My book budget has been pretty lean this year, but a book I ordered after Dad’s Celebration of Life arrived today. It features the work of artist John Martin, whose art has featured previously on this blog. Martin’s apocalyptic landscape pieces have spoken to my mood as of late, as I wander the ashy wasteland of my own devastated life. I recently read that Martin had his own share of personal tragedy – in fact, he lost his father, mother, grandmother and young son in a single year. His painting of apocalyptic scenes of death and destruction continued after a period of mourning.
I had to chuckle as I unpacked the book from the package and the title really sunk in for the first time. Immediately I was taken back to Grade 11 at Strathcona Composite High School. I was fortunate to attend classes there, enjoying Dad’s company to and from school, as he worked there as an English teacher. He had orchestrated my taking an academic challenge English course that year. It was there we delved into motifs of dark and evil, goodness and light, and tracked the Renaissance-Enlightenment-Romantic periods through literature.
My world blew up when encountering some of the many romantic poets who spoke to my soul. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats… I remember reading reading the romantic poem in front of the class – Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark” – while transcendent Mozart music played on a tape recorder behind. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit”… Pure bliss. My heart found its home, and I longed to reside in the passionate Romantic era forever.
The class took a deliciously dark turn, and we began exploring themes focused on the loss of innocence and evil, which spoke to my teenaged angsty desires. At one particularly dark moment, our teacher led the class to the shadows of the basement boiler room to read TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men and The Wasteland.
I was introduced to the movie A Room With A View. An early scene tracks a prim and proper, innocent and sheltered Lucy Honeychurch observing a suddenly violent and gory scene – a man’s stabbing and the frantic aftermath as villagers attempt unsuccessfully (and rather bloody) to revive his corpse in a fountain. Although not entirely sure why, I excused myself from the classroom and began walking to the washroom along the green-tiled corridor. Darkness on the periphery of my vision began spreading inward, until dark spots began appearing in the center of my view. I’d never passed out before, but that day I nearly lost consciousness. An instinctual reaction of horror. Previously sheltered from gore and violence, my personal experience witnessing that opening scene was every bit my loss of innocence as it was Lucy’s.
Midway through the term I found myself unexpectedly led into the deepest, darkest, most labyrinthine jungles of Africa with Charles Marlow in the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Kurtz’s summative quote “the horror! the horror!” has haunted me through my years, continuing to resonate to this day (and on retrospect, it sums up July 2024 nicely, actually). Studying Heart of Darkness was a natural segue to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a movie loosely tracking the same plot. My delicate sensitivities were not able to watch the movie in its entirety, but I did remain in the classroom for its duration, turning away during the more difficult visual parts. (As an adult I remain acutely distressed at gory visuals, and have to choose my viewings carefully.)
After the classroom viewing, Dad introduced me to Eleanor Coppola’s: “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalpyse”, a documentary chronicling the production problems and bad luck cloud that seemed to hover over filming Apocalypse Now. We enjoyed the dark humour of Ford’s filming experience, and would later joke about Francis Ford Coppola, and my dark angsty grade 11 year. The humour levelled up when when the Francis Ford Coppola winery brand was established in 2010. Dad would often delight in seeking out the Coppola wine, and it graced many a dinner table during family get togethers. A private, shared, dark humour. I still have the last Coppola wine he gifted me back around May – long since emptied, naturally – and deeply cherished.
Grade 11 was a pivotal, transitional year in many ways. Beautiful worlds of possibilities opened up as as I encountered the romantic poets (John Keats: O! for a life of sensations than of thoughts!) and composers, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and artistic films such as Room With A View and Psycho (yes.) in the class Dad had facilitated.
