Every day is a milestone

From 4 September 2007


(one day, I'll write something new)


In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes that mourning comes later. Grief is passive. Grief happens. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, requires attention. Maybe I have it backwards, but I feel as though I skipped grief and have been mourning from the very beginning, paying attention to all the details, the obsessive details.

The day my dad died was glorious and sunny in Toronto. When I was home for his funeral, I lay in his bed, where he lay and where he lay dying, and tried to imagine his last day, his final moments there. I wondered if the curtains were open, because if they were, he’d have had a sunny, verdant view of the apple tree and blue skies. But, no. My mother says the curtains, heavy and dark, were drawn that day. Maybe that was for the best — I wonder if it’d seem like an insult, to lie dying as the world was bright and shiny and fresh with the promise of spring and all new things. To know that people, vital people, were mowing lawns, driving cars, riding bicycles and carrying out Saturday afternoon errands. To know that he was, helplessly, leaving it all behind, utterly alone in his final moments. As we all must be.

Several weeks later, I was at the cottage, taking a walk on the flat rocks where we used to have bonfires and parties as teenagers. I saw a piece of newspaper caught in the brush. I looked at its date — it was May 19 and I instantly recognized it was from the long weekend, just a week before Dad died and his last weekend at the cottage. The first weekend of the cottage season, when everyone on the beach is reuniting after the winter. The weekend when everyone there said he looked better than he'd looked in years. The weekend when everyone was saying their goodbyes to him, even though they didn't know it. I like that they were doing so in the spirit of hello.

Later, back at the cottage, I came across a crossword puzzle page in a newspaper from last August and saw Dad’s handwritten responses. It was about three-quarters finished. That night, I completed the answers he didn’t get or hadn’t got round to. After, I couldn’t bear to recycle it, or burn it in the fire. I think of us as having done the puzzle together and I like being able to look at his familiar printing and imagine him living and breathing, reading and thinking. I need this as a simple testimony to his existence: Look, there's his printing; he wrote those words under lamplight one summer night, so that's tangible proof he was once here. He's gone, but it remains. After our holiday, I brought that folded newspaper page with the crossword puzzle back to Winnipeg with me. I clutch at these mundane things, am compelled to keep them, preserve them, these bits and pieces of a life lived. The more ordinary, the better, it seems. I'm more struck, more moved by them than by anything more obvious or apparently significant. I saw him in his casket and felt oddly detached. His birthday passed like any other day for me since his death. But I catch sight of his shoes, tucked carefully under his chest of drawers, and am overcome. They look so... vulnerable, forlorn even, sitting there. I'm all about the details.

I miss his presence in this world. I miss the e-mails and the phone calls, even when there wasn’t much to say. I made the mistake of re-reading some of his e-mails to me one night at work. So mundane, so ordinary... mentions of his latest doctor’s appointment, of a get-together with someone, of Mother’s Day brunch, shopping plans. It was the very ordinariness of those messages that struck me and made me cry in my seat there at work. The very ordinariness is what makes us think that life goes on and on and on.

I think of him a dozen or more times a day. I check his e-mail account from time to time (his password was easy to guess), as though there might be some secret there that I have yet to uncover, some message for me or something written about me, something that may comfort me. One of Dad’s e-mails to me, written April 26, noted that he had begun his 17th year of retirement that day. And he quipped that if he’d known he’d live this long, he’d have taken better care of himself. That was a month to the day before his death.

Everyone talks about the milestones — the first Christmas, the first birthday — that one finds so difficult after the loss of someone close. But what I’m realizing is that every day is a milestone in some way or another. This is the first Sept. 4 without my dad. I don’t know what happened last Sept. 4, but I know this much is true: he was alive. Maybe I called him, or chatted with him online; maybe I didn’t. But he was *here,* living, breathing and alive in this world. See, the thing is, even when one is chronically unwell, one is alive until one's last breath.

Today, meanwhile, life goes on without him. It’s as if he is still here; it’s as if he never were.

Concentration

Deerbaby's lovely photo today was about playtime, but the look of concentration on her little girl's face reminded me of one of my favourites. If I had to choose a photo to characterize C, this would probably be it. It doesn't at all capture her joyfulness or sweet nature, but the faraway, other-ness is all there.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Meandering work in progress -- ideas jotted April 2010

I have always had a job. When there wasn't full-time work, there were freelance gigs and contracts. I took my first union job when I was 14. Before that, there was babysitting.

And yet, I am not a person who has enjoyed her work. Much of the time, it felt onerous, crushing, a daily proving ground. I have never learned the art of leaving work at work -- it came home with me, living rent-free in my brain, making me afraid to answer the phone at 11 p.m., knowing Someone Wanted Something. It's the reason I have never had a personal cellphone. I am like Pavlov's dog; the ringing makes me anxious.

During all those working years, I worked hard. I took it seriously. Too seriously, perhaps. I fantasized about not having to go to work, of not having to perform, of not having to juggle assignments. I imagined what it would be like to attend a concert and not have to dash off 14 inches of pithy prose before the encore. To read a book and not have to review it or interview the author.

