Part IV - An Interlude

Follows Part I, II, III.

"This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay."
- Daniel 2:31-33

"Until the morning I wake up perfect, I try not to inflict the same desire on the people around me."
- Steve Madill's frequently quoted sentiment.

Gentle reader, this is what it is.

In the middle of trying to write about my father's death, an unscheduled special-guest-star from the past shows up. On a slow evening at my local Sobeys I run into Pastor Lazar. Or I don't run into him - I see him from around 3 feet away and watch him do one of two things. He either:

a) Turns himself into another aisle (the citrus aisle, for those concerned with details) to avoid me, which assumes that he recognized me after at least 6yrs or

b) He doesn't notice me in the first place and turns away either due to a slip on his cane or maybe because he really needed 4 jumbo lemons for $1.25.

Getting into all of this involves a brief rundown of Pastor Lazar's whimiscal activities, which means I have to recount events that are at least 6yrs old. Here's what the record states; Pastor Lazar was encouraged to surrender his parish by the senior Baptist fellowship in Ontario (with sincere hopes that the door would not bump his ass on the way out) due to his admitted acts of impropriety.

And while it would be a heap of outright hoot-and-a-half fun to recount the details about what these admitted improprieties involved, it would ruin any point I'm trying to make about being able to cope in a mature fashion with unresolved feelings around the issue, and being distanced from both the individual and the events (not to mention the possibility that the stories I heard were perhaps, shall we say, embellished by a bunch of gossipy Baptists).

Suffice to say that Pastor Lazar admitted to being involved in the kind of naughty-Vicar activites that would have been hinted at in low-budget British comedies in the swingin' sixties. These incidents took place between consenting adults, granted. But with the 'abuse of trust' aspect that comes into these things ("Trust me, I'm a Pastor") they tiptoed right up to the edge of being illegal. I can't say if the good Pastor 'fessed up under his own volition or if he was stared down by select parishoners (and a few good lawyers), but it was obvious that his time as a man of the cloth was pretty much over.

He soon left the parish and (it is assumed) the faith. Last I checked, one cannot be defrocked in the Baptist church (and feel free to correct me if my info is wrong) but one is definately kept away from the general public after any admitted improprieties on this scale.

Now- let's head back to the Pastor in the citrus aisle. I was a good distance away from him, wondering how to react if he spoke to me, which appeared unlikely if he did recognize me and a moot point if he didn't. I was also wondering if it would be worth saying anything to him and was weighing the benefits of muttering something contemplative and vaguely comforting ("Feet of clay, every one of us Pastor") or skipping the treacle and going right for the jugular ("Hey, Pastor, how about reciting the ten commandments for old time's sake. And no skipping the ones you don't like. I'll buy you a brewski if you can keep a straight face...").

Right. So much for the dirt. Here's the mea culpa.

This comforting/acidic conflict really only lasted a few seconds- I wasn't going to speak to him and would simply have nodded in his direction and made a run for the cashiers if he'd noticed me. I didn't want to kick him if he was down. Didn't want to kick him if he was up for that matter and would only have bared my teeth if he'd let loose something that was patently manipulative; any comment about how much he admired and respected my father would have done it.

This expectation wasn't fair on my part, I admit it. It's insane to attack someone for what you think they were going to do, and it's decidedly paranoid for me to have plotted out a response to what he might have done. But this shone a nice big bright light on some of those unresolved feelings I mentioned earlier, the ones I'm doing my darndest to suppress or distance myself from.

From an early age I was under the impression that Pastor Lazar was very fond of, and had a lot of respect for, Pastor Lazar. In the spirit of full disclosure, I've got to mention that I never liked him. This isn't meant as an 'I told you so' on my part - I didn't like the fact that I didn't like him, since he was good to my family. He never raised a hand to me, never even raised his voice, but I was never comfortable around him due to a low-level gut feeling that he was hiding a vicious temper.

That didn't turn out to be the case. He was largely adored by his parish, so when it went off the rails and he admitted to a goodly amount of mischief, his supporters were embarassed and everyone else was stunned.

I had been visiting my parents that afternoon - my father walked into his living room and dropped the story. The details were slow in coming, and the inital details made it all sound like a cheap bedroom farce. I took a long walk with Abby, saying something like "I don't know if this is hysterically funny or if I want to start crying." The man did help to form my moral centre, after all.

And stop chuckling at that last line.

Okay, go ahead and chuckle at that last line. But I'm trying to give credit where credit is due. If he flung his own moral centre (or whatever I consider to be a 'moral centre' since it's all about me, no?) out the window in favour of more immediate pleasures, exactly who among us hasn't, at least once or twice? I could tell you some stories...

...but let's move on. After Lazar's departure, the parish included he and his family in their prayers for healing and reconcilliation. Baptists are diehard 'love the sinner, hate the sin' types. I can respect that. I am bound to that. I have a grudging respect towards anyone who practices what they preach (literally in this case), even if I don't necessarily agree with the outcome. And while l'escapade Lazar slid past my usual indifference towards what consenting adults get up to their own time (his abuse of trust spun it all into rather dark territory), my 'judge not, that ye be not judged' kneejerk kicked in promptly thereafter.

Since I wasn't a direct victim of the good Pastor's fun and games (and was pointedly not even attending that church at the time)...why pass any judgement whatsoever? If I have issues (and it's looking like I do) they're probably mild compared to the fallout from his parish. I want to wash my hands of it all because he hurt people I cared about. Six years later, I can think "You hurt my father's feelings," and want to remind him of that.

After his resignation, my father would occasionally say "Maybe I should call Bob Lazar," in a slightly far-away tone, as if it was something he felt he should do. He didn't - life got in the way - life ended - Pastor Lazar was very low on anyone's 'get in touch' list despite his presense and support of my family during my father's first operation. Maybe his stature as a cleric was all valid then, faded afterward. He hurt my father's feelings, abused his trust, but helped him in good faith previous to that. And while we're asking questions, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

None of this matters in the end; the Pastor simply bagged his groceries with (I assume) his wife and headed out the door, leaving it all wide open; he either recognized or did not recognize me, he cared or didn't care about it, he has repented to the best extent of his conscience his past offences or simply shrugged it all off and asked 'What am I supposed to do?' to the universe at large.

