --Alan D. Wolfelt “When you are sorrowful look again into your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” – Kahlil Gibran The Central Lions Seniors Association has a Tuesday morning writers club. We members write at home and read our writing together. My companions in this endeavour are an eclectic lot. They write about all sorts of interesting things: a mistress of Louis XV; the rise and fall of polio; attending a Rose Bowl game in Pasadena; the extraordinary dietary preferences of cats. With a few exceptions I usually write about one thing: my experience of reconciling with grief. I’d like to write about other things. Maybe someday I will. Those who write about grief and bereavement tell us our society is intolerant of grief, impatient for us mourners to move on. With this in mind I tend to approach the Tuesday musings with a cautious suspicion. This is the first time I’ve gathered with the same writers, week after week, month after month. I notice, in their passing comments, that the members worry about boring each other. I worry about that too. Can the day be far off when a weary listener will jump up screaming: “All right already! Get over it!” Alan Wolfelt is a renowned authority on grief. He differentiates between grieving and mourning. He says grieving is what you feel on the inside. Mourning is the outward expression of the grief. Mourning is the thing you do in order to reconcile with grief. Spoiler alert! He says the grieving may never stop and the mourning can go on for a long time. Sometimes I ask myself why, when I was looking for activity to fill my time, I chose to join a writers club rather than a grief support group. The people in a support group would have been sympathetic. They would have expected expressions of mourning. The leaders would have encouraged me to share my pain. So why choose a writers’ club? The answer is: I didn’t compare the two. I joined a writers club because I like to write for fun. I figured I wouldn’t need a support group if I was having enough fun. I didn’t have any topics in mind. I expected to make a few people laugh a little. How was I to know that my journey through grief would show up in almost everything I wrote, exposing my pain to a captive audience of unsuspecting strangers? Alan Wolfelt writes that mourners have six needs: acknowledge the reality of the death; embrace the pain of the loss; remember the person who died; develop a new self-identity; search for meaning; receive ongoing support from others. From my perspective, some of these needs take care of themselves. Others are more dependent on action from me. Some people have trouble acknowledging the reality of death. I’m having no difficulty with this. We spent several hours with David’s body after he stopped breathing. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it and his clothes are long gone. As for the pain, it does not wait for my embrace. It holds me in a hammer lock. After 47 years of closeness in David’s company, it’s quite an adjustment to accommodate the fact that other people don’t need to remember him as often as I do. I am working on that. Things get even more complicated when it comes to developing a new self-identity and finding meaning. That’s going to take a while. As for seeking ongoing support from others, that support can come in many forms. It might come in the company of close friends, or in a group united by a common thread. Grief support groups unite around the process of mourning. Is there any reason to take it elsewhere? Grief, I have found, is more persistent and more flexible than you might think. It is welcome in a support group, but it doesn’t need one so much if you can find other places to take it. It will tag along wherever you choose to go. Writers clubs unite around the process of writing. With little choice but to listen, the members of our writers club have graciously made room for my pain. It holds its own alongside the fascinating variety of topics others bring. Mourning is not a stable condition. The commitment to present writing to a group on a regular basis has helped me shape it in ways that offer some encouragement to me and possibly some entertainment value to us all. Grief doesn’t have to show up at a writers club naked and shivering. You can dress it up in stories. In recent weeks I have written about choirs, marshmallow parties and even Groundhog Day. Each story holds some quirky progress, the documentation of something getting better. Writing is a solitary activity. You explore topics of your own interest. You make your own meaning in your own words. A writers club gives you the added benefit of group support when you share that meaning in your own voice. It disappoints me some to discover that I have no choice about whether to grieve. I expected to be moving on by now. But I do have some choices about how to mourn. Mourning is not so bad if you can make it playful. Playfulness is welcome among writers. Perhaps that is the best defense against the possibility that some fellow writer will stand up and shout: “Enough already! Get over it!”

HALFWAY THROUGH

“Hope is the ‘Yes!’ to life.” –Ronna Jevne I’m halfway through the 22 hours of training you have to take if you want to be registered as a volunteer at Pilgrim’s Hospice. They provide services to people who are dying. So far we’ve covered the organization chart, policies and procedures, confidentiality, communication skills, family dynamics, and psychological issues. “Aren’t you bored?” my friends are asking. “We know how you hate policies and procedures. With your training and experience you could teach communication or family dynamics or psychological issues. Don’t you have better things to do with your time?” “Actually,” I reply with a half grin, “I love it.” They are surprised. I am twice as surprised. “What are you learning?” they want to know. I’d tell them, but the truth is, it’s too early to say. How do you really know what it is that you are learning until you have learned it? I’ve been wandering for a year now in the wasteland of widowhood and retirement. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out which way to go. In retirement I would have spent more time with my husband. In widowhood I would have returned to work. But what are you meant to do when you’ve been married for a long time and now you’re not? What are you to do when you’ve been working for a long time and now you’re not? Pondering the problem, I thought of setting a goal. But I’ve never been much of a goal-setter. As a compromise, I settled for a guiding principle I would try to follow: Just say “Yes!” My friend Jennifer invited me to join her at a singing event. I said “Yes!” We chose seats for no particular reason and later discovered that the singers in the row ahead were from Canmore. They told us that they sang together in a Threshold Choir. “What on earth is a Threshold Choir?” we asked. “We sing at the bedsides of people who are dying,” they replied. “It’s an international organization with a lot of local choirs. We love it. If you are interested, you should look on the Internet for the contact information for the Edmonton choir.” Each Threshold choir has a name. In Edmonton we have the Voices of Compassion Threshold Choir. The representative I contacted was both friendly and guarded. She told me the choir meets weekly to practice as a large group. They send people to the bedside in groups of three. There were questions she wanted me to answer. “Would you be comfortable at the bedside of a dying person?” “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been there a few times.” “Can you sing your own part in a trio without any music in front of you?” “Yes,” I said. “I have done that.” “Are you willing to take the volunteer training program at Pilgrim’s Hospice?” Hmmm! I might have said “Yes!” to that. I don’t exactly remember. If I did, I wasn’t being entirely honest. My real plan was to join the choir, then convince them that I didn’t need the training. The process of joining took longer than I expected. It is a small choir, formed only two years ago. They have learned a few things along the way. They have learned to be cautious about taking in new members. I had made the call in May, but it was already late in October when they invited me to a practice, and I was busier by then. I probably would have said “No,” had I not been so much in the habit of saying “Yes!” Now it’s January. After one whole year of wandering in the wasteland of retirement and widowhood I look back in wonder at how time could drag so much and pass so quickly. I had imagined learning to feel at home here. I don’t feel at home. I want to, because it looks like I’ll be here for a while, maybe even forever, learning how to survive, learning how to thrive. To survive means putting up with things you don’t love, like being alone much of the time, and not having a structure that pulls you out of bed on the days when you don’t feel like getting up. To thrive involves learning to recognize love when you feel it—learning the difference between doing things you don’t love and making sacrifices when you love something. It’s a distinction that’s hard for a grieving person to make. You spend a lot of time in an emotional fog. You become accustomed to feeling miserable while doing things you used to love I do love singing in a Threshold Choir. I love the music, challenging yet simple enough to allow all members to sing at a bedside in three-part harmony without the aid of a book. I love the way I feel after practice—warm and relaxed, the way you might feel after a long warm bath. I loved our Christmas party, when we drank a little wine and gave ourselves fully to the delight of singing rock songs at the top of our lungs until we were hoarse. I love the closeness of it—the way everyone cheers when I arrive at practice later than usual. These people, strangers to me such a short time ago, are cheering because I am there. I love it so much that I never did ask if I could skip the 22 hours of volunteer training at Pilgrim’s Hospice. I was pretty sure they’d say no because it wouldn’t much matter how smart or experienced I am. I would still have to go through the process. In 2020 you can’t just march into an institution and ask if they have any dying patients you can sing to. Somebody has to recognize an appropriate situation and invite you in. There are no hoops to jump if you are invited by a family member. But institutions won’t invite you or recommend you to families unless you have been cleared for entry by a criminal check and met their requirements for volunteer training. So I registered for the training, fully intending to sacrifice 22 hours to the boredom of sitting through presentations of familiar content. The joke’s on me. The content is just what I expected it to be and I am not bored. Here in the unfamiliar wasteland of retirement and widowhood, with more time than I need and emotions I’ve never before experienced, I never know what to expect.