And outside of class – in between blissful lunchhours escapes to Hawrelak and Emily Murphy parks – we had so many other treasured shared experiences. Dad and I would listen to Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints, Johnny Clegg’s Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World and Sting’s Soul Cages album as we rode to and from Strathcona in his little blue Toyota Corolla. We watched – no, experienced – Dad Field of Dreams, Dead Poets Society, and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V in the theatre together. Dad introduced me to The Power of Myth, an exploration of mythology with Joseph Campbell hosted by Bill Moyers. “Follow your bliss” became my life mantra. There were so many transformative artistic works forever etched in my romantic yearning soul.
Grade 11 was also the year I encountered my first John Martin painting, titled “The Bard” (below) – considerably less apocalyptic than the paintings in the book that arrived on my doorstep today, but still fraught with great tension. At the time I instinctively loved it and intuitively identified with it. Looking back now, I think the painting spoke to the awakening and transformation of my own romantic soul that year, largely due to Dad’s myriad of influences. It was a year I began to take my own path separate from conventional society, as I began to understand my own individual identity and realize self autonomy and the deeper passions that lay within my heart.
Every year we gathered on Remembrance Day, enjoyed your beautiful, thoughtful display of the Grandparents and war remembrances on the fireplace (below), and solemnly watched the ceremony on TV. In May I planted some special Flanders Fields poppies in the front yard, looking forward to thrilling and delighting Dad with something new and special.
Today has been a particularly gut wrenching day for some reason. A bad sleep, tortured dreams (including a miraculous recovery by you, Dad, oh, if only), grey skies, and I’ve gone through the day with that lump in the throat ever present.
I hope in some way Dad you can somehow enjoy the flowers I planted for you with all my love- the ones that bloom so brightly today, under the grey skies. I miss you so much. Now they bloom in remembrance of you.
The night of the first frost is my least favourite day of the year as a gardener. I have a limited number of old bedsheets that are put to good use, but I’m only able to cover a tiny fraction. The worst is wandering around with sheets and deciding who shall live and who shall die tonight. It is terrible to have such responsibility. The uncovered, heading to the gallows, beg me to live. The covered are whispering, “dead plant walking” to the ones left behind. The temperature is at 5C now and dropping. Some are plants my father bought me in May. And I must let go.
A few flower pictures taken today. I will be posting further on gardening soon.
Grandpa (Vernon Delmar) Davies (Pictured): “Thrashing in Lenore/Virden Manitoba 1947. I loaded it all myself.”
My Grandma (Rosalie nee Malowny) Davies, would frequently say in passing through the decades, “it’s a good life if you don’t weaken”. It’s a variation on a quote particularly popular around 1908-1920s, and Grandma said it so often I honestly thought for many years she was the originator. It is apparently more often to hear “great” in place of good, but Grandma never dared to be that optimistic. Whenever Grandma would say it to our family, her jaw would tighten, and you could feel the, resolute, steel-tough, laser-focused steel toughness behind the words. She was laser focused on enduring and continuing onward.
My Grandma had a tough life.
I only realized, years later, how tough. She grew up poor, in a massive family, on a homestead in in Libau, Manitoba, where the girls and women worked to the bone, and often went hungry to feed the men. She didn’t speak much of that time. In fact, I only remember one story: during corn harvest, they were blessed to have food, and she had over 20 cobs in one sitting. Absolutely starving, and one moment in time they had an abundance of food for everyone.
The booming town of Libau, Manitoba, seen today. Post office is tiny white building centre-left.
My Grandpa Davies, similarly, grew up in Selkirk, Manitoba, on the homestead. His father taught him how to swim by throwing him off a bridge into the Red River. I am not kidding, this is literally what my Great Grandfather did to a young Literally not kidding, it was a story he told his entire life, with chills. If he hadn’t been able to stay afloat that day, well, I wouldn’t be writing this blog today. A whole family tree, gone.
Selkirk Bridge today spanning the Red River
My Grandpa (Clifford William) Reade, similarly, had a tough upbringing in a huge family, emerging from his childhood with a toughness and a burning to make more of his life once out of the family home. His father was headmaster and teacher of the one room schoolhouse in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. As was the case with all my grandparents growing up (except for my Grandma Reade), I’m pretty certain corporal punishment was a regular occurrence.