The baggage here is mine entirely, hard to understand, impossible to forget and damned difficult to write about. It's in the past. If I'm not distanced from this, it's my fault. I walked up to it, looked at the details, wondered what my part should be. Moving on from it would be far easier and probably more decent, all the way around. But feet of clay, every one of us. Right, Pastor?

Part III - Family

Follows Part I, Part II

Sacrifícium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise

Backwards again. A week before he died.

My sister called me at work early and suggested that now would be a good time for me to leave early and visit my mother since she's been in tears since 7:04am that morning when my sister, playing with her dog (a pop-eyed, flat-faced Pug), says something dippy and baby-talkish like "My sweet sweet boy, what would I ever do without you?" and my mother, close to losing her own sweet sweet boy starts to cry, which starts my sister crying, leaving my father in the other room listening to the two of them crying, which would probably not have improved his mood if he wasn't wacked-out on that morning's first dose of hydromorphone (which, at the time, I believed to be morphine cooked with water and some kind of binding agent, making it tantamount to crack).

By the time I talked to my mother, she was not in good shape, which was new. The weeks before had been pinched, serious, painful. That morning, I heard the cracks and exhaustion. And it was one of the few days during my brief time at the Government of Ontario where it would cause serious problems for my continued employment if I leave suddenly (there was a performance review at work that day, I had to both be reviewed and to give feedback for other staff). I called Abby and used my sister's approach, suggesting to her that now would be a good time to visit my parents, since one of them sounds close to losing it and the other is on increasingly short borrowed time.

The night before was a bad one; my father couldn't lie still, couldn't get comfortable, expressed great upset at having (imaginary) contractors all over the house, an unlikely occurance at 3am on a Thursday, what with overtime being what it is.

He had also mentioned politely that all of the doors in the house had been hung upside down, we might want to talk to somebody about that.

This type of handyman hallucination had been happening repeatedly. My cousin Sam and I listened to my father sigh patiently a few weeks before, saying "Alright, if we're going to do this, we'd better start soon. We can get most of the panelling up before we take our late dinner," pretty much out of nowhere.

I think I said "Dad, we're going to call it a night, since you're already in bed. Why don't I get some more tea for Sam and a ginger-ale for you?" and the topic was dropped.

Abby and Patricia became the Batman and Robin of palliative care, they dropped everything and drove to my parents place, apologizing for my delay and offering my mother anything she wants. Which calms her down.

By the time I got out of work and made it to the house, my mother was stir crazy and leapt at the chance to head out for more hydromorphone and an hour of peace and quiet. I sat beside my father on the OHIP endorsed inflatable bed, the white-noise of the pump actually soothing me, it something that doesn't require thought. Music took too much effort; I remembered a long-ago novel, 'The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice Cream God,' some passage about a teen driving to a potentially horrible date and refusing to turn on the radio, not wanting to associate those tunes every night the rest of his life with a bad scene. I was stuck to that, and anything that wasn't moment-by-moment coping wasn't of any interest anyhow.

He was on a self-enforced clock. Every 3 minutes he changed position, opened his eyes for a few seconds, closed them and tried to sleep. After a few minutes he stretched out his hand towards me, so I held it. Then he pulled away. The process repeated itself a few times, before he opened his eyes and looked at me as if to say 'Why are you holding my hand?'

This routine is further augmented with him saying "George? Five," or "George? Seven," and it hit me that my dad was back in Derbecker's Store, in the thriving metorpolis of Neustadt Ontario, making change for customers and stocking shelves. It was probably 1953 or so, just then, for him. Or somewhere else; at one point he wakes up, stares at me and says "George, will you need the rake? And keep on the left side of Mt. Pleasant." I tell him I've got the rake and I'll keep on the left side. He goes back to sleep.

Eventually he wanted to walk, as far as the den. He tried to sleep on the couch, but his head slid off the pillows and he was too weak to lift it. He winced and asked for George. I propped him up at one point, and he said he wanted to go back to bed, as soon as I took the fire out. Right there, he says as he pointed to a new lump, on his neck and be careful, it's hot.

There was no response from me. I told him I'd try, and took him back to bed. He was passing a lot of gas at the time; there were air fresheners everywhere so the room had an atmosphere of pleasant green apple and farts. My mother returned, and my aunt arrived shortly thereafter, lying as always, saying she's was just dropping by for 5 minutes and staying 3hrs.

This wasn't a bad thing - we needed the extra support. And for reasons I can't quite fathom, she brought 3 dozen boxed finger sandwiches from the Pickle Barrel. Those little soggy things; egg salad, tuna, smoked salmon. This was her idea of a treat in the face of crisis, and the assembled throng did set upon them, and the room soon smelled like farts, soggy egg, soggy tuna, soggy smoked salmon and pleasant green apple.

My aunt was trying to be supportive, but there's was a crisis which made her feel that (temporarily, to be fair) she was in a position of authority and was being proactive. The soggy sandwiches turn my stomach, and I go into the kitchen to warm a can of soup and found that I'd been followed;

"Michael! I've got sandwiches! Have one!"

"Thanks, no. I just feel like some soup."

"They're good sandwiches! Take some home! I don't want you making a mess for your mother!"

"I'll deal with the dishes, thanks anyhow."

"You don't have to deal with anything! I brought sandwiches!"

"Don't care for egg or tuna."

"There's salmon! You like salmon!"

"I'm sure they're great. I don't eat salmon either."

"Michael, you're fibbing. I've seen you eat smoked salmon. At Alan’s. At Christmas."

"Ginge, I'm having some soup. Do you want some?"

"I don't want your mother to have a mess!"

"I'll take care of it. Now shut up and let me make some soup."

"(crestfallen) I wish I'd known. They have little roast beef sandwiches. Would you eat those? I'll know for next time."

This could have gone on for hours.

I made soup and ate it and was ready to ignore her. But she behaved and I did the dishes and something close to normality hung in the air for a few minutes.
_________________________________________

The next day, I called the house from work, and was delighted to actually get my dad on the phone, fairly lucid, propped up in the den, watching TV, eating (very slowly) a chocolate chip cookie and working on a bowl of applesauce laced with ground-up Hydromorphone (doctor's suggestion). She told me that my father's four siblings and their spouses were on route from rural Ontario. I offered to show up as support, she says that one more person in the house would be a bad thing, but thanks for the offer. I go back to work.