MARSHMALLOWS

In the months following David’s death our son Lawrence would come over to watch TV in my livingroom. There I would occasionally come upon him, sitting in the chairs his father used to occupy, reaching down the sides to retrieve long lost treasures trapped in the upholstery between the arms and the cushions. “What are you finding?” I’d ask. I would be thinking of spare change and other things that escape from pockets. “Marshmallows,” he’d reply. And sure enough, he’d come up with a dusty dried-up miniature cylinder that must have been there for a while. “To the garbage,” I’d say. “In a minute,” he’d reply. “There are only minis here. I guess when Dad was eating the bigger ones they never fell down that far.” I’ve always been drawn to the sensuality of marshmallows. It’s not just the sweetness that compels me. I love their shape, their ends, flat enough to stand for themselves, and their round, rollable bodies. A marshmallow is a silent treat. Ten of them could roll off the counter and you’d still be able to hear a pin drop as they hit the floor. They are pliable yet resilient. They know what shape they are supposed to be, and somehow they manage to hold themselves and be pillow-soft at the same time. They are simultaneously smooth and rough. Heat them a bit and they’ll stick your fingers together, strong as Crazy Glue. Run warm water over your fingers and the marshmallow glue will disappear completely. From the perspective of physical properties, a marshmallow is a wondrous thing. As I began thinking about writing this piece, I was surprised to find that the only thing I really knew about marshmallows was how to eat them. How were they named? How were they made? Fortunately, Wikipedia was there to save the day. There is a plant, known as the mallow that grows in marshes and damp areas of Europe, Asia and North Africa. The mention of it brings to mind a lush green tree with puffy confections on all the branches. Miniatures would peak out from between the leaves, waiting to grow. But it wasn’t quite that simple. Showing characteristic leadership, the ancient Egyptians ground up the mallow roots, mixed them with other substances, whipped air into the sticky mixture and ate it for medicinal purposes. Much later the French figured out that you could fill a deep tray with corn starch, make holes in it, and pour in the melted marshmallow mixture. When the centre cooled and the starch hardened on the exterior, you could lift out the marshmallows which now had a soft elastic skin. Even later the process was refined to exclude the mallow plant. Modern marshmallows are made by heating corn syrup with sugar and mixing it with dissolved gelatin. The gooey mass is then fed through an extruder. It emerges as a long tube which is subsequently cut into pieces and coated in cornstarch. Lawrence has never cared much for family parties. Any excuse to miss one would do. So I was taken by surprise when he said we ought to have a party on January 10, the first anniversary of David’s death, all the more proof that grief changes people in ways you’d never predict. “We need to have marshmallows,” he said, “And Safeway white cake with thick icing.” It sounded like just the sort of party you’d have for our sweet-loving David—just the sort of party you’d have with him. He’d be there for sure, celebrating with family and inhaling the sugar. I could feel the incongruity of such an event, having David absent yet somehow present at the same time. I wondered whether pieces of his favourite cake would mysteriously vanish when we weren’t looking. Lawrence bought the cake on his own, but he and I did the marshmallow shopping together. It was a task he would not take lightly. I could see that he must have shopped for marshmallows with his dad. He lifted the bags from the shelf and inhaled their sweet aroma. Only the freshest, softest, fluffiest specimens would do. Each marshmallow had to stack independently, never sticking to its neighbours. You could assess this by gently caressing the packages. We came away with two large bags that met all his specifications. Like Lawrence, I am prone to sentimentality these days, drawn to things that can bring David to life—if only in the imagination. Marshmallows had a double meaning in our family. David was our personal marshmallow. If you asked him to account for an act of kindness or generosity, he’d grin and say: “I’m a marshmallow.” That was the only explanation you’d get. It was I who first assigned the label to him. I believe I was angry at the time. “You are a marshmallow,” I bellowed, pointing an accusing finger in his direction. Just what it was that caused the outburst I cannot now recall. No doubt he had raised my hackles by caving in sweetly on some point of order with the children. Did he allow somebody to have dessert when I had specifically warned that there would be no dessert until the dinner plate was cleaned? Did he permit someone to go swimming without having cleaned up the bedroom clutter? Whatever it was that he had done, I wanted him to know that I expected a firmer approach. But in choosing the name I had made a serious miscalculation. Calling him a marshmallow as a shaming device was about as effective as accusing skating ice of being smooth, or blaming diamonds for sparkling. It was a compliment. He loved marshmallows, and if he was one of them, then he had found his tribe. He was proud to be a member. If he could keep them around the house long enough for baking, David used miniature marshmallows to make Rice Krispies squares. He was so good at it that our daughter Ruth asked him to make a Rice Krispies cake for her wedding. In preparation He shopped for four nested wedding cake pans, 2 pounds of butter, 104 cups of cereal and 8 large bags of fragrant, soft, perfect miniature marshmallows. In the hot days of summer we were both happy that Ruth was getting married and sad that she would be moving away. David wanted to choose the perfect time for the making of the cake--to ensure the freshness and also leave spare time in case things didn’t go as well as expected. July evenings in Alberta tend to be warm, lit by a brilliant sun that sets some time around 10:00 and leaves a long soft twilight. They lure you outside for walking and barbecuing and gardening. But now and then you get a series of scorching days, followed by an evening where the sky bruises to black, the rain hammers everything and lightning flashes in all four directions to the undulating beat of continuous thunder. It was on such a night, with the windows wide open to let in the fresh cooling breeze, that we set about the task of constructing the huge cake that would send our daughter off to spend a new life in Ontario. With the tempest raging outside and me acting as baker’s helper, we measured and melted marshmallows into puffy sticky clouds. Then we mixed, marvelling at the way things change. It would never have occurred to us to use Rice Krispies squares as a wedding cake. But the cake we were constructing on this stormy night would boldly grace Ruth’s head table, adorned with a spray of removable flowers. It would be cut generously at the wedding, and served on the spot. The guests would snap it up and go back for seconds. Ruth would proudly say, “My dad made that cake!” And so it came to pass, that on January 10, 2020, with Ruth and her family living in Ontario, Lawrence, Mark and their loved-ones settled at my dining room table to gorge on over-sized slices of thickly-frosted cake and unlimited quantities of marshmallows. With me occupying the chair at the head where David would have sat, we indulged in marshmallow nostalgia. Lawrence and Mark recalled the Christmas morning when Mark’s wife Tracey gave them marshmallow guns—yes, guns that shoot marshmallows. Reverting to joyous childhood, they were pulling the triggers and firing marshmallows at one another. “Those marshmallows go to the garbage,” I said. As they retrieved the spent ammunition from dusty corners David said, “Are you just going to throw them out? Could you not eat them?” Eating Marshmallows was one of David’s favourite pastimes. He ate them in the evenings while watching TV. He also ate them when we camped. We tended to camp simply, in the bush where you find the mosquitos. We didn’t generally have running water, and we never had a good supply of running water hot enough to melt the sticky marshmallowness off our fingers. If we used mosquito repellant the marshmallows would take on the flavour. If we didn’t, then we had to scratch at the bites with sticky fingers. You could cut down on the stickiness by clapping a toasted marshmallow between two cookies and calling it a smore. But a smore was more fattening than a plain roasted marshmallow eaten on its own. I don’t suppose it had occurred to David that marrying a blind woman would relegate him to a life of roasting marshmallows for two. “Blind people don’t roast marshmallows,” I told him the first time he handed me a roasting stick. Just to prove it, I torched the first three I tried. “Blow them out when they catch fire,’ he said. “Blind people don’t see the flames until it’s too late,” I said. Sighing in resignation, David settled into a pattern. He would eat one marshmallow raw, roast one for me, then roast one for himself. Every so often he’d over-roast one that had been intended for himself, and if he could blow the flame out before it blackened, he’d hand it to me. I never minded a little bit of ash. You can know a lot about eating marshmallows, and still have more to learn. Sitting at my table, remembering his dad, Lawrence rolled a marshmallow in icing from the Safeway cake. “Icing on a marshmallow?” we exclaimed. “Did David do that?” “I don’t think so,” said Lawrence. “But it’s good. I think he would have liked it.”