The school house my Grandpa attended under his father’s iron rule.
My Grandma (Vera) Reade grew up in a Duokhobor settlement, one of six children, in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan. My Great Grandparents had left a much more climate-friendly watermelon-growing British Columbia Duokhobor settlement (due to circumstances I’ll share in a later post), to the harsh, unforgiving prairie with its bitterly cold winters. Grandma would recall feeding the men first, my Grandfather and his employees on the farm, and how the women would hungrily wait, eating afterwards if there was any food that remained.
A team of women in traditional Duokhobor garb pull while the man steers the plow, breaking ground on the prairie for the first time, in the late 1800s, Blaine Lake.
“Duokhobor” is a Canadianized term for the Russian духоборы, духоборцы, or romanized, dukhobory or dukhoborsy. Duokhobors were traditionally known for their pacifism and Rejection of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the word duokhobor is translated to mean “spirit-wrestler”, or “spirit-warrior”.
I am always in awe that my four Grandparents, who all came from such harsh conditions in the early 1900s were able to triumph into self-actualized, successful, beautiful, thriving, loving human beings. I was blessed having them all for 2-4 decades in my life. I knew them well, loved them deeply, and had the agony of losing every one over a period of 20 years. Every day I honour them in special ways. I carry their love, their passions, their traditions, their artefacts, their pictures, their songs, their humour, and their cooking, as I continue onward in the world without them.
My Grandma’s saying would often speak lingered on in our family’s oral tradition. We would often use the phrase ironically, when facing challenging or unfortunate circumstances, usually with a cluck or chuckle.
The quote would also provoke deeper family discussions over the years. Is it a really good life when faced with brutal circumstances? What quality of life is it if you don’t enjoy the softer aspects of life? If you’re so hardened by life, so tough, is there any room for opening your heart to love, for enjoying the delights of the moment, for appreciating the subtle beauty of nature? It seems to suggest reinforcing the “stiff upper lip” and “real men don’t cry” concept.
For Grandma Davies, it was a reminder to stay strong and not letting the many hardships she faced break her. There was also a very physical, very mortal awareness to the quote, particularly with what she experienced in her childhood – the illness, the death, the starvation.
“Weaken” to me was never about a softening of the heart, or for that matter a tenderness or a heightened sensitivity. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is surrender, bending like a reed instead of being brittle – that is the Tao, or natural way of the universe. Not weakening, at least in my personal experience, means knowing and drawing on the strength of my core spirit, and nurturing a healthy resilience so that, in Zen terms and my motto for life, when you fall down seven times you get up eight. It also means being strong enough and brave enough to open up your heart, knowing that the risk of your heart being shattered is worth it and having faith that somehow if/when it happens you will endure.
Dad would similarly often speak constantly over the years of the need to “drive forward”, “keep moving ahead”. It was of critical importance to him to constantly grow, change, transform. This was life. Submitting to stagnation and decay was not.
During this most devastating period of my life, with my heart shattered and my life shadowed in much darkness and pain, I falter. I can no longer feel the core I have relied on through the ups and downs of my life. I have zero resilience in reserve left- hardship, worry, stress, illness, and grief have depleted it to nonexistent levels, something I’ve never experienced before. My connection to the nurturing energies of the universe has been severed, and just as I can no longer taste after illness in July and August, I no longer feel joy watching a sunrise.
I’m not filling a hay cart, or pulling a plow, or fearing a beating, and I’m hardly starving. And yet I still find myself weakening. This Spirit Warrior is in a battle for her spirit and heart. She is struggling to find and revitalize her own essence, the spiritual core and burning deep within. I realize now that a large part of my own healing will rely on the the light, love, and wisdom my family blessed my life with. They are within me and a constant presence. Please, please, beloved Grandparents and Dad- please, help show me the way.