By around 2pm, my uncle Moody calls and is very interested in how I am doing, he wants to talk about Abby and my work and anything that isn't my father. My mother comes onto the phone and says that he needs distraction and could I perhaps tear myself away from Ontario's Ministry of Transportation a few hours early after all?

I email my boss and the people I'm working for, give them several phone numbers where I can be reached, insist that I am going to my sick father's bedside and not to the movies, and get a cab.

By the time I got to the house, my father had apparently managed to have a conversation with his family for around half an hour before starting to fade. Pain in his left eye, headache, backache, shakes, nausea. He winced and covered his eyes as the Neustadt Ontario contingent chatted gently around him, talking about the new Pastor and how pretty everything is now that the thaw is starting.

Moody finally says, very quietly, "Maybe Johnny should go back to bed. I hate to see him suffer."

Johnny was taken back to bed.

Moody took off his glasses and slowly picked up a magazine, holding it less than an inch from his face. At first I thought it was to conceal tears, but there were none forthcoming. The intense and sudden interest in Dogs Monthly somehow prevented the tears, or at least created a disraction that wasn't a dying brother.

We all deal with stress in different ways.

The conversation wandered. I assured Marion that dad was getting good care, I let Moody compose himself, I explained the difference between flour and egg dumplings and milk, baking powder and flour dumplings to Eunice (they had eaten my stew at lunch), and told Art where he can find Fibber McGee and Molly broadcasts on the internet. Everybody leaves happy (if that's the term), or at least hoping. Moody held my hand tightly in a handshake but wouldn't meet my eyes at the door.

An 80yr old trying not to cry looks very much like a 6yr old trying not to cry.

When I call from work the next morning, everything is terrible.

He didn't sleep. Wasn't making sense. Couldn't get comfortable. Wouldn't eat or drink. Couldn't take his medication, it hurt too much to swallow.

A doctor was en route, but there was a possibility that he would end up back in hospital that same evening. If that happened, he's clearly wasn't going to make it out. It was down to a matter of days. I realized that I could have counted hours if I had wanted that much horror. I tried to prepare for hospital visits, and high hopes for an IV, morphine, and dreaming of 1953.

Part II - My Father's House

Follows Part I

Aspérges me hyssópo, et mundábor:
lavábis me, et super nivem dealbábor.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean:
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

I said, “I should be beaten.” I was kneeling on the floor in the basement of my parents' house as I said it to Abby.

That incident took place half way through the morning. I had already seen my father's body, and had passed out at the sight of him, sinking to the floor with sweet, sickening ease in his bedroom's doorway. I remember hearing my mother say "Oh Lord," and feeling my aunt lean me up against the wall. Somebody put a glass of orange juice in my hand. I drank it and went to his bedside, aware of the white noise of the inflatable mattress and of one of the tinny portable radios that he always had with him when working in the yard or his workshop.

I ran my hand along his forehead and felt the death. This line has to be delivered without apology; there was still heat under his skin, but it was a remnant from hours before. He was warm. But he was no longer radiating warmth. It registered as death immediately upon touch.

I kissed his forehead, his cheeks, making the last offering that I could as a son. I'd kissed him living and dead. I knew the rest of mourning flowed downhill from this.

I kept control; further weeping wouldn't lift the grief. My father dying for months had been heartbreaking. When he was dead, it was painful. I thought that pain could be endured, loathed, teeth gritted and forced through. My mother would need me at one point, or my sister would have to let something spill over. I needed to be in one piece.

I at least wanted to get through the day whatever way my body told me to(the day was visceral, I didn't have enough sense left for thinking), and at least my muscles and skin were controlled. Tight. Only a few weeks before, out for a much needed staggering drunk through University haunts with Travis, hearing him tell me "You've been a soldier through all this, keeping it in. A grunt, you've been a grief grunt. But what are you going to do when he dies?"

I couldn't answer at the time, but knew that my final response would have something to do with hate. Grief felt - feels - like a frozen brick wall in my way, impassable and worth hating simply for existing, and worth hating even more simply because the wall doesn't care. I hated everything in that house that morning with the exception of the people within it, and I hated that I could neither help them in the way they needed or change the fact that my father lay in the back bedroom, silent and growing cold.

“I should be beaten.”

So. Back to that. The fact that I was kneeling in the basement was incidental, it wasn't prayer or accident. I hadn't passed out for a second time. I think I had crawled over a couch to get to a cupboard to liberate a case of club soda for the assembled mourners. But there didn't seem to be much of a reason to get up once I was down, it wouldn't help anything except maybe take care of anybody who was thirsty. And I didn't care.

Abby came downstairs, picked up on whatever black space I was in at the time and asked "What do you need, right now?"

I love her deeply and still had to force my response. But I was also knew that I didn't need tact around my wife, I couldn't hide anything from her if I wished. So when I said "I should be beaten," it was the most honest response I could manage.

She was quiet for a few seconds. I went further and said "I feel like I deserve to be beaten," which isn't quite accurate. I wasn’t sure if I deserved it exactly, but was convinced that it would be the most reasonable and just course of action.

I spoke to her slowly, in a newly acquired I am not a crazy, self-destructive person tone of voice. “I know this is nuts,” I told her, “but I think that I should be beaten. It’s not going to happen and it wouldn’t help. And I know it’s insane. I’m coping. I'm fine. I love you. But you asked. I just think I deserve to be beaten right now.”

I wasn't up to concealing anything that was on my mind in such a horrible circumstance. If anyone stood in the way of anything I had to do that morning, I would fly into pieces onto them.

Abby must have known it, and either understood everything or simply forgave me as she said "Michael, you don't...you couldn't...deserve to be beaten."

She took my hand and we talked about what was needed, what the day would hold and how to face what was next. She went back upstairs alone, reluctantly, while I waited for my legs to work again.

Ámplius lava me ab iniquitáte mea:
et a peccáto meo munda me.
Quóniam iniquitátem meam ego cognósco:
et peccátum meum contra me est semper.

Wash me throughly from mine iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.