WRITING THE CHRISTMAS LETTER: 2019

“If you use the bad parts to get to the good parts you’ve done something good.” Elton John In the last week before Christmas I agonized over the production of a Christmas letter, the kind you add a personal sentence to, and send out to everybody who writes to you, and everybody you expect to get something from, even some people you don’t get anything from and haven’t for years. Back in November, when I carefully contemplated what to write in such a letter, I had decided not to write at all. That plan held up very well until a week before Christmas when people began writing to me. David and I used to co-produce a Christmas letter back in the days when it could be signed with both our names. I’d make a start some time in November, asking David what he thought we ought to write. He’d mention a few things. I would keep at it, adding and deleting, until I deemed it ready for proof-reading. David would correct the typing and add a thought or two. “That’s fine,” he’d say. “It’s ready to send.” Without David in the physical world, I believed the writing of my 2019 Christmas letter would be a solitary pursuit. But then, things got complicated. It seemed I was dealing with two versions of myself. There was the me who had decided to write a Christmas letter, and a reluctant woman sitting at my computer, refusing to press the keys. “How hard can it be to write a Christmas letter?” I said to the reluctant woman. “All you have to do is tell people what you did this year. Start at the beginning. Here. I’ll show you.” Pushing her aside, I wrote a paragraph. “David died on January 10,” I wrote. “His last few days were difficult because we often couldn’t understand what he wanted to say. But he was determined to be understood. He insisted that I immediately put money for 2019 into his tax free savings account.” He didn’t say, “You will have the money after I die if you put it in while I’m still alive.” But we both knew what he meant. He meant: “Go do it right now.” I showed my paragraph to the reluctant woman. She was outraged. “You can’t start a Christmas letter that way,” she scolded. So I pushed Delete and started over. “We were all saddened by David’s death at the beginning of the year,” I wrote. The reluctant woman stayed my hand. “That’s not entirely true,” she said. The truth is, you weren’t that sad because you thought it was time. You’re a lot sadder now than you were then. One of your favourite memories happened right after he died. Remember how you sat with him, marvelling at how his twisted tortured body had suddenly relaxed, how you lingered with him, holding his hand in absolute peace. That doesn’t sound very sad to me.” “Should I take it out then?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said. “Should I add the part about being peaceful at the end?” The reluctant woman was—well—reluctant. “Maybe you should skip David altogether and do what other people do. Try describing your grandchildren.” I pressed Delete and started over. “All five grandchildren make a project of delighting their Granny. Carys is a gymnast with a fondness for unicorns and Lewis can charm you while climbing on top of a table at lightning speed. Ben has learned to read in two languages, Evan builds something with Lego every morning before he goes to school, and Clara spent most of last week pretending to be a baby lion.” After that, I couldn’t think of another thing to say. So I wandered around the house, pouring cups of coffee, setting them down on various tables and losing track of them before I’d finished. “Come back here and finish this letter,” nagged the woman who had previously been sitting at my computer. “And don’t push the Delete key. This stuff about your grandchildren has potential. It just needs a little fluffing up. Take a break from that topic and tell them about your travels.” Feeling a little bit encouraged I wrote that I’d made four trips to Guelph, one to spirit River, one to Jasper and one to Vancouver. I spiced it up with some stories of cruising in French Polynesia. I was conscientious about naming people who had been there for me during my travels. Then I got up, searched the house, and used the microwave to warm the coffee from some of the abandoned cups. “Be happy,” I said to myself. When I sat down again I deliberately wrote about happy things. I wrote that I was happy to be living in my apartment, happy to be walking in my neighbourhood, to be playing bridge and going to exercise classes and writing for fun with new friends at the Joy of Writing Club. I wrote that I had joined two choirs. I mentioned that I still facilitated hope groups, having not quite completely retired from my work in hope studies. All of this was true, and my confidence grew—until it didn’t. In its place there came a tsunami of grief that sent me running to my bed where I howled in abject misery. “What now?” I cried out to the reluctant woman. “Do I have to quit, after all the work I’ve done?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t push the delete button.” Instead of continuing the letter, I went back to the computer and read an on-line article in Psychology Today. “You can’t outrun grief,” the author boldly declared. The reluctant woman considered this. “You are the living proof of that,” she said to me. “Perhaps you should grieve a while. Maybe you’ll be able to finish the letter tomorrow.” In our forty-five years of marriage David and I read hundreds of Christmas letters. Some were funny. One relative always drew her year in cartoons. Another used the language of a medieval castle. Some were informative—births, marriages and such. Others were boring. Enough said about that. But there was one letter that chilled us so thoroughly to the bone that we had to turn to each other for comfort. It was a devastating life summary, sent by Cousin Lila. It was cloaked in sadness and despair. Her husband and all his siblings had Alzheimer disease. She wrote details about each of them. She ended the litany by wishing all of us a Merry Christmas. “Lila is depressed,” I said to David. He said, “Everything in this letter is probably true, but I wouldn’t send it at Christmas time.” With this in mind, I turned back to the reluctant woman. “I’m not Cousin Lila,” I said, “and I’m not Susie Sunshine either. I want to write a Christmas letter. Who am I?” anyway?” “You’re a grumpy, weepy, unpredictable griever living a basically happy life,” she said. And so it was that I found myself back at the computer the following morning, cleaning up my writing and developing an opening paragraph something I hoped would tell a truth that could reasonably be followed by Merry Christmas wishes. “It will be a different sort of Christmas this year. No doubt each of us will miss David in our own way, though it has been some time since we had a Christmas that wasn’t influenced by the need to accommodate illness. I would say that grief in my case is less a gradual process of healing over time and more a situation where kamikaze attacks occur when you are doing well in the big picture. I’ve been concentrating on learning new things, having fun and paying it forward as a tribute to the small army of people who have been lighting up my life over the past few years.” The reluctant woman and I checked it over with a critical eye. It was a longish letter, a little too perky, a little too busy. But the time had come to add personal greetings and send it anyway. Out went the copies, one by one. After so much dilly-dallying, I had expected to be pleased. Instead, I found myself turning apologetically to the memory of David. “I’m sorry that letter seems so cheerful,” I said to him. “I failed to mention how broken-hearted I am. They should be told that every fiber of my being still wishes you were here. I wanted to tell them how utterly bereft I get when I think that all my future Christmas letters will be written without you. How could I have edited it all out?” But the memory of David was remarkably unperturbed. “We couldn’t have sent such a letter,” was his response. “It’s not in our nature. If we couldn’t have said something good, we wouldn’t have said anything at all. But I do think you could have mentioned the tax-free savings money we put in my name back in January. You’ve had that money in savings for a whole year now. That’s $5,500 plus interest you won’t have to pay taxes on. It is an accomplishment worth celebrating.” “Too late for this Christmas letter,” I said. “That story will have to be written elsewhere.”