A lighter post, celebrating the two furry bundles of joy in my life with a few pictures- my two beloved rescue buns. Skye (mostly white) and Sitara (mostly black). ❤️
“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.” – Albert Einstein
Throughout the last month I’ve touched on some of the cataclysmic happenings and portents our family faced in the lead up to Dad’s death, including water and floods, bird motifs, and the Lady of Shalott. I’ve also briefly touched on the failure of the 50+ year old freezer on the day of Dad’s Celebration of Life and burial. There is still much more to share, both in months prior and following July 29.
The freezer failure was one, of many other, house-related failures leading up to Dad’s death. A separate post at some point in the future will need to cover lights burning out and dimes, which were the motifs of my Grandfather and Grandmother Reade’s deaths. Of note, a light burned out a week and a half before Dad passed away in the hallway and I had quickly changed it, trying to ignore the obvious symbolism it represented.
My approach to energy and forces is grounded on a rudimentary understanding in basic theoretical physics concepts, a rich appreciation for mythologies and religion, a grounding in middle eastern concepts, training toward becomming a Red Ribbon Master in Black Tantric Buddhism Feng Shui, an intuitive energetic sense, and lived experience. My knowledge and experience have led to an interesting approach toward the world. I truly believe everything we experience is connected by an intricate tapestry of energy and force. Even a drop of the ocean contains the essence of ocean-ness. So too do we each contain universe-ness. I am reminded of one of my Dad’s favourite quotes by Walt Whitman, words he lived by: “I am large, I contain multitudes”.
There are many things unexplained in this world. Some employ belief and blind faith, others cry foul… I choose keep an open mind, borrowing perspective from Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We are nowhere near close to understanding the universe in all its multitudes, and just because we can’t explain it, does not mean it is not true.
It is through this lens I view 2024. The severe disruption in time and space to our family, along with such an emotionally tormented time, seemed to ripple outward, both backward and forward in time.
What especially astounds me are how what we would call inanimate objects, but certainly objects of energy, were affected by the disruption. The failure of the freezer after 50+ years the day of Dad’s burial? The coincidence seems far too much. Throughout his over 50 years of his life, that freezer was a constant presence in the background of his life. It was a symbol of Mom and Dad’s union as they were starting out, in fact. Similarly a gorgeous, intricate crystal vase gifted to Mom by Dad, found itself inexplicably smashed, its shards covering the entirely of the garage floor.
The beloved Toyota he so generously and lovingly gave me, as well as what was his present vehicle, a Dodge Caravan, both inexplicably and suddenly needed major servicing, directly before and after his death. Even taps and plumbing within Mom and Dad’s house (yes, more floods, which I hadn’t mentioned previously, because they’ve been since July 29) started failing in the aftermath of his death, leading to more pricey repairs. A fence began failing and collapsing, the posts finally reaching a critical weakness from within. What does it all mean? Did he imprint some undetectable energy supporting some of the items around him, like an imprint of baby geese on its mother? Was there some kind of symbiotic exchange of energy and force on some level not yet understood? I don’t have answers or scientific explanations, but intuiatively it would seem that the disruption and upheaval of Dad’s passing has been so extreme that its effects seem to have gone far beyond simply my family’s private, internal, extreme grief. It continues to reverberate throughout space and time. Such was the magnitude of my Dad’s influence in our lives.
Right then, let’s continue onward examining these stages and assessing where I’m at. I think I covered SHOCK enough yesterday…
EMOTIONAL RELEASE
My experiences are more akin to waves. Massive, unrelenting crashing waves of pain that completely overwhelm me and leave me without breath. There can be waves washing over with greater and greater force, or sometimes a sneaker wave just unexpectedly attacks and knocks me flat. My spine liquefies and my physical being bends over, collapsing. These moments are always to do with the acute horror of no longer having Dad in my life. Sometimes it is the juxtaposition between remembering how things were and how we expected them to be and the dark reality before me. I become aware of that infinite fracture within me of unfathomable pain. It is limitless.