I waited in the basement for an impossibly long five minutes or so, needing the time to at least imagine the scenario that would offer some relief (for want of a better term) from the dread of that morning.

The scenario I was longing for went like this; Three or four guys would come into the basement and tie me to something. They would be impassive but not entirely unsympathetic, and would begin the beating after speaking to me(I knew that the would have to say something by way of explanation, but could not for the life of me imagine what).

Once the beating began I could grit my teeth – at least I thought that I could – at the start of the attack. When the pain really kicked in, I was sure that the reasons for the beating would be self evident. That much physical pain with an identifiable source would at least be something immediate and identifiable rather than the dull and numb ache around the loss of my father. Physical pain is finite; grief dwarfs it. My father was beaten by his cancer. If I was beaten by the imaginary three or four guys, we’d be even. It might match his slow descent and suffering; I owed him that much at least. If I could suffer my body enough, the deeper pain could lift.

Years of denying a Christ complex were immediately blown out of the water.

It was crazy. I knew it. I didn’t care. I craved it. If life was insane and the opportunity had presented itself, I would have welcomed it.

I wasn’t, however, crazy enough to expect it. I knew that a goon squad to thrash me wasn't forthcoming. You can have this meltdown on your own time, the rational brain told me. Today, listen to your mother, respect your father’s body until it’s cold, carry any weight that falls in your path. You have years to mourn and only hours to endure what has to be done about his body.

I got up and went upstairs. The day went on.

But the idea that there was a further price to be paid stayed with me for hours. When I wasn't taking slow deep breaths and steeling myself to when his body left us forever, something inside me replayed thousands of snippets of all-purpose stuff to hurt me.

Memories of laughing over a rare pitcher of beer with my father at a favourite pub.

Speaking to him at his retirement party, and choking up for not knowing how to thank him for giving me room and board for years simply out of love.

The silence over the phone at the first time he couldn't force himself to stay awake while speaking to me.

The feel - knowledge - awareness - of his shoulders becoming thinner and fragile, memorized through dozens of hugs as the disease progressed.

The phrase "You're a good son," delivered by him as a shorthand for 'goodbye' over the years, hearing it for weeks by his bedside near the end.

And - of all things - a Bruce Springsteen song. From the Nebraska album. Black and white acoustic guitar and a mournful harmonica, my father's house standing like a beacon, cold and alone, "...shining `cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned."

Part I - Our Event

Following Unction and Funeral Laundry.

Per istam sanctam Unctiónem et suam piisimam misericórdiam, indúlgeat tibi Dóminus quidquid per
visum,
audtiotum,
odorátum,
gustum et locutiónem,
tactum,
gressum deliquisti

- The sacrement of Extreme Unction

Tell the story backwards, since now there's nothing left but time.

The phone rang very early, lifting me out of a thin sleep. It barely rang. I can explain that – electronic ringers sometimes appear to ‘blip,’ as if they have only caught the tail impulse of the first chime of an incoming call. This woke me up, and my rational brain split the difference between what had happened and what was likely to happen.

I had been waking up to imaginary late-night & early-morning phonecalls for almost 3 months; the awareness of why the phone would ring so late or early was unmistakable either as part of the dream, or as the thing to lift me out of any such dreams.

I instantly made a very good case for this awakening to have been yet another one of those bursts of unwelcome adrenalin.

It reads like cliché or poetic license to say that time stood still, and that expression doesn’t quite apply in this case; time was not suspended, it was drawn out and counted in reverse, waiting to be waited-out.

You hear phones ring every day – you know the length of time between rings and come to expect it. So after I woke up to something that may or may not have been a telephone’s ring, the part of my brain which regulates familiar things knew how long it would be before the next ring occured.

If it occured. If the interval went into overtime, then the first ring had been yet another nightmare.

All I had to do was patiently wait for the phone to not-ring. And my father would not be dead, for another day.

I’d gone to bed the night before expecting that ring, prepared and resigned to it – so every last-moment thought compressed itself into those few seconds, waiting for the next step. There was no prayer, which was on the surface, at least, unusual- every breath for months had ended in Amen. But I had resigned myself away from prayer for conspicuous miracles such as recovery, into a barely muttered litany of requests for relief from his pain or simply his passing in a state of grace at peace with whatever thoughts remained.

Those small blessings – any of them – would qualify as miraculous.

If the phone didn’t ring that second time, that too would qualify.

Ecce enim veritátem dilexísti;
incérta et occúlta sapiéntiæ tuæ manifestásti mihi

Thou desirest truth in the inward parts
and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom

I knew that I at least had a chance with the phone.

That hanging time was probably the most ‘real’ moments of my life up to that point simply because there was nothing else worth consideration at that instant. If the phone doesn’t ring, he’s still alive and he’s going to be gone in days or weeks but not today, so I will wake up and I’ll felt what it’s like beside the death and I will be better prepared when it comes and there will be more time even if only hours more knowing he’s living and that is enough the fact of it the mercy of it the reality of simply living a little longer is enough distilled into resulting from all prayer for miracles into this one brief more. It would be enough.

I cheated – was cheated - out of fear or hope, as my familiar brain lept milliseconds ahead of schedule and told me rather impassively that my wait was over, that the pause was officially longer than usual between rings and therefore no second ring would be forthcoming. Carry on.

Something internal soothed me.

Something else ignored it and simply muttered ‘keep waiting.’

A very slow, quiet, battle between a vague sense of unconscious recognition and the duration between ring tones.

If I could just wait it out, it would be safe.

The rest was, literally, clockwork. I hung between what I thought was enough time and what I suspected was enough time, the truest experience of no-man’s land that I’ve ever felt.

The ending won’t surprise you. The phone rang. I let it draw every decibel of its duty before picking up the phone. And heard my sister telling me that my father had not passed away gently in his sleep; he had coughed and convulsed around 4am, continuing to do so for just under an hour, spoken-to and touched and held by my mother and sister until his breathing fell shallow and ceased.

It had been too quick for me to come to the house, or simply they weren’t going to leave his side to pick up the phone to call me. They were close and listend and knew every last breath as he slipped away.

If you believe that it’s melodramatic to say ‘at least he wasn’t screaming,’ visit a hospital ward with a few patients whose pain medication no longer takes the edge off. Look at how bad it can get. Then consider the benefit (if that is the term) of your body simply shutting down rather than clenching firmly against losing what little vitality is left.