GRIEF IS A MONSTER

Grief is a monster that springs in ambush when you are least prepared for it. It squeezes the life out of you until you can barely breathe. At least that’s what I’m noticing about grief these days. It’s a recent discovery. I’ve viewed it differently in the past. Monsters were distinctly absent from my prior encounters with grief. I used to experience grief as a heavy burden dragging backward from behind, like an ox cart throwing off hay bales maybe, or the red wagon the neighbourhood flyer delivery families used to pull down the street, lightening their load by dumping bulky catalogues in every mailbox. Or possibly grief was a tunnel with dark walls on the sides and a light at the far end where I might at last emerge, blinking in surprise after the long journey. These things I imagined in my days of smaller griefs. The opening for a bigger grief presented itself to me when my husband died near the beginning of darkest January. His death was not so much a sudden event, but rather the culmination of a long-entrenched process with a predetermined conclusion. Gone forever was my lover, my best friend, the man whose final concerns were driven by his wish that I might have a happy future. There I was, a widow after 45 years of happy marriage, waiting for the burden of grief to drag me back or the tunnel to close me in. But where was the burden? Where was the tunnel. Where was the sadness? I waited for the grief to happen. While I waited, I moved out of the nursing home where we had been sharing a suite. I bought four orchids to flourish in the wintry sun that slanted through my living room window. I sang as I cleaned my kitchen. I played Bridge with good friends and exercised at the YMCA. Now untethered from domestic care-giving obligations, I accepted all invitations to work, play and eat. But where was the burden? Where was the tunnel? Could the process of grieving really be dispensed with so easily? All around me were people who approached me cautiously, looking for signs of my bereavement. I told them all that I was doing fine. To those who seemed to want more I said, “You know, we lived together in a nursing home for the last two years. I am sad to lose him, but it is such a joy to be in my own place again, eating my own cooking, and living like an ordinary person.” It hardly seemed an adequate tribute. But I could offer no better accounting than that. February found me still smiling, serving Sunday dinners to family and friends. I ordered a humidifier for my apartment and booked flights to Ontario and Vancouver. Grieving in a recognizable configuration still had not begun. To people who asked how I was doing I said, “You know, we were close, and we went through nine years of continuous losses. At first he couldn’t skate and then he couldn’t take long walks. Then he couldn’t keep working and then he had to give up driving. Eventually he couldn’t operate the TV remote or feed himself. We mourned all those losses together. So I guess maybe my mourning was pretty much done by the time he died. .” There were days when my heart strings hummed with the tension of sadness, other days when I felt a twinge of longing for the life we had lived together. I greeted these symptoms with some relief. Still, it didn’t seem quite enough. “This is grief,” I said to myself, “And it is not so bad. Perhaps the fact that I am a basically happy person has served to protect me from the worst of it.” February, however, is a short month. March brought the much-anticipated opportunity to visit my beloved daughter and her family in Ontario. Ontario hadn’t seemed so far away when David was ill. Our daughter had made it her mission to be with us as often as possible. Now it was my turn to go to her. With joyful enthusiasm I packed a small bag. It had been a long time since I had been free to travel. I smiled all the way to the airport, joked my way through security and happily read a novel while we passed over the prairies and Northern Ontario. It wasn’t until the flight attendant announced the beginning of our descent that the monster first came for me. One minute I was fine. The next minute I wasn’t fine at all. My chest was tight. My throat was clogged. My body was acting beyond my control, sobs were shaking my shoulders and tears were pouring down my cheeks. I surrendered in bewilderment. At that particular moment there was no reason to be sad and I was sadder than I had ever been. Just across the tarmac, on the other side of a door three little blue-eyed blonds were tugging at their mother wondering; “When is Granny coming out?” I had longed to embrace them. Yet now, at the moment when this could be, my thoughts had retreated to a point back in history, the times when we used to talk about the grandchildren we would have some day. David and I were going to take those children camping. We were going to take them to the zoo. We were going to read to them together and take them to the library. Now David was not here for those things. I was still wiping my nose when I exited the airplane. Never had I felt more alone. Waiting to hug me, as I crossed the threshold, were the bouncingthe apples of my eye, the delights of my heart. So bereft was I that it took all the discipline I could muster to greet them with the enthusiasm I would have felt an hour earlier. Had it been even a little bit possible, I might have curled up on the floor of the arrivals area, clutching my knees to my heaving breast. “Fake it till you make it,” I said to myself. Faking it was the best I could do at the time. Fortunately I would be with them for six days—time enough to restore my equilibrium. Later, with only the memory of the emptiness to show for my sudden outburst, I patted myself on the back. “Now you have experienced grief,” I said. “You got through it all right. Return to the process of building a satisfying life.” So I bought a new piano and played it every morning. I registered at a seniors centre and joined a writing club. I chose spring bulbs and pots of pansies to grow on my balcony. March went out like a lamb. April brought me a plugged ear that required the attention of a doctor. I hadn’t seen this doctor since I left the nursing home. He used to come to our suite on Fridays. We’d worked closely together, giving the best care we could for David. Somehow we’d managed to maintain a cheery disposition and a stiff upper lip in the face of so much suffering and helplessness.. A plugged ear is much easier to fix than a neuro-degenerative illness. In the face of such a simple task I looked forward to telling him about my new piano, my plans for spring, the flowers I was growing. But as soon as he asked me how I was doing, the monster came out of nowhere and nailed me to the chair. I felt the tightening of my chest and my face refused to smile. I took a deep breath to calm myself. Clearly I was not going to be able to tell him about the new piano or the flowers. Acting on its own, with no permission from me, my mouth blurted, “Just sitting here with you is giving me PTSD. “Really?” he asked in surprise. “Really,” I said, for now I was back in the nursing home, trying to live one day at a time, trying not to wish away the together time that remained for David and me, wishing I could do more for him, wishing I could do it better. “That’s funny,” the doctor said. “Being here with you isn’t giving me PTSD.” This, I knew, was an invitation to let it go. The old familiar me would have laughed. The old familiar me would have told him about the pansies and the family dinners on Sundays. But with the monster gripping my neck all I could manage to say was: “I think it’s only my left ear, but you can check the right one.” And when I got home, clear-eared and heart-broken, I lay on my bed for hours, hugging my knees to my heaving breast. “Move past it,” I said to myself. “Forget the monster and go on with your life. Or maybe learn to keep an eye out so it’s not such a shock when it springs.” On my phone was a text from Alayne, inviting me to join her on a trip to the farmers’ market. Alayne was a friend of David’s, then later a friend of mine by association. In those last couple of years she continued to visit, came in the last few weeks knowing David would be unable to speak. I accepted her offer with trepidation, knowing myself to be vulnerable in a way I had not been before. If ever there was a good place for a monster to lie in wait, then that place was surely the farmers’ market, the very one where David and I had spent many joyful Saturday mornings in years gone by. We went so often that the vendors noticed our absences and asked why we’d been away. All my senses were on alert, waiting for the ambush that never came. This visit to the market was not quite like the others. None of the vendors remembered me. I’d been away that long. Nobody wondered how I was doing. With a tremulous awakening of confidence I picked up an opulent hydrangea, then a fragrant Easter lily. I snatched up a jar of my favourite Sauerkraut and added a bag of carrots. Into the mix I threw a package of jerk chicken sausages, fresh pita, hummus, and finally, a chocolate treat made from ground up crickets that I thought I’d take to entertain the unsuspecting snackers at the bridge club. Smiling triumphantly in my kitchen as I unpacked the load, I said, “Aha Monster. I fooled you, didn’t I? You thought you’d scare me away from the farmers’ market, and I went anyway.” But even as I said it, I began to suspect that this grief, which was neither a burden to be slowly unloaded, nor a tunnel with a light at the end, was a smarter-than-average monster. Smarter-than-average monsters are too smart to ambush you when you’re ready for them. They know enough to wait until you aren’t. With that in mind, as I plan my second trip to Ontario, I am hoping the monster never strikes twice in the same place.

JOHN THE MENTOR (Nursing Home Life part 3)

