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Deathbeds and Live Blogging


Four in the morning and it’s probably the most peaceful the house has been in days. I haven’t had much sleep in the last few days. Since Thursday it’s felt like time is standing still at a hurtling pace and though that makes no sense at all, it is what the last days and hours are like. Periods of total normal puncuated by long moments that seem as though one has lived them already. Deja vu stalks me because  of me – because of Will – and yet not. There are cystalline moments that belong just to this experience and just to Dad. 

I am the only one awake right now which is not surprising since I was the first one to go to bed last night. Driven by the noise of all things. Between the constant hiss and rattle of the oyzgen machine and the need to flee my younger brother’s anger, my sister’s grief and my mother’s helpless resignation.

There was not so much noise when Will died. I outlasted it until it was simply he and I.

Yesterday tried my patience with my youngest siblings. BabySis is too simple-minded to process what she sees and her mental defects are jarring in the harsh light Dad’s dying has thrown on them. She has been so annoying over the last twenty-five years that I was able to skip over the fact that she is borderline mentally disabled. Functional but vulnerable. And I want to be able to feel some for her but I just want to put distance between us. I am tired of her neediness and for once happy that LawnMower Man came back into her life because he seems genuinely concerned and protective of her. 

I haven’t seen LawnMower Man in over twenty years. Not since right before he knocked her up and then split for the West Coast. He is a tiny man. Skin so tight that he looks plastic. HIs clothes seemed painted on. He had Ken doll hair. Molded to his head and lips that seem stretched too tight.

“He looks like an old lesbian,” I told Rob who didn’t disagree and probably shouldn’t have laughed but his own siblings look like trailer park inhabitants too, so he knows exactly what I mean.

And then there is CB. He was drunk most of Friday to varying degrees. There is irony. He more than any of us suffered most from Dad’s drinking and hated its effects on the family unit, yet there he was at 3:30 in the morning, hammered, sitting watch. 

“He is very vulnerable,” Mom kept telling us.

And he is but I don’t care right now. Perhaps I will again at some point this week, but last night I gave in to my body’s need to sleep to get away from the rage that radiates off him.

Whatever lie I have to tell him to get him back on a plane for Tahoe will be told. He isn’t staying here with my mom. 

DNOS is alternates between in charge and distraught. She wishes us gone as much as she wished us here. She doesn’t like having to share her dad with the rest of us in his final hours. 

At one point last evening, when Dad was caught in a cycle of coughing, trying to swim free of the mucous that is swamping his lungs, she ordered us all out of the room. 

“It’s been just the three of us all along and it should end with just the three of us,” she said through the tears.

I forced CB, BabySis and Nephew out of the room. I silenced their indignation with the force of my will – which is considerable – and allowed DNOS, Mom and Dad to be alone. I remember clearly my own mute frustration at the end of Will’s last weekend when all the family and friends, who’d basically forgotten about him and us, came scurrying to the hospice. Despite the fact that it had been just he, BabyD and I for nearly three years, they laid claims based on longevity that had nothing to do with love as I know it. So I cleared the room for my sister and kept it cleared the rest of the night.

He’s still alive. Gurgling and surprisingly warm. I laid my hand on his chest and felt the heart pumping too hard. Death rattling in his chest and throat. How many times did I listen to someone in their last hours as I walked the hallway to Will’s hospice room? Even BabyD could recognize the sound by the end of his long stay.

“That person is going to die tonight, right Mom?” she would say as we walked past and heard the wet breath.

I wish Dad would just die. I wished the same thing about Will at that time nearly three years ago now. There comes a time when it is past time.

If You Lost your Job is the Monday Meme


Leah McLaren is probably one of my favorite columnists. She writes for the Globe and Mail, and I envy the hell out of her job. I would love to be paid to have an opinion as opposed to just having one for free like I do here. She wrote a piece about long distance relationships back in August ago citing her own rather steady diet of them as the basis for her authority.

It seems that Ms. McLaren has always chosen her career over her relationship of the moment because she was not of the mindset that putting one’s relationship ahead of one’s chosen profession was the proper way to go about things. She felt that those who went in the opposite direction did so because they hated their jobs.

And that’s key.

Career versus job.

She makes the mistake that all people with careers do. They assume that the majority of the world works at something they deem a career rather than simply having a job that affords them (more likely not) with the means to live their lives. Most people I know have jobs. Jobs they would walk away from without a second thought if they won the powerball or someone offered to sugar-daddy them. Jobs can be great. They can be fun and stimulating and all those things that a career is – but they aren’t the core of who a person is. Not in my opinion.

I loved teaching. Lots of stuff about it I still miss. But it wasn’t my core. It didn’t fill me up. Or make me stupid enough to confuse work with life or value it above friends and family.

Very waspy way to look at things for a Canadian, I thought when I read her piece.

But I think many people have confused what is really important in this life. After all, if civilization as we know it ground to a halt in the next few years – and don’t think it couldn’t – what would you have going for you? If the job/career was gone? If you had to start with just the possessions in your possession right now and with the people who share your life right now. What then?

What does a life outside the model we have been conditioned to believe in look like?

The Hunchback of Fort Saskatchewan


I cannot remember my Grandma R., my mother’s mother without recalling her rounded shoulders. She had what they used to call a “dowager’s hump”. Mom used to say that if anything about growing old could be avoided, she truly hoped acquiring a hump was one of them. However, she believed the hunchback look was hereditary (and judging by many of my cousins perhaps she is right) and that she would one day be as afflicted as her own mother.

Of course her fears turned out to be nonsense. The tendency to severe rounding of the shoulders might be inherited but it isn’t destiny. Not according to my yoga instructor and my massage therapist, both of whom harp at me constantly to “stop hunching!” A refrain my mother practiced as well as she preached incidentally.

But I write therefore I hunch. Read Full Article