I put down the phone and simply said "He's gone. He's dead," to Abby. We dressed and went to the house to wait with his body until he was taken for cremation.

Not of This World (Father's Day)

Part I is here, for those who don't care for scrolling.


Dreams can be surreal, where one bit of dislocated this ends up in your otherwise fully-formed that. Fastest example I can think of is that for months after my father died he would wander through my dreams emaciated, wearing a green housecoat. I’m going to classify this under the surreal banner since nobody else in the dream seemed to mind that he was padding through whatever landscape I had literally dreamed up. It didn’t disturb me exactly – I would usually think “Ah, this must be taking place when was dad was sick” – and it felt more surreal than nightmarish. It didn’t have the seemingly deliberate nonsense of a nightmare that taps into something when you’re a captive audience in sleep.

For me, the most effective nightmares have always had a twist towards the inevitable. I had genuine, shot-for-shot nightmares for months about something I saw a few years ago, when my wife and I were heading out for dinner. We heard loud chirps and flapping feathers coming from one of the bushes at the side of our very old apartment building. There was an agitated sparrow dive-bombing around the bush shrieking, but clearly not making all of the chirping noises.

It took a few moments to figure out what was happening – a nest had fallen from the tree above the bush. The chirps were from the chicks that were lost in the bush. The dive bombing mother was trying to fight off the silent cats that were circling the bush, with each circle getting smaller. They kept close to the ground, avoiding the sparrow’s wings and patiently gazing and listening at the chirping chicks inside.

This stuck with me, replaying itself in the deep lockup of sleep from time to time, always with the same image of the slowly encroaching cats. There was nothing to be done, cats are cats and sparrows fall from their nests. I considered chasing them off and rummaging through the bush, but it was thick enough that I’d never find a thing. There were far worse events happening in the world at the time, but it’s the bird and the cats that remained in my dreams.

While it happened, it just looked unfortunate (except for the cats, of course). In dreams, it felt portentous. Maybe it was helped along with dim memories of Sunday school – “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Matthew 10:29 for the completists), a quote that always sticks with me at hard times. Or maybe it just replayed itself because it felt cinematic; Hitchcock would have loved it. He would have found it quite funny. Don’t worry about the little birdies, he would have drawled to his audience. I’m sure the pussycats will find them soon enough. And that will take care of the noise.

You won’t put too much faith in dream interpretation unless you’re a diehard Freudian or Jungian on one side, or into the whole ‘the universe speaks to us as we sleep’ types, and none of those camps appeal to me. Some people get into it - my grandfather on my dad’s side would allegedly buy and sell stock based on the content of his dreams. Exactly how he reasoned these decisions has been lost to the ages, he might have taken the old Greek pantomancing approach and treated the dream as a series of omens to be taken seriously.

Which I can’t take too seriously, myself. Since most dreams are nonsensical, I can’t imagine my conservative Baptist grandfather saying “I dreamt that a green chicken was pecking at a mattress filled with chocolate chips while a flatbed truck drove circles around them as the driver sang ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness.’ Therefore, I must sell my Bell Canada stock and invest heavily in commodities this month” to his broker.

Let me add a proviso to the previous scenario- I have just realized that I don’t remember if my father told me that my grandfather sold stock based on his dreams, or put stock in the content of dreams. So much for the green chicken. Either way, it comes down to a reading of omens, or to be more precise, a reading of images or events that are construed as omens. I got tagged with the nickname ‘pantomancer’ for awhile either due to a friend’s left-brained-word-fetishist attachment to the word, or because I was using the phrase ‘That’s a good omen/bad omen’ too often (a case could be made on both sides).

My rational brain doesn’t care for omens, nor does it put any serious significance in dreams. The irrational brain has attached itself to a few incidents that are invariably no less random than anything else that happens on a given day, but felt like portents of something, of reality either framed or twisted to give a hint of events to come. Otherwise known as the Dead Squirrel scenario.

It was August, hot as hell in 2002. My wife was making soap for a small company at the time, so our apartment was already hot from pots of olive oil and water with lye added; she’d pour them together at the right temperature for soponfication. She’d then pour the soap into tall molds that we’d put in a floor freezer that was more or less hidden by a skirt in our dining room.

To get the freezer working, my father had come down to the apartment a few days before to change a wall socket from 2 to 3 prongs. It had taken him a good 5 minutes to get up the stairs, no more than 8 steps. I'd know that his back had been hurting, but I didn’t know that it was that bad.

I’m mentioning this to supply context – watching my father in such a state was enough to put me into a mood. When he left the apartment slowly, I remember thinking “He can’t handle those stairs anymore,” as if I had seen the degeneration from day one. But it had been a shock, and when I thought “This is the last time he’s going to set foot in this apartment,” I put it out of my mind as worried melodrama.

Days later, the squirrel. The apartment smelled like hot soap. The floor freezer and an air conditioner were plugged into a power bar which would trip if the drain got too intense. It had rained intensely for a few minutes, plunging the already curtained apartment into further darkness. The sky was both black and contoured, if that makes any sense – you could see the shape and shadows on the the rolling clouds. The thunder had been deafening and the power had flickered a few times, tripping the power bar. I turned off the air conditioner until the storm was over.

The rain was just stopping as Abby was pouring soap and I was trying to download something when we heard a sickeningly loud THUD from outside, something percussive enough to rattle the dishes on our kitchen wall. We spent a minute runnng around the apartment looking for whatever large heavy object had fallen over before we heard scratching at our window.

I lifted the curtain to see a chubby baby squirrel lying near the edge of the air conditioner. There was an active colony that lived in our roof and travelled over the power lines, this one had obviously fallen. It was moving very slowly, unrolling itself from an unnaturally twisted shape towards the edge. There looked to be blood on its muzzle and there was a perfectly small yellow puddle that stood out from the clear raindrops on the white air conditioner. It had literally knocked the piss out of itself on impact.

The mother – father? – arrived a few seconds later, scrambling down the wall and rushing to sniff the body of its young. The little one was still moving (if barely) when the parent stood on the legs for a second, staring at the window to discern if Abby or I was a threat. I saw its mouth open and, for reasons I will never know, it held our gaze for a few long seconds. We didn’t hear a thing, but it looked like it was screaming.