There was food for supper in our kitchenette fridge, but we opted to have supper in the dining room on our first night at Laurier House. Principle had triumphed over preference. In principle, it was best to eat in the dining room because Laurier House is a community as well as a nursing home. David and I have always been community people. In every new place we’ve moved to during 44 years of marriage we have stepped forward to meet the neighbours and join in with local activities. So it made sense to eat in the dining room, even though we had a fridge with food in it. My preference would have been the kitchenette. In principle, we had to pay rent to live at Laurier House, David for long-term care, me as his companion. Food was included in the rent. Why pay again for food you have already paid for? My preference was to buy our own food and eat it in our suite. In principle, we had moved to Laurier House so that there would be a team of people to join me in taking care of David as Multiple System Atrophy steadily progressed. David gave a firm indication that he wanted to act on principle. So we chose it over preference, even though I didn’t want to go there. I had never imagined a nursing home as a place where I would want to live, or a care centre dining room as a place where I would want to eat. When sociable people like us move into a community, its character gradually becomes part of them. They take on its projects, its conflicts, its joys, its aspirations and its sorrows. Having moved several times, we were familiar with this process. Perhaps it was this knowledge, more than any other factor, that explained my reluctance to join the community in the dining room “Pretend it’s a restaurant,” I said to myself. “Fat chance,” myself said back. But we went anyway. Feeling as lost as accidental visitors to a foreign land, we accepted the offer when one of the care attendants came to take us to supper. Perhaps a dozen people had arrived before us. The Laurier House dining rooms are furnished in tables for four. Places are pre-assigned so that the staff can set up in advance. “This is John,” said the care attendant as she positioned David’s chair. “This is David and Wendy.” Then she was off to shepherd someone else. Not counting us, John was the sole diner at our table. It appeared that he was already well into his meal when we arrived. Acting on our natural curiosity, we set out to get to know him. Sociable and curious, we hadn’t been there more than a few minutes when we came up against the first obstacle. We couldn’t figure out why John was there and we didn’t know how to find out. When I was a little girl, my mother taught me a thing or two about asking questions. “Never ask people how old they are,” she said. Later, in response to a transgression on my part she added, “Never ask people how much money they have.” Even later, she added: “Never ask visitors when they are planning to leave.” After that, it was mainly up to me to decide what questions to ask. In the case of John, there seemed to be something I had to know, and I swear I heard Mother say: “Don’t ask people why they are living in a care centre. Wait for them to tell you.” Mindful of her warning, I tried my best to be curious and wait at the same time. While I waited, I contemplated. John did not seem to be a staff member. He appeared so much healthier than most of the residents. Maybe he was a companion like me. But that didn’t seem right either. Laurier House is extraordinary among Alberta Health services care facilities because it houses two categories of occupants: residents and companions. Residents qualify for care services from Alberta Health. Most of the Laurier House residents use wheelchairs. A few use walkers. Some rarely or never leave their rooms. David is a resident. Companions--usually spouses of residents--share accommodation with residents. I am a companion. The ratio of residents to companions is about four to one. This, plus the fact that John was unaccompanied, caused me to assume that John would be a resident. But if that was the case, then it was going to be difficult, without asking directly, to figure out why he was there. John was a friendly, take-charge sort, somewhat older than us but seeming just as young. He was the kind of neighbour you’d like to meet on your first day in a community. When it came to getting past the niceties, he was at a distinct advantage. It wasn’t difficult to see that David was using a wheelchair, or to hear that his speech was impaired. There was stiffness in his arms and hands. His head bowed forward a bit. Knowing we had moved in that very day, John launched an easy conversation about the details of our move. Did we both live here? Where had we come from? Were we comfortably settled in our suite? We wanted to respond by showing interest in him, yet beyond a certain point, we didn’t know quite how. All four of his limbs seemed to be intact. He could hear well and see well. He mentioned driving his car to medical appointments. He had lived here a little less than a year. But what was he doing at Laurier House? The mystery was solved when a care attendant stopped by to put a sympathetic hand on John’s shoulder. “I am sorry for your loss,” she said. When she had moved on, John told us that his wife had very recently died. He lived at Laurier as her companion. . This was a possibility I had not considered, nor did I really want to. Here, on our very first day, we sat within touching distance of a man grieving the loss of his wife. She might have sat here with us if we had arrived a week earlier. At that very moment, David and I were grieving the loss of our regular life together. John must have grieved that same loss not so long ago, and now he was dealing with this new grief. Had we already been friends, we would have known how to talk about this, but as strangers our avenues for mutual consolation were harder to find. John was a stalwart man, resolute in his dedication to moving forward. So we did not speak of grief. We talked of other things. Already he was searching for a new place to live. We followed the details of that search. This is what Laurier House companions do when their spouses die. With no resident to support, there is no reason for companions to remain. Three weeks after we arrived, John was gone. For a brief time he was our best friend. He was the first person we lost at Laurier House and we missed him. The loss I felt at John’s departure took me back a few short years to the time when David’s mother was in her mid-nineties, alive and alert. In the previous twenty years her peers had all died. A social type, she immediately developed friendships in the seniors residence where she lived. But her new friends also died. Yet somehow she had continued on a forward journey with resignation and a surprising degree of optimism. Watching her, I had hoped to follow her example—when I was in my mid-nineties. The opportunity to follow her example came much earlier than I expected. I was 63 and David was 64 when we moved to Laurier House. There was already some illness amongst our peers, but most of our friends and relatives were travelling, volunteering, entertaining friends, and living the life we had hoped to have in our sixties. Joining the Laurier House community was going to expose us to loss at a level we had not anticipated. I am grateful for the time John gave to us. He did not leave without a trace. Instead of talking about grief in his last few weeks, he turned his attention toward settling us into our new future. He taught us how to assist a friendly resident who was constantly searching for her room. He taught us that you could probably be served if you showed up for breakfast half an hour earlier than the posted serving time. He taught us that you could take a breakfast tray to your room, or ask a care attendant to get one for you. He taught us that you could ask the dining room for a litre of milk, or a carton of juice. When I consulted him about a problem with our shower, he said that his shower, left to its own devices, seemed most inclined to point at the side wall. That, he explained, was the reason why he usually chose to bathe. These things we would no doubt have figured out eventually, but we were grateful for the lessons. Time is a clearly defined thing. It takes as long as it takes. Only human perception makes a minute seem long or short. As I write this piece I am aware that I have already been at Laurier House longer than John. The time I spend here is the time I have with David, so I cannot wish it shorter. . In the brief time we knew him, John showed us how life would unfold at Laurier House. People would come. They would hide. They would settle in. The staff, getting to know them, would treat them with affection. Then they would go, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. That was the rhythm of the place. We were at the beginning then, looking for a roadmap to guide us on a journey nobody would ever want to sign up for. We were looking for hope. If John--grieving a loss and facing his second major move in less than a year--could smile through it all, treat people with respect and open his heart to disoriented newcomers, then maybe we could too.

