Passed by a lifeless squirrel on the road right near Mom and Dad’s a short time ago. My throat caught and tightened. A few minutes later, putting out feed, Dad’s little friend did not come. I didn’t think there was anything left to hurt but my heart hurts. The magpies were already taking care of things as I drove off.
Rest in peace dear heart, you were another connection to Dad. I know he would whisper to you and we both loved you. (Pic from last time we met)
Keychain I’d gifted Dad a few years back below; he loved it. They’re my keys now.
As my brother Scott alluded to in his Eulogy at Dad’s Celebration of Life, Post-It Notes were an endearing part of home life and how Dad kept track of the myriad thoughts within his brilliant ten-steps-ahead-of-everyone-else’s mind. He let no fleeting thought go to waste, they were pure potential energy. In fact, he wrote about this himself in one blog post: https://tothineownselfbetrue.ca/2019/07/07/staying-organized-post-it-notes/. It is very painful for me to share that even in the hospital he used them, to track medicine, lists of concerns for doctors, and unfortunately his symptoms and suffering.
The morning of his quintuple bypass and heart valve surgery, Mom and I met him early in the morning to wait for the surgery pick up. We tried to keep spirits light. I remember telling him how he was in the best care possible. How great it will be to have the surgery behind us all and be on the other side. I told him on a scale of concern, and this coming from worst case scenario Heather, I was not worried. We were all laser focused on optimism and the future. spoke about looking forward to finally making it past the rubicon and onto a journey to healing.
At one point that morning Dad picked up a yellow post-it note from the hospital bed table and pressed it into mine. I glanced at it, and put it in my pocket. We passed the nervous time away with further light talk and my brother Scott joining us brought additional joy and added hopefulness to the morning. The core four – the “fab four” of our family would face this together and make it through, leaning on our collective strength and love.
It was days later I found the note in a pocket. Days after unsuccessful attempts to stop sedation, come off the ventilator and into full consciousness. The note is below (I apologize, in this picture it is stained with my tears):
“If you can stay warm, you shall not perish from the cold”.
Reading it a first time, it seems deceptively simple. But my Dad was a man of great depth. I knew it meant so much more.
In the days that followed I would stay with him during the most impossibly hellish, darkest, coldest nights in ICU. I have never witnessed such levels of suffering. I filled the space with warmth and light and hope and love and beautiful music as best I could. I read messages of love from my friends around the world wishing him well and spoke for hours until hoarse about current events, family loves, passions, and plans and hopes for the future.
As the lights would dim and evening turned to night in ICU, a bone-chilling cold would descend, the likes of which I’d never felt before. One night a respiratory therapist working in the shadows saw me shivering and brought me a warmed blanket. An angel of mercy amongst many cold, (understandably) hardened and (some) fundamentally defective night staff. She whispered apologetically “nobody here knows why it gets so cold at night, not even the staff” and disappeared back into the darkness. I later spotted staff in coat and scarf in the hallway.
During that time in cardiac ICU and in the time following July 29, pain and loss and grief has brought winter to my heart and spirit. I’ve lost my connection to my own life source and spark within, in turn that connection to the life breath and energy of the universe.
I continue to struggle with the mysteries of Dad’s last note. I know that within this note is the road map for survival but there is a puzzle wrapped inside. How do I stay warm and keep from perishing from the cold in a world without him in it…
I must write soon about how much Dad loved coming over for “deck time” and enjoying Italian coffee outside on the weekends.
This picture from last year exemplifies how he was all in his glory during those visits, taking in the sun, the sounds of the birds on the lake, the garden and flower abundance all around. My resplendent Dad.
It’s a perfect crisp, sunny morning today, and we drink from the same mugs, but his space sits empty and a tissue box replaces a coffee carafe. I am exhausted from round the clock feedings for my beloved bunny, keeping her alive with sheer will and love. The garden in the yard below is unharvested and neglected. He would still be in wonder, though. I planted so much just to delight him and bring a smile. My hyperactive senses desperately reach out for his presence. I long for his voice and our laughter and deep talks. Where are you, Dad? Are you here?
An impossibly tough day. GI obstruction for our little one, hopefully headed off by early intervention. While waiting to pick her up when hopefully discharged, we visited Dad at the cemetery. A cold wind blew through the trees. We added a few flowers, the sunflower in honour of the ones the squirrel and birds planted at home – the ones we told him about in the hospital but he never got to see.
The city plaque will take months to come; I added a small one with a feather etched on the side. Anyone who read my post about portents will understand why.