A moment later, the young one fell over the edge. We heard it hit the ground. Abby winced and I, despite years of priding myself of not being squeamish, dropped the curtain and turned away. We heard a scrambling of claws and it was done.

The sky was beginning to lighten. I turned the air conditioner on so there would at least be something other the silence. We both said a few things about squirrels being tough, they’re built to deal with things like that. But the pall over the afternoon hung heavy. And against my better judgement, the slow nightmarish quality of it all felt like an omen. The message was simple, straightforward, unapologetic and horrible; Things are going to get bad, there is going to be pain and death.

Any armchair psychologist can figure this one out – it was a bad day, I was worried about my father, something unpleasant happened and it seared itself to the memories of everything that followed. This one played out in the nightmares as well, as cinematic as Hitchcock but without his barely under-the-surface chortle at what fools these mortals be. It brought with it the inevitability of a horror – something is going to happen. You won't like it. You can’t stop it. And you have to watch it all.

Funeral Laundry

"...things that are new grow old at length,
They're replaced with better or none at all:
People are prospering or falling back.
And rents and patches widen with time;
No thread or needle can pace decay,
And there are stains that baffle soap,
And there are colors that run in spite of you...
The laundress, Life, knows all about it."

-'Mrs. Kessler'
from 'The Spoon River Anthology' by Edgar Lee Masters

It started with the return to a church basement, and a horrible riff on Norman Maclean that I couldn’t get out of my head on my way out; All funerals merge into one, and a casket runs through it. The casket was carved from the world's great woods and rests under rocks in the basement of us. Under the rocks are words. All of those words are ours. I am haunted by boxes.
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Three scenarios for your consideration;

1. Your father is dying. He's heavily medicated and barely coherent at times. A family friend with a self-admitted drinking problem visits often, and while his support is welcome you can't help but notice that he drinks. He even brings his own bottle of scotch. "This is hard for me," he says, "I need it to get through seeing your father this way." One evening he gets loud and makes inappropriate jokes about death. You call him on it, he says "It's just me being me" and calls it a sophisticated sense of humour.

The next time he arrives, you refuse to let him in with his bottle. He sulks and storms out. He calls a few days later, willing to forgive you for throwing him out. He doesn't want an apology, but thinks it would be nice if one were offered.

2. Your father dies. His obituaries list a number of charities that you family has requested support for in lieu of flowers. On the first day that the obituaries run, a old friend calls to offer her condolences and asks that you include the name of a charity that she supports during the speeches at the funeral. "You've gotta give some back sometimes," she says. "This is your chance. Your dad would have wanted you to do the right thing."

3. A few days after the funeral, an acquaintence from church (religious, but not a member of the clergy) calls you about your spiritual state. She has laid out a prayer and worship program to help you cope with your loss and is very willing to work on it with you. You politely decline. She responds furiously, saying she was only concerned for your soul and for the wishes of your dead father.

In a week, she writes a long rambling letter of apology, citing her occasionally over-enthusiastic devotion to God as the reason for her outburst. You take a few days to consider a response, and receive an angry phonecall where she explains that the proper, Christian thing to do when offered an apology is to accept it. "This is important," she says, "and I won't ask again."

Let me come clean immediately - these aren’t true stories. None of these scenarios occured to me or to any member of my family during my father's illness or after his death. If you think you recognize yourself, your friend or your Aunt Minnie, you’re wrong. I've created the scenarios as sort of theme-and-variation on some incidents that did occur in the real world, rather than recounting the exact events.

This is a cheat; I admit it. The reader should know it. To get into real world detail would display levels of dirty laundry that I don't want on these pages. So ignore the incidents for a few moments and focus on the motives. Or the proper response to such situations. When faced with somebody so self-serving in the face of illness or death, what is the right thing to do?

You have a choice. You can tell them to get out and go to hell, or you can be so stunned by their disconnect that you wash your hands of them entirely. It's a harsh conclusion to make about somebody, the belief that anything you say to them will simply bounce off their surface. No change or understanding would result.

The worst behaviour that I saw always boiled down to people who were convinced that they were doing something good, responsible and required for my family, and any benefit to themselves was therefore a mere side effect. If the people in question were told quietly and politely that their timing was lousy or their gesture (however sincerely intended) was unwelcome or inappropriate, they took GREAT FULL CAPS OFFENCE (in correspondence as well as in conversation) and would explain at length how they were deeply hurt by the response.

I won't use this forum to air dirty laundry exactly, but years later I feel compelled to point at a few of the laundry bags that were left at my family's doorstep and question exactly why they arrived in the first place. Admittedly, some of it my own, mingled with others' remnants. It will be easier to remove once recognized.
__________________________________________________

To be fair, when faced with a dying relative it's probably impossible not to feel fragile and inarticulate. As the illness proceeds, the person you love sinks into a deeper and deeper well. You can follow them in and climb out from time to time for day-to-day living, but you can’t bring them out with you.

Naturally, you spend most of your time down the well.

People visit or shout down to you from the surface. They dislodge pebbles from time to time, harmless looking little things that gather momentum on the way down and hurt when they hit you. You could spend hours explaining gravity and trajectory to those at the top, letting them know that these harmless wee things can draw blood at a distance. Or you simply ask them to be careful and not shuffle so close to the edge.

Try it sometime, from the bottom of the well. Most people will nod and keep a careful distance from the edge. Some can’t hear you and shuffle until you scream at them. And others will be busy with something else, and will say “You can take it” as they shuffle away.
_________________________________________________

The petty, selfish behaviour I saw from time to time was done with the best of intentions on the surface, but stemmed from something unexpected and opportunistic beneath. You don't expect to see that in a friend. If it's a surprise, its horrible. If you can look at and recognize the roots in their past behavior, it's worse.

Most people want to be fair - if you accuse somebody of being a jerk, the fair thing to do is to allow the accused to explain themselves ("I'm not a jerk, I was just drunk/upset/dedicated to my cause/misunderstood"). I gave up the policy in a few cases because I was sure that any defense on the part of the accused would be entirely sincere. And utterly false, at once.