REMEMBERING PIRATE

A dog named Pirate died in Calgary on April 20 2018. He died a peaceful death with medical assistance. You may have known him by another name and longed for his return. If so, we want you to know that he lived a good life, all things considered. His death will be mourned by many people who encountered him in the course of his life’s journey. One of them is me. Pirate was a lucky dog, lucky in a context of hope, which is to say that a considerable number of bad things happened around him and somehow he managed to move forward with his own special blend of forbearance and enthusiasm. If he had a motto, a code to live by, I believe it would have been: “Seize the day and love the one you’re with.” Pirate was a white dog, a white dog with some brown. According to veterinary estimation, he was born some time in 2003, Part Shih Tzu, part terrier. He was a small, one-eyed curly-tailed creature whose complete life history has thus far been shrouded in mystery. We can trace it with certainty back to an August day in 2005 when Maxine Thompson of Lougheed Alberta noticed him wandering around Main Street, searching for a lover, or a friendly human. We’ll never know which it was, possibly both. He wore a tattered leather collar that bore no identification. His mud-caked hair hung low off his belly and drooped over his face. Maxine, recognizing a probable resemblance to a well-groomed Shih Tzu belonging to my father, asked Dad to take charge of his care. She promised she would find him a home if his owner had not been identified by the time she returned from an impending vacation. Thus my father began a process of bathing and trimming and ratty old collar disposal that eventually revealed a dog much life his own, except for the missing eye and the fully functioning proof of manhood. It also became obvious that, at some previous point, this dog had both learned to love humans and to build good relationships with them. Two weeks passed with no person stepping forward to make a claim. My father’s dog and his new playmate became fast friends. Maxine was still enjoying her vacation. Dad was rapidly taking on the mantle of a two-dog man, a man in serious danger of keeping two dogs when he needed only one. So he decided to give the dog to David and me “You need a dog,” he said. “Here is a free dog. He’s even house-trained.” Dad was right about one thing. He was, in fact, house-trained. Together on separate journeys, we and Pirate were to learn that there is no such thing as a free dog. We welcomed the dog into our Edmonton home with a brief tour that included a visit to the food bowl. Almost immediately new responsibilities began to emerge. The first was to give him a name to which he could answer if he should somehow escape from our unfenced yard. The second job was to build a fence, seeing as how he escaped from our yard at the first opportunity, and every subsequent opportunity, claiming our entire neighbourhood and the adjoining river valley park as his own. The third job was to find a veterinarian who could reduce his sexual longings and possibly his need to wander, vaccinate him against all forms of pestilence and advise on what should be done with the empty eye socket. David suggested that we call him Pirate. It seemed a good fit for a one-eyed wanderer who’d been living rough. Pirate thought so too. It only took him a day to get used to coming when we called him for a treat or a walk. Building a fence took a little longer. With considerable assistance from two sons and a neighbour, David fashioned a smart white picket fence enhancing the front exposure of our colonial-style home. A Caragana hedge provided protection at the side. The vet vaccinated Pirate against multiple threats, then performed four surgeries for which Pirate was not entirely grateful, one to eliminate the lust for fatherhood, one to clear the eye-socket of debris, and two more eye surgeries to clear debris that stubbornly remained. By the time he’d been with us for a month, we estimated the cost of our “free dog” at approximately $3,000, not including food. Nevertheless, Pirate continued to pursue the idea of being a free dog. From the very start, he consistently showed us two things. The first was that he loved us. The second was that he was committed to living a life befitting his new name. He showed his love by welcoming us home joyously whenever we returned from work, allowing us to pet him when he wasn’t busy, promoting our physical and mental health by insisting on daily walks regardless of the weather, and encouraging us to experience generosity by giving him unlimited treats. He established his reputation for piracy by claiming his right to free himself from bondage by any available means. There seemed no end to the methods he used to assert his freedom. In the days before the fence, he simply declined to observe the yard boundary. When we attached him to a chain, he paced up and down the veranda steps until the chain lodged in the cracks between the boards, then insisted that we free him immediately. When we replaced the chain with a rope, he spent ninety peaceful minutes chewing the rope into six-inch lengths, thereby rendering that rope ineligible for further employment. And when the fence was at last established, he dug a hole between the stocks of the tcaragana hedge and had already found some stinking dead thing to role in by the time his skulduggery was discovered. Yet it seemed that Pirate did not want to be free so much as he wanted to believe that he could be free if he chose to be. One night I heard him barking, so I went to the door to call him in. The louder I called, the louder he barked. At last, rushing barefoot into the yard to retrieve him, I found him on the outside of the front gate, demanding to know why it had taken me so long to open the gate so that he could come in for a treat to reward him for coming back instead of making us search for him. “Why didn’t you come back via the route through which you escaped?” I asked, while opening the treat bag. “The escape route only goes one way,” he replied. “Don’t you worry that you’ll be lost and uncared-for like you were when Maxine found you?” I asked. “Don’t you worry that you’ll be hit by a car when you’re wandering the streets?” “No,” he replied. “Why would I worry? I do okay, don’t I?” “You’re counting on luck,” I retorted. Indeed, he was a lucky dog. When we lost him in the park, a neighbour recognized him and brought him back to us. When a cat threatened to scratch out his other eye, he managed to negotiate a peaceful settlement. When I was hit by a car while holding his leash, he avoided being run over. Pirate was a digger. On the days when he wasn’t trying to escape, he dug holes for reasons we could not always understand. The second time he dug a hole in the middle of the lawn, we informed him that he simply had to change—or else. Or else what, we wondered when we saw evidence of the third lawn digging. Faced with Pirate’s reluctance to change his behavior, I e-mailed a letter of inquiry to an expert. “How can we convince our dog to stop digging holes?” The response was prompt and matter-of fact. “Terriers dig,” said the expert. “Get over it. Give him toys to play with, establish places where he is allowed to dig, and treat him so well that he won’t want to escape.” We bought more toys and considered ways to treat him better. “You can dig behind the pink peony,” I told Pirate, while dusting myself off after the first time I fell into the hole he had secretly dug behind the pink peony. “Thank you,” he said, failing to mention the new hole he had already dug behind the white peony. He’d buried a toy back there and apparently needed to dig it up. “You might as well dig behind the red peony too,” I said a few days later. So he did. Then he went back to digging under the hedge. The sons who had built the white picket fence unfurled a role of chicken wire which they installed amongst the stocks of the hedge. Digging under the chicken wire took longer than digging through the hedge alone. We considered this to be a victory. As the expert had told us, terriers dig. He was a dog who never failed to answer when opportunity barked. When a big scary canine would pass by the front gate he would tear across the yard at top speed, furious and threatening things he would do if only that gate weren’t there to protect the interloper. We never had to go home early to let him out because he could control his bodily functions for 12 or 14 hours. But if we returned home after a fifteen minute outing, it would be absolutely necessary that he should go out. He could manage fine in a daytime thunderstorm, but thunder in the night would catapult him trembling into the space between us in our bed, issuing a challenge. “are you the kind of unfeeling people who would force a frightened dog to sleep alone in the rockingchair?” If our mother had died, or our father, or our sister, if we were recovering after cancer surgery, or nursing a broken foot or a broken arm, he would nuzzle us sympatheticly for a few minutes, then invite us to move past the pain by taking him for a walk. Though his digging made us think of him as a terrier, he was only part terrier. Another part of him was Shih Tzu. Shih Tzus are known to be serially loyal, meaning that they attach easily to humans, then reattach to new humans just as easily. Knowing this, and knowing that he had once been known by some other name, I guess there was always some part of me fearing that a previous owner would come forward and claim him. After all, someone had taught him to love humans and to empty his bowels and bladder in appropriate places. This fear was repeatedly tested during more than 3000 walks in the 10 years we spent together. We walked in an off-leash dog park where people were constantly calling their dogs by name. I couldn’t help but wonder what Pirate was called before we named him Pirate. It seemed inevitable that one day, someone would shout; “Here Herbert!” or “Here Rover!” Then Pirate, recalling his past, would run to this person, tail wagging. So it didn’t seem all that surprising when, in the eighth year, a stranger walking toward us in the park said, “Is that Gracey?” I was speechless. “Pardon me?” said David. “Is that gracey?” “No,” said David. “It’s Pirate.” “It looks like Gracey,” said the man. “But maybe it isn’t.” Then he continued on his walk. I wondered if he was on his way to the police station to report a dog theft. “Are you Gracie?” I whispered fearfully to Pirate when we got home. “Please don’t be Gracey.” Pirate didn’t answer. If he was Gracey, he wasn’t letting on. That night I went to bed wondering what would happen if Pirate turned out to be Gracey. I needn’t have worried. He wasn’t Gracey. We were assured of this a few days later when, on another walk in the park, we came face to face with the real Gracey. There she was, a little white dog with brown markings, curly tailed, one-eyed, a mirror image of Pirate. Facing each other their good eyes met and so did their missing eyes. Apparently it’s not all that uncommon for Shih Tzus to be missing an eye. It has to do with the structure of their faces. Pirate may not have lost his eye in a fight as we had originally suspected. It might simply have fallen out. Serially loyal dogs like you better than other people during the time when they live with you. Pirate liked most people well enough, and some especially well. One of his favourites was Wayne, who lived in Calgary and was married to David’s sister Lorna. Wayne liked to take Pirate for walks when he was visiting us. Perhaps every stage of life is a stage of transition. Pirate was around during times of letting go, of giving up beloved patterns and future plans we didn’t even know we had until suddenly they were derailed. But while we agonized over the changes, he went forward, seemingly unflappable. Pirate’s ability to transfer loyalty served him well. His attraction to Wayne proved to be a lucky attachment. David developed disabilities that forced us to move from the colonial home with the smart white picket fence and the reinforced Caragana hedge. What were we to do with Pirate? “Wayne needs a dog to walk with,” said Lorna. “We’ll take Pirate.” Grateful as we were that he had a new home to go to, we couldn’t hide our tears when Wayne and Lorna loaded their van with Pirates toys and moved him to Calgary. I last saw Pirate a couple of years ago, on a brief visit with Lorna and Wayne in Calgary. He greeted me with pleasure, jumped into my lap for a five-minute pet, then ran upstairs to crawl into bed with Wayne. He and Wayne were still together there when I left the next morning. The switch of allegiance was complete. Given that I couldn’t keep him, I had to love him for that. Pirate was with Lorna when he died, having transferred his loyalty to her. He would have stuck with Wayne, but Wayne had become ill. He had moved to a care centre. In the process of dealing with Wayne’s illness, they’d exchanged their home for an unfenced retirement duplex. Unable to build a fence, Lorna developed the habit of walking Pirate several times a day. This is how they lived until a series of seizures rendered him unable to stand without falling. “I’m sorry you had to deal with Pirate during such a difficult time,’ I said to Lorna when she told us that he was gone. “Oh, don’t be sorry,” she replied. “I miss him. I get home from visiting wayne and he isn’t there to greet me.” David and I know how she feels. We miss him too, though in a different way. We miss the petting sessions and the snuggles and the endless toy tugging competitions that Pirate always won. But beyond that, we miss the life we had when Pirate first came to us, a life where the future promised an untapped reservoir of good things and we had the freedom to say: “Sure we’ll take that dog.” If he could give us advice at this point, I feel certain he would say: “Look around you, see what you have, make the most of it and move on when you need to.” This we have tried our best to do. Somewhere out there we suspect there is a person who once lost a friendly little white diggedy dog, a dog with brown patches who dreamed of being free. We don’t know what your life was like, or how you came to lose him. But if you are that person, or any other person who loved Pirate, we are truly sorry for your loss.