We glimpsed a squirrel preparing for fall nearby. Our beloved squirrel whisperer would nod and smile in approval.
Dad is beside my beloved Grandma and Grandpa Reade by a lovely tree.
The cold wind continues to blow. I think of the Wind and the Willows story that you read to me, Dad. One of many beloved times we spent together sharing books. I am afraid of fall, but perhaps shouldn’t fear so much – I am in winter already. I will share the last writing you gave to me on the eve of your surgery next post.*
Deck time hit suddenly; it will be the post after Deck Time. ❤️
Woke up to my therapy bunny, one of two that are the only source of glimmers of joy for me these days, deeply unwell this morning. I have been thinking each time facing a hurdle this year I just need to make it through..
The problem is now, there is nothing left of me. I have no resilience left, no strength, no money, nothing. I’m not even clinging to a fragment of the raft’s wood at this point. The relentless series of misfortune has taken everything. I thought that perhaps when Dad passed there would be an easing, the final cataclysmic act… I was wrong and there seems to be no mercy.
All this time The river flowed Endlessly like a silent tear – Sting, Soul Cages
In previous posts I have alluded to the Shakespearean-like way in which my father left his corporeal form. The natural world surrounding our family was upended for months beforehand, in true “fair is foul, foul is fair” Macbeth fashion- it was as if the earth itself was shuddering in preparation for his imminent departure. I dedicated one bird-focused post to portents of death (https://idwellinpossibility.ca/?s=portents) leading up to July 29. The scope of this disuption was not limited to the avian kingdom, however; there was so much more. There was a steady drumbeat of ill fortune – relentless layer upon layer of terrible events.
The thread of undoing began in September 2023 and continued throughout the spring and into the events of the hospital. Misfortune struck first in September, when the basement had a severe sewage backup. Hopeful for a simple clog and repair that a plumber could fix, an emergency call a $20,000+ uninsured sewer line sag with hydrovac excavation services.
We were yet another victim of Alberta’s leniency toward home builders who rush in to build homes and rush out, changing their numbered company every year to avoid accountability for shoddy work. I wept for our plum tree beloved by many bird families, our hydrangea, the other perrenials I’d transplanted from my late grandma’s garden. Utter destruction. (A subsequent camera inspection at the end of the massive work revealed another sag and a fractured water pipe at the entrance of the house, but out of funds, we choose to sit on those time bombs for now). From that point on, it was a steady drip, ooze, flow of water (or lack thereof) into the first half of 2024.
The outside tap ceased to work and I lugged water from inside to water front flowers.
The hot water tank failed and needed replacing.
The drain pipe from the air conditioner to basement began dripping.
The shower upstairs ceased to have warm water, leading to over four months of shivering showers.
The kitchen tap began to malfunction and drip.
The toilet apparatus upstairs broke and ceased to work.
The upstairs washroom tap only would run cold water.
The sump pump failed. At the same time the drains filled with leaves from neighbours’ trees and began flooding over.
The replacement sump pump failed to work, needing a service call.
The water sensor refused to work, had several service calls, and remains glitchy.
Even our outdoor hose suddenly and inexplicably blew out.
There was too much water. I was awash in constant uncertainty, crisis, draining. By June I was trying to simply get through the next hurdle, the next task, with weaker spirit, and fewer funds. The ten months brutally wore me out (the animal illness post is also still to come…). And finally, when I was at my absolute weakest, my most exhausted state, crawling on the shores trying to gasp for breath, the worst imaginable crisis I could ever imagine rose up, and in three weeks swept away everything I knew and loved. Absolute, cataclysmic destruction. And now, infinite tears, and infinite sorrow.
***
A couple of weeks following July 29, I found a mouse suspended in water – drowned – in a pail behind me on the deck where I sat grievng (inexplicably, after a summer with little rain and baking heat). I scream-cried and convulsed. I am that drowned mouse.
Fall is settling in with cool temperatures, a mournful wind through the leaves, grey skies, and scattered showers. There is much tumult in the air, along with haunting past memories, sorrow and painful feelings of loss incoming today from all sides of my life.
These verses from the song Why Should I Cry for You from Sting’s Soul Cages album, have haunted my heart since July 29, 2024, when my life shattered forever. Today is the day to post them.
Dark angels follow me Over a godless sea Mountains of endless falling, For all my days remaining, What would be true? Sometimes I see your face, The stars seem to lose their place Why must I think of you? Why must I? Why should I? Why should I cry for you? Why would you want me to? And what would it mean to say, That, ‘I loved you in my fashion’?