Sincerity goes bad in self-delusion. A guy falls off the top floor of a 10 story building. As he passes each floor he grins cheerfully and shouts “Doing okay so far!” into every open window.

When you consider this story, do you think that:

a) It’s a stirring parable of a guy who refuses to be beaten down by less-than-positive events?
b) It’s a good example of misguided optimism?
c) It’s a very old joke?

If you’ve answered a), we have little to talk about. I’m writing this to illustrate my support for b). If you’ve chosen c), well, I really can’t argue with you.

When you consider self-involved and oblivious (not to mention painfully sincere) consider somebody who runs a good con. Make that a great con. A few years ago, a friend I'm calling Jaz was trying to borrow $10,000 from a number of sources to join a 'money club.' It was sort of a secret money club, sort of like a pyramind scheme. But different. She had been assured that it wasn't illegal, apparently, just...sneaky. And unlike pyramid schemes, this one worked.

Wanna know the secret formula for money club success?

It was women only.

She knew her audience and manipulated them shamelessly. No husbands or boyfriends to withdraw their funds or miss payments or to decide they want to run the place.
It preyed on women who, for whatever reasons, wanted their money as far away from men as possible. Her suckers would feel very comforted maybe a little smug at the same time. They could go to sleep thinking 'I'm ahead of the game, and I'm in safe company, for a change.'

Jaz met the founder and said she was very nice, intelligent, organized, and sincere in wanting to give other women the chance to make some well-earned money for their families and needs. She was a great proponent of the idea that women work together. Women don't lie to other women. Women understand the importance of sticking up for one another. And the taxman (taxMAN of course) never had to know about any of it, since he didn't understand.


Of course, it unravelled. The money was funnelled into a vacumn around the founder and those involved lost everything (Jaz was spared - she never raised the admission fee). I don't know how it played out in court, but I have my suspicions.

And here's where the real con comes in. Once pulled into the cops, somebody running a low-level con will claim ignorance of tax and fraud laws, maybe make a passionate speech about the difficulty in making an honest buck in a crooked world...and plea bargain their way down, not looking the victims in the eye at the hearing.

But I'm under the impression that this woman was the true con artist, and somewhere along the line she had neatly skipped over the part where she was taking money from strangers, and had gotten to the point where she honestly believed that she was performing some kind of valuable service (admittedly with fragile cash flow issues). And when they dragged her into court, she probably cried the loudest and told all of her victims that she was hurt. Devastated. Perhaps more of a victim than any of them, because she had enough faith in her system for all of them. And she'd love nothing more than to pay every one of them back. And if the money club faltered, it was because there wasn't enough trust and hard work. Maybe they were all to blame, but she'd take the hit for the rest of them. By God, she was going to make it right for everyone who felt that she'd done them wrong.

If this indeed is how it played out, she probably meant every word. She'd forget it all, chapter and verse, by the time of early release. But when it came out of her, it was gospel.
_________________________________________________

The money club is the best example I could think which illustrates something obvious, self-serving, delusional, and totally wrong. The people I've washed my hands of fit in those categories because they were convinced they were entitled to something from my family - mostly time, and influence - and they were so out-of-line to even broach these topics in the wake of my father's illness/death (and were so unreceptive to criticism or comment) that it became obvious that they had not noticed the circumstances.

The bile remaining stems from the fact that despite my best efforts, their pettiness is attached to the last flickering of my father. There were moments where I watched a situation play out and realized 'I’m not that. I’m not perfect but I’m not that.'

In simpler terms; if the best thing I can say about you is that you did not misbehave as badly as was possible at my father’s bedside or funeral, it’s not a ringing endorsement for your character.

If you arrived at the funeral for the sake of a good cry or simply to be seen offering a conspicious show of grief, I won't waste my time in your company.

If you came for yourself, spoke about yourself, referred to yourself or your causes, you did not behave properly at a funeral.

The cliché fits; Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.
________________________________________________

All of these issues around funerals, bad behaviour, my father's wasting, and how do we do what is best winds through me as I attend Ray's funeral a few weeks ago. There's a snippet of cheap music that won't leave me en route to the service:

"Simply from the old school
He was quiet about his pain
And if one in ten would be that great
I would never hate again..."

I wanted to remove any personal baggage that might be strapped to my back for this occasion. But I know the church, the layout, the guests. There will be many of the same people who attended my father’s service, and those who attended services for Ray's daughter, murdered in Russia over a decade ago. I want only to offer condolences to his family, minus any issues of my own. But I can't find the resigned reserve I usually carry to funerals - I can’t bring myself to look at Ray’s picture and the 38yrs of history that trails behind it.

When it's over, the classic all-purpose room in the basement is heavy with memories, most of it lingering grief. I join the line-up to speak to Fay, gritting my teeth to avoid being yet another person that weeps on her shoulder. I manage to say “He was a wonderful person, I’m so sorry” and put my arms around her.

As I'm leaving she says “I look at you, Michael, and see the sweet face of your father.” It's a compliment, but it hurts. Good intentions and well-wishers and grief and those voices that speak indeterminate and soft behind the curtain of this world and my father’s house.

Unction

Unction [uhngk-shuhn] – noun
1. an act of anointing, esp. as a medical treatment or religious rite.
2. an unguent or ointment; salve.
3. something soothing or comforting.
4. an excessive, affected, sometimes cloying earnestness or fervor in manner, esp. in speaking.
5. Religion.
a. the oil used in religious rites, as in anointing the sick or dying.
b. the shedding of a divine or spiritual influence upon a person.
c. the influence shed.

-As defined on Dictionary.com


There are nightmare scenarios that are worse in hindsight or in planning than when you actually have to face them. The horror isn't diminished exactly, but is played out with an immediacy that spurs you into some kind of action, rather than introspection. Instead of thinking "What should I do," you find yourself acting around the nightmare, either drifting over it or sinking into whatever complications it brings.

7 years ago, the second wave of cancer hit my family. My father had already lost his kidney two years before, and any further metastases were undetectable. This second wave was my mother, hit by shooting pains causing her to crumple over in her garden. She was rushed to hospital with what they thought was a rupturing appendix, and during surgery it was discovered that her appendix was fine but that a cyst attached to one of her ovaries had burst.