SHALL WE TALK ABOUT DEATH?

Yesterday at lunch we were talking about death with some friends. I hadn’t been the one to raise the topic, but I did participate willingly, since death seemed to be the topic of the day for me. Only a few hours had passed since I read Sandra Martin’s article in The Toronto Globe and Mail—THE LONG GOODBYE: LET’S TALK ABOUT DEATH. In it Martin poses the question: “Have you noticed how few people seem to die these days?” She was not, as it appeared on first viewing, talking about a decline in the death rate, but rather about our tendency to replace direct mention of death and burial with other expressions. People pass away, or they glimpse the last rays of afternoon light, or become bright morning stars, or are laid to rest. Martin, it seems, would prefer conversations to be more specific, less poetic. I have some sympathy for her point of view. I am, in fact, forced to confess sympathy, or admit that I was wrong all those years ago when I engaged in subversive conversations with my friend Bert. Each conversation would resemble the others. Bert would mention that so-and-so had passed away. “When did she die?” I would ask. “She passed on in late December,” he would say. “Oh, I am sorry she died.” On and on it would go, neither of us willing to back down, neither of us willing to acknowledge that we were arguing semantics when we ought to have been grieving. We were in our twenties then and though the deaths we discussed were the deaths of real people, we spoke of them at a distance, as if they were theoretical. These days, when I discuss death with friends, the conversations are different. Gone is the competitive tone replaced by the recounting of experience and the gentle prodding of a future not yet determined. There is much to talk about. We have all sat sadly and fearfully with dying parents and felt the desperate grieving of those closest to us as we arranged funerals. We have all wandered aimlessly through our homes after the funerals, wondering how to fill the gaping holes. What’s more, now that we are in our sixties, our thoughts are turning to impending deaths—our own. Some of us have cancer, others have other conditions. None of us has been given a probable date for our death, but we can see how it might happen even as we engage in the most positive approaches toward living. So we practice talking about with people we trust, lighting on it cautiously, tenderly, careful not to linger too long. But still we light on it. Where once I would have stood in enthusiastic defence of Martin’s position on telling it like it is, I now find myself reading in sympathy that so-and-so has joined the choir of angels, or watches happily over grandchildren from a better place. It’s poetry, really. Poetry comforts. I wonder if there is anything to be gained by trying to force people to say words they do not want to utter. We all no that a death occurred. What we don’t know is what is happening now to the person who is no longer alive, and because we are grieving, because we are in need of comfort, , we want to give the benefit of the doubt, to believe that something good has come of it all. Near the end of her article Martin asks “Will you join me in a collective resolution to rip the shroud off death imagery?” Honestly, at this point in my life, speaking as a person who has always been willing to address death in direct language, I think I’ll decline the invitation.

PREPARING FOR CHRISTMAS

I got down the Christmas dishes this morning, put them on the lower shelves where they can be easily reached, put the every-day dishes up on the high shelves you can’t reach without a ladder. Yesterday I played a new Christmas CD. The day before I practiced some of the Christmas songs that never become listenable unless I practice them for several weeks—the songs I didn’t practice at all last year. Christmas, in my world it seems, is arriving early. Last year I didn’t prepare for Christmas. Well, I suppose I prepared, in the way a sleep-walker or a robot might prepare. I didn’t anticipate. I didn’t feel Christmas. Christmas came last year. It came without my help though I did whatever it was that I had to do. One day, very close to Christmas, I got a ladder and brought the dishes down. One day, I think it was boxing Day, I played a few Christmas CD’s. Baby Ben made his grand entry into the world on new Year’s eve and, as he pulled us forward into the future, I observed with relief that the whole business of holidays was finally over. I hated last November. Last November we were closing down my beloved programs at Hope foundation. I was saying good-bye to clients. I was mourning the loss of my colleagues. We were making adjustments to accommodate david’s changing health. We were paying daily hospital visits to our frail and cherished Gramma. Last November was a lousy month. December was just as bad. Last November I didn’t want to do the things I like to do. If something came up that might be fun, I did it reluctantly. I caught myself hoping I wouldn’t get any Christmas presents. It was a very strange time. But I guess I learned something a long the way, something practical and useful. A good thing it is too, for this November finds me doing painful work--hope work with groups of people who have recently lost a colleague to suicide. “what do we do,” they ask, “after we accept that it is normal to feel guilt and anger?” The answer to this question is not clear to me. I suppose there really are no rules to govern it. But I have, with the memory of last November fixed firmly in mind, approached these workshops with the conviction that there is no moral reason why we can’t consider the possibility of seeking out positive emotions like joy, awe, interest, inspiration, amusement, contentment, pride, gratitude, love and hope. There is no moral reason not to pursue things that delight us, things that fascinate us, things that refresh us, work that really matters. Circumstances may rob us of the desire for these things, but there is no moral reason why we must deny them to ourselves. Perhaps this conviction is helpful to others as well. My email contains a thank-you note: “Thank you so much for your wisdom, encouragement and hope on Friday. They meant a lot to us and to me personally. I had not realized that I had started to give up some of the things that I love to do until you brought it to my attention. I now know that I need to once again do the things that refresh and delight me.” When I read that note, it occurred to me that I had already started looking forward to Christmas this year. But it was the note that woke me to the realization that I hadn’t noticed the change.