DEPRESSION
Depression and I are well acquainted, but interestingly I would not describe myself as depressed right now. Grief is different. I would describe this instead as a complete cut off from your life source. A severing of the cord that ties me to the very source of the universe. This leads to the question – if the fires that used to burn within you go out, what propels you forward? Why would you read a book, or listen to music, or tend to a garden? There are those brief moments of doubt that come suddenly, too – the awareness of the enormity of the task and the feeling that one cannot go on.
PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS OF DISTRESS
My personal experience is chest pain, stomach disorders, loss of smell and taste, and an inability to breathe in deeply. A quaver at the end every time I try threatens to explode into hyperventilation.
ANXIETY
Yes. The hyperventilation has been a new tool added to my anxiety arsenal. But in the dulling of the senses and disassociation, there is also a “why worry, the worst has already happened anyways”, almost a laissez faire attitude toward risk. In that sense things that prompted anxiety in the past no longer do so.
HOSTILITY
No, no hostility here. In my case, it’s echoes of HELPLESSNESS. A screaming into the void from the helplessness of how everything went down. Dad’s final six months, and even worse, last month, were terribly unfair and unlucky, and it is deeply saddening that he had a raw deal in his final month. July was like falling into a bottomless pit, and you constantly are fighting, trying to cling to the sides, trying to grab onto anything like a branch or root, and having them snap off in your hands, and continuing to fall. We repeatedly could not, would not, catch one break. There is, without question, the strongest sense that he deserved better. However, there is no hostility. I’ve not any fight left in me to be mad. Only infinite tears.
GUILT
I’ve always lived my life as carpe diem, no regrets, and this is how I always was with Dad over my lifetime. Right until the end I did everything physically and spiritually possible, with the clearest heart and most sincere intentions to the best I could. I even spiritually sent an SOS, begging my grandparents to send him back if they saw him coming toward. I have no regrets. I’d give this one a N/A.
HESITANCY TO RENEW NORMAL ACTIVITIES
More than that, it’s just that bizarre feeling that you’re fundamentally broken inside but you can go on, detached from life, without anyone at work realizing how broken and disconnected you truly are. It’s surreal. I am able to fake it and operate at about 60-70% capacity, but with nothing left after the work day for anything but sitting and staring.
HEALING OF MEMORIES
This comes naturally, and refocus largely happened from finding ways to celebrate Dad’s life. The Celebration of Life ceremony was part of that, but my life will find meaning finding celebrating in other ways, too. I will never be rid of the trauma flashbacks, although in time they may grow less. They join the ones that already visit me from previous traumas.
Of note, Dad also provided some guidance on finding ways to heal and honour him within a box beside his desk in his study…
ACCEPTANCE OF ONE’S NEW ROLE IN LIFE
This one I find cringe. Shed the cloak of grief and take on the robe of peace and renewal? Are you kidding me?
I will say that this, though. My own personal Breaking needs to cycle through the seasons. Ashes and void need to meet each holiday and season we shared. I don’t expect there will be any attempts at rebuilding a semblance of a life of meaning until the first cycle is complete. Everything has changed in the breaking, and what is built, although impossible to conceive of right now, will be entirely new. I am under no illusions – the way I’ve joyfully lived my life for five decades is no more.
I realize there are many grief resources out there. The hospital shoved us an envelope of resources as we were walking down the corridor dazed, still with Dad’s blood on our shoes. We threw it out later as anything associated with ICU was discarded due to the trauma associated with that place.
The above sheet was provided by the funeral home and crematorium as part of their package. It’s neatly presented, like a handy one page tip sheet. It’s just missing the bow. I shouldn’t be so facetious, the intention is good, my mindset isn’t today. There were other tempests on the horizon that revealed themselves this morning. “You Want it Darker” by Leonard Cohen is going through my head.