Dad’s notes from his original post regarding Sting lyrics (I chose the same verses he did) (https://tothineownselfbetrue.ca/2021/01/11/a-forgotten-sting-gem/): (excerpt from an old favorite I used to sing, from “Why Should I Cry for You?”, one of Sting’s best songs, from 1991’s The Soul Cages album)
To my knowledge, this is the only picture of my great grandmother (Dad’s grandma), Lucy (nee Settee), who was born in 1906 (along with my young grandpa). In Dad’s early years, he and his parents lived in his grandmother Lucy’s house off Portage Avenue in St. James. Lucy owned a café, or as he called it, a greasy spoon, at the corner. Dad would often describe her as his “wild grandmother”. One summer while Dad was at the beach he returned home to find Lucy had been careless and lost his beloved dog Scamp, his boyhood companion. It was a loss he never recovered from. Lucy later surprised him with a CCM 3-speed bike from Eaton’s as a birthday present before he began grade 5, liberating him from his mother’s one-speed “wonky pink bike”, perhaps an attempt at redemption.
Dad’s grandfather, Vernon Reid Davies, pictured below. Now I know where Dad’s gorgeous blue eyes came from! To my knowledge, this is the only close-up picture we have of him in our family. Born in 1897, Vernon grew up in Selkirk, Manitoba.
Dad’s most significant memory of his grandfather was that he would bring cashews in a can to him as a gift. His son Delmar (Dad’s Dad) continued the tradition, gifting our family cans of Planters peanuts and cashews in the 80s and 90s for Christmas with gift tags on the outside, providing hints to what’s inside by with Grandpa’s capital letters in coloured marker “YUM-YUM” (in case the short cylindrical shape of the gift and dulled rattle inside when shaken wasn’t clue enough!).
In the spirit of yesterday’s post with a baseball theme, I am reposting Dad’s poem “Farm Baseball”, which was inspired by a baseball game in 1984 on a distant farm in the Libau area (site of family’s first homestead on my Grandma/Dad’s Mom’s family) in the province of Manitoba. It’s one of my favourite poems.
The baseball game took on a mystical quality that night on my Great Aunt (Dad’s Mother’s sister’s) farm, played with extended relatively rarely visited. I remember being surprised seeing the youthfulness of usually more reserved older relatives as the kids vs adults game took shape. My Aunt Katie in kaftan is spotted running wildly in one of two pictures that survive as artefacts of that night.My Grandpa is in red shirt searching for a home run ball that landed in the trees as Dad’s cousin Butch watches on in baseball hat and Aunt Katie in kaftan runs wildly between bases.
In the second pic that follows Dad’s poem, my Grandma (Dad’s mom) crouches in front in sundress at home plate. I am running in front wearing a sunhat with visor.My Uncle Mike (Aunt Katie’s husband) is bent over on the right, likely still smarting from the hard crack of the ball I sent into his middle section prior to the photo (I still wince at that one, although at least it was an out for kids, and helped his side!).
After supper we play ball in the yard embraced by shadows of gathering dusk.
My cousin wears a John Deere cap, the one his father might have worn in a previous game.
The children giggle: it’s them against us as it was 20 years before. Small nervous offspring testing their uncertain powers on a makeshift diamond: shoes and chairs for bases.
Dad hits a long fly into the tall trees that sprang from saplings planted long ago. He pauses for a moment to savour the ball’s high arc— thru the clean August air.
The adults move to make a play on my son. “Get him–get him” cries my mother, reliving the time she tried to catch my dodgy youth.
Double-play: my aunt waits at first with outstretched arms to tag her granddaughter, the two of them lost in private ecstasy.
Like 20 years before though, the sky turns to velvet and the grown-ups tire first. The children plead for extra innings but umpires have deaf ears.
Played out, we all retire from the field our ritual of the summer lawn postponed because of dark.
Walking toward our twilight cars we dream of being around in time for the next unscheduled game.
Dad’s Original Notes Accompanying the Poem on his Blog:
“The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”–Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”
A poem about memory (one key form of consciousness), the passing of time, and the human and family rituals that repeat themselves briefly giving meaning and purpose to our lives and activities. It is fairly clear that the poet’s consciousness takes in a lot including the various consciousnesses and unfolding experiences of the individual players.
Nature often plays a role or is the backdrop to the many moments of being in our lives. In a sense, it is as much a character as any of the humans in this scene. Every moment of consciousness takes place in a specific moment or unique context. And as you read the poem, you are also aware of what that some of the characters may not be conscious of, too. And so it may be that perspective may also have a significant role to play in whatever process, event, or emerging consciousness.