I envied my friend, who left her banking job to stay at home with her children. The children kept her busy, I knew, but to be free of the phone calls, the meetings, the demands of others, especially the idiotic others... bliss. Sure, she faced the demands of young children, but she was meeting the needs of people who loved her, at least. These were pleasant, easy children and she enjoyed being with them. I enjoyed being with them. I thought I, too, might enjoy this lifestyle. I was frazzled and burned out. I couldn't wait for the chance to resign, to retire.

I left work in late 2007 and I haven't been the same since. I assumed that once I unwound a bit, I'd hit my stride. I haven't. I cannot shake this feeling that  I just need to put my feet down.

"Work had become the scaffolding of my life," the former magazine editor Dominique Browning writes about the demise of her job. "It was what I counted on. It held up the floor of my moods, kept the facade intact."

Although I voluntarily quit my job -- Browning was laid off -- the end result was the same: "Without work, who was I? I do not mean that my title defined me. What did define me was the simple act of working. The loss of my job triggered a cascade of self-doubt and depression."

I miss the busyness, the whirl of the day, having to constantly rise to the occasion. I don't travel anymore, or stay in luxe hotels in New York City or Los Angeles. I don't wear nice clothes, or shop for boots so expensive they'd make my mother's eyes water. Now, I cut my own hair. Nothing says "I've given up!" like cutting your own hair.

I used to fantasize about having all that unstructured time. I've never been a tidy person, a domestic person, but I became fascinated with those who have made an art of it. I devoured the writing of Jane Brocket, who shucked corporate life to rhapsodize about The Gentle Art of Domesticity. Oh, I thought, I will so love keeping a home! I will finally have the time to do it right, to be organized, to be careful and thorough and mindful. It'll be so restful. I'll be busy, yes, but it will be a rewarding, comfortable sort of busy. There'll be no weeds in the garden, no languishing pile of clothes to be dry-cleaned. Besides, I'll have time to work on my photography, read for pleasure and catch up on correspondence. I'll enjoy cooking once again. I'll knit socks and sweaters. I will be on top of things. I will be... serene.

As C would say: Oh, it is to laugh.

In my new role as care-taker -- of a school-age child and a chronically ill parent -- I am still busy. But I am often left with a lot of unstructured time and that is the death knell for a procrastinator, for a person who needs structure and task to focus. Now, I am aimless. Without momentum, I drift, not knowing where to start, what to do, or the desire to do any of it. And -- I suspect this is depression -- I have no energy. The weekdays mostly blend and blur together and I find myself envying C, who runs to join the school line with such purpose.

I am a terrible housekeeper. The house is messier and we are more disorganised than ever before. I am having to face up to myself: if I didn't really enjoy work, but am an incompetent homemaker, then what am I? I can't really go back to work. For one thing, I need flexibility, given the unpredictable state of my mother's health, her home's distance from my home and the role I have assumed in managing her care. Further, we have moved to a city about one-tenth of the size of where we once lived, where similar opportunities just don't exist. True, Toronto is just about an hour away, but again, I cannot give the time or the energy to a big-city job that requires hours of commuting. And given the psychic hole I have dug for myself, I am certain that any freelance work I might take on would just create a new layer of hand-wringing, something else to fret over, to squeeze in around all the undone housework.

From the archives - 26 August 2007

I was editing a wire story tonight about violent crime and the calamitous murder rate in New Orleans. This made me think of a former boyfriend, the ballet dancer who was in New Orleans the last I knew of him. I recall thinking about him at the time of the hurricane a couple of years ago, but I didn't worry too much because above all else, Joseph is a survivor.

So, after handling this news story tonight, I take a moment to Google him. I stumble upon the news that he was shot in the head on July 1 while riding his bike in New Orleans. He is alive, but the brain damage seems significant. Some of the bullet remains in his forehead. He's in a rehab unit now, but it sounds disastrous: he's got no medical insurance, was battling a lung infection and doesn't make much sense when he does communicate. (I had to smile at the last bit, because he often didn't make much sense when I knew him... )

If I've referred to Joseph before, I'm sure it wasn't in glowing terms. I may have called him psycho boyfriend, or the drug-addict boyfriend. Maybe even psycho drug-addict boyfriend for good measure. It was convenient, I suppose, to sum him up that way, reduce him to a sort of two-dimensional character. Truth is, Joseph's sweet, sweet nature and pure spirit make it possible (for a while, anyway) to get past his considerable failings and all the drama. He's idealistic and optimistic beyond all reason. He's dreamy and beautiful, all naive and guileless. He wrote really bad poetry. He was often cast in those impish, sprightly roles in ballet -- he was the perfect Puck, for instance. But so beautifully did he move on stage, he could make you cry just as soon as laugh.

Life had been hard to him and he'd been betrayed by those who ought to have protected him and taken care of him. It was that broken-wing quality that drew me all those years ago, I think, because in spite of all the ugliness he'd seen, he seemed blind to the danger and treachery of the world, or not afraid of it, at least. No matter how unlikely the circumstances, he always landed on his feet. He seemed to glide and careen through the universe without much thought about how it'd all turn out, if there'd be wreckage, if there'd be tears. Or if, finally, there are some things that can't be fixed.

Blue heron