The day is an especially grim one, more air conditioning follow up work which is associated with pure trauma, as the installation had started on the second last day of Dad’s being at home in July. The AC baggage is still too heavy to unpack.
I found myself on my lunch break, feeling bleak as ever, so I figured I might as well go through the list, and see how I score in the grief stages. I only made it to analyzing the first stage. I’ll try again tomorrow…
SHOCK
Yes. Death was unexpected. Throughout the entire experience, right up until the night before, our family (and Dad), as well as medical professionals, shared a belief that this was an entirely survivable event.
That sense of the world going on around me in dulled shades of grey since the Day of the Breaking fits in well to this concept of trauma and dissociation.
I remember leaving the room on July 29. The ICU had had a change in staff at 8:30 am, and everyone was buzzing in the hallways. Life was continuing for everyone around us, but we were frozen in that minute. 9:18 am.
The doctor jumped on me as I began to leave, vulture-like, asking for/demanding Dad’s eyes (my g-d, his eyes! I support organ donation 100% but this was done with such blunt harshness and disrespect. His eyes, although depleted and upsetting were one of the last signs of life we clung to that last week.) The doctor stopped and then said carelessly “oh, I guess all his organs are too damaged to be used — but what about for science?”*
This incident left me with such a deep trauma it has haunted my days and dreams ever since… Anyways, I digress…
… I followed the Doctor With No Humanity back to his chair, to express to him this wasn’t just simply the death of a 74 year old man in an ICU bed, but that this was something greater… a loss to society… I tried to sum up the beauty of my father’s life in 30 seconds, failing horribly, but still desperately fumbling for, touching on his essence. He listened politely, an iron-like impenetrable armour guarding his demenour… but I digress again…
…yes, after that, I remember continuing to walk away from the room, Dad still lying there in the bed, machines silent, Mom and my brother standing vigil. Trying to leave. I still had to go through all the protocols for infectious diseases…taking off those hell rags I had to wear for the damn MRSA for the very last time. Hundreds of changes and one last change… for the damn MRSA the damn hospital had given him… but still I digress…
… I remember passing by the staff outside Dad’s window, the ones who had seemed to care days earlier and be supporting his recovery, and who had offered hope during setbacks. They were grinning stupidly and making jokes with each other as I made my way by. They turned and grinned at me with these joker-like grins, mid banter, wildly inhumane and inappropriate. These were not grins of kindness or empathy, but grins stemming from a total lack of awareness and being unable to read the room.
>>>Let’s take a brief pause here: Let’s strip down to the basic tenets of what makes us human. We live, we die, we feel joy, we feel pain. And when someone has died, a semblance of respect to those left behind, even if you don’t feel it, even if you’re a bloody psychopath, is appropriate. Please. Go through the motions. Be silent if nothing else. Please. We are human. Remember Albert Camus – The Prisoner? In all things of the sky and earth. Please….<<<
I realized then that the nurse’s smiles were not real. Those smiles we had interpreted as kindness- the same ones that provided reassurance to our family in the days prior – were simply masks that they don, along with their scrubs, at the beginning of their shift, in order to survive this hell ward. Self preservation. I get that. I worked in health care. I dealt with all kinds of horrors and sadness and grief and had to protect my heart. Just, don’t smile. Please don’t laugh minutes after someone’s beloved father has died a horrible, sad death. Put on another mask, for g-d’s sake, anything…
Okay, so, well, I’ve gone way, way, WAY off course here. It’s safe to say I’ve lost the way entirely. You want it darker? I’ve got it darker. But yes, shock. There is shock.
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
(TS Eliot, The Hollow Men)
***
* For any ICU physicians out there reading this, I recommend the following (hastily written by blogger) script instead:
Hi. Are you [insert name of deceased here] next of kin? [eg., Richard Davies’ daughter] I’m so deeply sorry for your loss, I realize it has been a very difficult time. I need to talk to you a minute, maybe you can come over here to a quieter spot (out of the frey) and sit down?