THE HOMEY SWEATER

Some things last longer than you expect them to. So it is with the wear-it-around-home sweater I call my homey sweater. My homey sweater doesn’t look like a sweater that wood last. Woven from some mysteriously stretchy yarn in a pattern resembling the popcorn stitch, you’d think its fuzzy edges would catch, pull and disintegrate to strings and balls. Believing I might only have it for a short time, I wore it sparingly when first it came to me. I met that sweater in September 2005, a bright, breezy September like this one. Early mornings arrived with a chill. In all other ways, that September was different from all others before and since. On the nights when I was able I drowsed brokenly on the cot in Mom’s hospital suite. Palliative Care was marked on the door sign. Every few minutes Mom would cry out and I would speak softly to her, stretching out the time, ramping down the tension, knowing it was too soon for the next painkiller. I’d read to her, tell her stories, sing songs, make promises. If she could be calmed she would rest again. I would doze again. Mornings dawning that September brought brilliant sunshine, chilly breezes. I’d lie a few moments of quiet, waiting for something to happen. When the hospital lights went down and the halls began to stir I would collect my weary self, grab a sweater from the end of Mom’s bed, and step out onto the patio. Closing the door behind me, I’d make phone calls, to Dad, to David, to my kids, to my sisters, to my brother. “A restless night,” I’d say. “We’re okay. See you later on.” Snug in Mom’s sweater, I’d hover in the ever-increasing swirls of autumn leaves, wondering how long it would be, how many more mornings I’d be here, how many mornings Mom would be here. The air was crisp, not the air of summer. Months ago I had wondered this. “We are talking in terms of weeks,” a doctor had said, back in early July. Back then, with work in its summer slowness, I easily developed the patterns of spending time. Work could wait, other things could wait. Now, with September pushing forward, promising October soon behind, people were looking for commitment from me. “I don’t know if I can be there,” I would say. “I might be there. You’ll need to have a back-up plan in case I can’t.” There was a back-up plan for a weeklong course I would have taught to health care staff from Manitoba. There was a back-up plan for a speech at the Canadian Palliative Care Association on September 28, and a good thing too, because that was a day when I could not make it. “Use the time you have,” I said to myself. “Stay here for the time you have.” The day when I would have been speaking on hope in palliative care was the day when we at last gathered up the things that had been brought to Mom’s room over the past few weeks. There were magazines and slippers, Tupperware containers, flower vases, bags of candy, packages of cinnamon buns, the accordion I had played to comfort her, assorted articles of clothing. We carried it all to the car. My arms were full. I wore Mom’s sweater out the front door, the efficient way to transport it. After so many hours spent inside, I haven’t been back in that room or on that patio since. Mom’s sweater was a white sweater, looking quite new at the time when first I began to wear it, not so old even now, though seven years ought to have dimmed the memory of how it felt to shrug in and out of it during that distant September. It’s the kind of sweater you wear, and wash, and wear, and wash and wear again. It’s light on your arms, warm in the cold, , a warm sweater that breathes, the right arm length, the right waist length. It is a comfortable sweater. I could see why she bought it, why she took it with her to the hospital. It seemed fragile when I took it home. “I’ll keep it for a while,” I said. “It won’t last long. It will be stained. It will snag. It will go to balls.” At first I wore it sparingly, not wanting to face the time when it, like Mom, would move beyond my reach. But that homey sweater has staying power. It travels about the house, perching on newel posts, hanging on the backs of chairs, resting on the back door bench, even hanging in the closet occasionally. Still reasonably clean, still reasonably free from snags and balls, it has lasted much longer than I ever expected. That sweater never minds being shrugged off wherever I leave it. It waits for a chill. “Put me on,” it beckons. “I will warm you. Use the time we have.” It’s my homey sweater.

THINKING OF HOPE AND PALLIATIVE CARE

Here I am planning, as I do every so often, a talk on hope for people who work in palliative care
And here I sit, before a computer, wondering how to approach the idea that patients, families and staff may harbour incongruous hopes
And here it is, a channel to hope that all of us can share
Named by a poet in the symbolic language of the 21st century.

From TED.com RIVES CONTROLS THE INTERNET

”Heck, if I ran the web, you could email dead people.
They would not email you back --
but you'd get an automated reply.
Their name in your inbox --
it's all you wanted anyway.
And a message saying, "Hey, it's me. I miss you.
Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy.”

A FEW MONTHS TO LIVE

Some days I’m a counellor. I met a man who had just found out he had only a few months to live. He came to talk about hope. His concerns were practical. How would he retain his normal composure in public? How would he modify his work to accommodate his disabilities? Who would do his work if he couldn’t do his share?
Some days I’m a learner, upgrading my competencies. A seminar leader asked us to consider what would be important to us if we’d just been told we had only a few months to live. We all said we’d forget about our work and do some things we’d always wanted to do, like learn to paint, or take the kids to Disneyland. The seminar leader clapped his hands in delight and we were proud to have given the correct answer. I wonder if he ever talked about hope with somebody who has just learned he has only a few months to live!

GARDEN MAGIC

“I miss my mom,” I said to David as we were preparing thanksgiving dinner. We were unbagging those nice clean vegetables that come from the farmer’s market, a little swish of water and you dump them into the pot.
Mom’s been dead for about four years now. “I miss her cooking,” I said. He said he missed it too. “And I miss being in the kitchen with her, getting things ready.”
At times like this your senses kick in. Just thinking about those good old days I could pretty much feel my hands hoisting and scrubbing and trying to peel those great big knobby garden potatoes stuck together like Siamese twins, triplets, mud caked in the places where they join. I could remember raising up my shoulder and slamming the knife down hardr than a camper’s axe to split those carrots that were so huge it only took one of them to feed five or six people. Do I miss that part? Maybe not so much. But I do miss my Mom.
Every spring she’d make the journey down to the basement, into her cold room. The cold room was the place where she kept the food. On the shelves there were beet pickles, the best beet pickles I have ever eaten. There were dill pickles, sweet pickles, canned raspberries. Some of them put up last fall, some of them—maybe a little older. Believe me, that cold room in spring was scarier than any haunted house you’d put together for your kids at Halloween. She’d open the door and after checking for mice, listening for frogs, she’d reach down into a dark bin where no arm really ought to go. She’d pull out something withery and soft, with tails hanging off it. Then she’d take that thing out to the garden, stick it in the ground, give it a little water, give it a little time and presto! It was garden magic! She’d have enough new potatoes to feed the army, with some left over for the navy and the air force. And that was only the beginning of mother’s garden. There’d be radishes and lettuce, peas and beans, carrots and parsnips and turnips, onions and cabbage and tomatoes, beets and cucumbers for pickles, and finally when you thought you couldn’t wait another day, there’d be corn on the cob.
But one spring day Mom said to me, “This will be the first time in 61 years that I haven’t planted a garden.” She was in the hospital then, sleeping on an air matress to chase away the bed sores, all tied up with tubes. She was suffering. It was hard visiting her, hard on the back, hard on the heart. When my dad heard her say the thing about the garden he jumped up and said, “Well, I guess I’d better go home and plant the garden.”
That made her laugh. He’d been growing food ever since he left school at the age of 13--growing wheat and barley and oats and canola and occasionally even flax. But planting a garden and fixing the vegetables was women’s work.
In June they packed Mom into the car and sent her home for a visit. She looked sceptically at the garden. The rows weren’t quite where they should be. The beets were probably planted too deep. The radishes needed eating. Still, things did seem to be growing. Mom went back to the hospital, a little room with a bed and chair, paying for tv and telephone by the day.
One day they offered Mom a choice. Did she want to stay where she was, or would she rather go to the room marked palliative care? Apparently the name palliative care keeps some people out. But Mom was always a practical sort. They’ve got a 27 inch tv in there and a free phone, she said. They’ve got a recliner for your father and a couch that guests can sleep on. They’ve got a microwave and a coffee pot and a toaster and a fridge and dishes in the cupboard, they still serve three meals a day. The room also had a patio door, leading out onto a patio with a table and chairs.
And a good thing it was that she moved, for out in the garden, the vegetables were getting restless. You couldn’t blame the turnips and radishes. They were bothered by bugs. Peas were bursting out of their pods, carrots were pushing and groaning and twisting around each other. The beets were jamming together and, of course, there were a lot of potatoes.
So every weekend we’d go to Dad’s house and help him get in the vegetables. Then we’d throw a roast in the crockpot, and we’d clean and shell and peel and scrape. We packed up the dinner when it was cooked and rush it to the hospital. A little crowd of family across the generations would gather there and we’d all go out to the patio with mom and eat together,. The nurses came out to take pictures. That was four years ago now. Seems like yesterday.
Not long ago we had dinner at dad’s. We told him we were coming. Dinner was ready when we got there. He served beet pickles. Oh they were good—not just god, they were great in the way that only beet pickles can be great- round and slippery and delicious; sweet and sour at the same time; tangy and gentle at the same time; firm and juicy at the same time.
“These taste just like Mom’s beet pickles,” I said.
“They are Mom’s beet pickles,” he said. “Seems like they’re not too old yet. There’s only a few jars left.”
He didn’t stop at beet pickles. These days, if you invite yourself to dinner at Dad’s, and the season is right, you will be served sweet buttered corn so fresh it snuggles the memory of the garden’s afternoon sun, and carrots scrubbed glossy and turned in butter, and slices of fried ham, or roast of beef from the crockpot. And did I mention potatoes? Well, no matter what else, there will always be potatoes, for the garden has performed its usual wonders.
And you might find it difficult to believe that this is the same man who, by the age of 79 had eaten mostly meals that had been cooked by his mother, or his wife, or an unseen cook behind a swinging door. But then, this could just be the final proof that an old dog can learn new tricks, or maybe it’s simply Dad’s indisputable declaration that eighty is not old at all for some dogs.