My mother is alive and well, after platinum chemotherapy and through the faith of a high Anglican. My father had a different cancer, before and after my mother's condition, with different chemo and no less faith as a born and bred Baptist. The end results, for reasons both physiological and oncological, obviously differ. No one story is any less painful to remember or to have witnessed at the time. But there are particular issues and minutes to each story that have been etched into the memory of the whole. It's hard to reason what renders something indelible - one cannot remember every second of any event, even when experiencing a horror. There's no way to determine why some instances remain and others fade, or why you will step outside of yourself in spite of events and know I will remember this.

It's October 1999, dry and cold. My father's cancer (the first instance) has passed, his later condition (unanticipated) is not yet an issue, not even considered in the wake of my mother's sudden illness. My wife and I are visiting the hospital, I am watching the clockwork tics of my mother coping with nausea, shakes from the inital blast of chemo, aches from the stitches as her muscles and tissues knit. Abby and I took long bus trips to the hospital, a cab would be faster and would not have bankrupted anybody but it was not necessary, and if there are more visits in the future then cabfare would add up. Taking the bus feels like taking a step, it is something to do that is not cancer or chemo or being scared. My father is at her side, doing what he can.

The situation isn't good. It could also be far worse. There are medications and nurses and a blanket of family and friends to support.But none of this is illuminating or soothing at the time. There's too much awareness of what the cancer entails, the fear of a blunt harm that bruises everyone in anticipation of nausea and biopsies. That said, nobody in my family is squeamish. The crisis-management gene has kicked in and everything is orderly, for want of a better word. We realize that there's nothing to be done outside of the care she's receiving, our role is to be at the hospital for my mother, making sure she's got visitors (or silence - during one chemo session she sharply but not unkindly told me 'I don't need to be entertained' - I took her at her word and read a novel as the IV dripped), making sure that if there's something to do it gets done.

This won't become a diatribe against the Ontario health system, the hospital was clean and the care was outstanding. But with stitches and painkillers and chemo and realization of the problem, the patient needs an advocate and my father, retired, methodical and no less scared than any of the rest of us is her advocate. Abby and I arrive and we have our visit - not too long, allowing for rest, bringing magazines and bottled iced tea, fetching chips of ice from down the hallway, watching the visitors hours and wrangling visitors. There are things to be done, attention must be paid. There is less fear in an order to things.

My father arranges to drive Abby and I to the subway after our visit, which doesn't have to be in a plan - my plan was a bus ride or a cab extravagence. My father, exhausted but smiling (tightly) has his own agenda, his own order of things to be done. And I feel it. He has put the night into an order - time alloted for visiting, for dealing with family matters, feeding the dog, attending to groceries, preparing the house for my mother's return. Driving Abby and I to the subway is in the order and I won't deny our place.

But there is a ticking, quiet inflexibility to the order that risks cracking the surface. I was no less scared than my father but knew that I lacked his responsibilities. I had been married less than a month and didn't want to imagine my wife in hospital, could only picture my father's upset in the vaguest terms, foggy and unformed. He was running fast, driving himself though what needed to be done, I act the same way under pressure (no less so when he was in treatment), trying (hoping working forcing) to be normal, even in the context of something unexpected and horrible.

The instance mentioned previously - the first of two - was my father's quiet, well behaved but stubborn insistance that his car had been stolen. On the way to the underlit garage, he looked into the corner where he was sure it should have been, finding nothing. To hear him say it in as many words ("Great. I'm going to have to go inside and report this to the police, my car has been stolen,") was horrible, a instant etched memory on a night that could have been set-directed for such an event - cold, flurries of snow, a bitter wind and machine-noises from the rear of the hospital. I knew the car was in the open garage somewhere (Abby wisely stepped behind our backs, eyes darting for the license plate and shape in the darkness) and knew that he was about at his limit.

I watched him process the information and make the only decision that he could handle at the time, which was that the car was beyond rescue and he had far more important and scarier things on his mind. I didn't want to tell him to sit down and have a coffee as Abby and I found the car (or ran interference with the police if his suspicions were correct) because I knew it wouldn't help. It might break him, and thus far neither he nor my mother nor sister nor myself had snapped, we had been dealing. This - faulty as it might have been - was dealing. And horrible. I wanted one of us to snap, simply to cry out the awfulness of what it was, and knew that would neither be happening nor productive.

It was a long, dry, cold matter of seconds. I'd let him go inside and make the call. He's coping. I'm coping. By letting this happen as it is playing out I am coping for us.

The moment breaks - Abby yells in a loud controlled voice "It's over here," standing beside the Taurus. I watch my father's mechanism twist for a second, could see One Less Worry pass into and through the gears. And we were in the car, to the subway, and home.

My mother recovered, not easily but well. Another story for another time.

And years later I returned to the same hospital with my father in the last weeks of his life. He was thin, barely able to walk, in need of another X-ray to see if there were masses or bruising or fractures, it's difficult to remember. He was aware, awake, calm, apologizing that I had to miss work that morning to take him to hospital (my mother was home preparing an air mattress and adjustable bed). The trip wasn't difficult, on the surface at least. He was attended to quickly and I was allowed to wait with him in the examination room, standing beside him as he lay, half asleep, undressed on the table. The room was underlit and faintly green from the tiles on the walls.

He's going to look like this when he's dead, I thought, another frozen moment, stretched out. That's horrible to think. I tried to admonish myself and simply didn't have the warm blood for it just then, for one reason - it wasn't true, yet. I held his hand for a moment on the table, he smiled sleepily. He might have said 'My son, my son' quietly, an expression he used to me for decades and I use unconsiously with my own child, wincing briefly seconds after.

If this brings tears now, realize that there none in that hospital that morning. There wasn't time. I was aware of the silence, of the sound of his breathing, the waiting moments stretched. I can remember this, I told myself. He was able to walk, and there would be some - if not much - time between us, my mother and sister, all those caring. This wasn't ending well but it was not over and there was room for faith.

It was the parking lot on a winter night lived again. I was in his place, putting a situation into a slot and heading forward. If my father coped - still hoped - on the table, I would respect it, knowing it would resonate sharp-edged and indelible, impossible to forget. Then - I'm coping. For awhile longer, I am coping for us.

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