I’m so sorry as I know everything is so raw right now, and you’re probably in shock… the hospital has to ask some questions because of the timing. You’re familiar with the organ donor program? Had you talked to your Dad about this program? We were wondering if you’d like to donate his organs? I know this is very difficult and I’m very sorry to be asking. Would you be interested in donating his eyes to a recipient?
Dad and I have always shared a wicked sense of humour. Like most families, we shared “in” jokes, ones that our only our shared histories could appreciate. We also shared an ongoing, decades and decades long appreciation of and shared amusement over rats.
It began with my guinea pigs. The noble guinea pig, beloved domestic rodent. An unexpected guinea pig landed in my classroom on a cold -30 degree celcius day. A school bus driver spotted an opportunity to bring some new excitement to a tough farm piggy’s life. Becky had had already lived long life, loved burrowing in farm field hay, and had even enjoyed a litter with her long predeceased husband Rupert. As a new teacher, I was keen to take up the challenge, bringing her into the fold as a classroom pet, teaching kids about the joys of living beings and fostering empathy. The only issue: Becky did not spend one night in the classroom, of course. I fell in love with her carrot-chomping ways instantly and brought her home to stay, although she enjoyed many 30-minute drives for day trips to the kindergarten classroom.
Below, sweet but tough Becky, accepting a treat:
Molly (later Mozart, and finally Mo, in a shocking gender twist) was soon to follow, and later my Moxie and Roxie. The last two came into my life during a particularly sad and heartsick time on a cold winter’s Valentine’s Day when I was seeking to bring joy into my life and love into my heart once more.
Christmases for the guineas were always celebrated on Orthodox Christmas, after the distractions of the bigger celebration two weeks earlier for the family. My Grandma Reade (with Duokhobor origins) would affectionately refer to Orthodox Christmas as “Little Christmas”, an affectionate nod to her background. Little Christmas and smol sweet beings were an obvious fit, and when describing the event to Dad I shortened it to “Ratmas”. My connection to rats was forever cemented.
Below, Mozart (Mo), and baby Roxie and Moxie, watched over by Grandma.
Dad loved making connections, especially connecting people close to him with their passions, interests, hobbies, and jokes. A wealth of rat newspaper clippings followed, and, in the 2000s, website links and YouTube videos. Every newsworthy rat made my inbox, bringing so many smiles and laughter over the years. Pizza rat? Yep. The rats driving vehicles? Of course. (and don’t even get me started about the Year of the Rat!)
Celebrating the rat in a rat-free province, (at least a province with no overt reproducing populations, cross border rats are quickly neutralized), was delightfully rebellious, of course, but our shared humour went deeper than that, I think. At the heart of it, I think Dad embraced my love for the vulnerable prey animal, and we both rooted for the much-maligned underdog (underrat, as it were). We both saw myself in my deeply sensitive, wired-to-fire guinea pigs – at times in sensory overload; often at odds in the world; and at risk of being misunderstood.
Yesterday (Sunday), while vacuuming (chores are one of the hardest; the toughest thoughts always come then, so do the tears), I was straightening up some other cherished gifts from Dad, and thought of this rat connection we had shared over the decades. I was deeply saddened I wouldn’t be receiving any more rat news, and thought about blogging about this oddity – to put it out in the universe, juuust in case friends or familiars wished to still send me (what would be thoroughly embraced) rat news. I put it on the backburner of my mind.
Today, I was attempting to catching up on a few posts from several weeks ago on Mastodon on a Monday morning coffee break. One of the first few posts I encountered in my feed was a link to a highly informational rat cartoon to explain how rats have a highly developed hippocampus. The synchronicity was pure delight. I took it as a good sign indeed that I was meant to write this ratty little post, and so here it is. ❤
