The Quiet Room

In the quiet room there is the sound of the oxygen pump and Mark mistakes it for the pattern of Eddy's breathing and worries it is slowing down. We stand around Eddy's bed and pet him, his chest and legs, and his head. Occasionally Mark pets his cheek. At first we don't know what to say and the nurses are there swabbing out his mouth and turning him in the bed and then realizing they need to change his gown that is wet with sweat they ask us to step out and we do. In the common area there is a dog lingering between the water dispenser and an open office and a man comes out and goes in and the dog changes from bored to attentive and then back to bored. People wheel by in wheelchairs wearing socks with grippy pads. Some people sit listening to music, some people just stare. A woman I saw crying at one of the many dining tables one day is today folding clothes, over and over. We go back into the quiet room and continue our petting and stroking and quiet weeping. We talk over Eddy and to Eddy and around Eddy and eventually we put on music and we all sit down and forget about Eddy and then we take turns looking over at him. From where I am sitting I can see his pulse in his neck expanding and contracting against the white white pillow. The lights are low in the quiet room and the decor makes it seem like you are in a cottage at the beach, in Greece. If you were on morphine this would all be believable. You could easily tune out the pumping sound of the oxygen and the sound of the fan and all the sounds coming from the front desk of this vast building filled with other afflicted humans who can no longer care for themselves. You could focus instead on the voices of the people you loved most in this world even if you had no ability to understand what anyone was saying, the pumping sound might register as waves lapping on a distant shore. No one asks questions about how long it will be until we arrive at the place we are all going and the day passes and we come and go from the quiet room, and later in the evening after we have all gone home, Eddy dies. And that is where we are now. This is the day that we knew was coming but we didn't know how and we didn't know when and yet here we are doing exactly what we knew we would need to do.

Saturday with the folks

I guess it's in the air. Everyone's parents are getting old, failing and decrepit. Our roles as parents and children are crossing over one another at the dividing line. We make suggestions and come up with solutions, shouting them from where we stand, our minds and bodies still keeping pace, mostly. Saturdays we visit Eddy first, now in care, it's depressing. We stay a shamefully short amount of time, but how long can you sit watching someone sleep? We move west to the city and see my dad, now 84 and his wife. My parents I say and pause, my mother is dead. My stepmother, now my only female parent has Alzheimers or some other dementia-like disease, and my father are the parents of record. They are one unit, bound tighter now that she is dependent on him entirely and he is more dependent on us, our open arms, palms raised up offering help with anything, everything. We eat lunch with them, bake cookies, clean up here and there. We are jovial and encouraging, helping her with the words she can no longer connect with, seeing that he is not becoming overwhelmed with this new position of care giving he has been thrust into. After a time we go outside with him discreetly and discuss things that need to be discussed while the dogs pull and sniff around the block that surrounds the house, circumnavigating the island of their despair. On the way home we stop to see Mark's mother who is the best off of all of them fiercely independent still and able to mother us a little which feels like a relief because we are not ready to cut loose that generational buffer between us and our own eventual demise. At night I dream again and again of my mother and relive her illness, she is well and then not well and then dead again and I forget how it happened but I am grateful she comes to visit me and I suppose it will be this way with all of them and then me and on and on.

My Awesome Dad

The crash site

Dad is 3rd from the left, floating the wing across the lake.

My dad is awesome. I got an email from him tonight letting me know he was sending me some money for Pearl's education fund. He will never know how much I appreciate this. He paid for my college education which was unbelievably generous of him. I worked hard and I use my education daily just to show him how much I appreciated it. He instilled in me the idea of loving what you do. And I do. He gave me some money for Pearl a few years ago and with Mark's help we started an investment fund for her. I was putting money away every month and when the economy slowed down I eased up a bit but never stopped putting the money away even though it presented a small hardship. I see it as an invaluable investment in her future.

My dad is 82 now and he still works a few days a week. I am including some pictures here of him with his glider after he crash landed it in a lake near Pemberton BC in May. He was unhurt and the glider is getting fixed. He was excited about the whole experience, not deterred or frightened. I strive to be like him, excited by all aspects of life, open to experiences, willing to work hard for what you want and believe in. Anything less is just a waste of time.

I am one lucky girl to have someone like this in my life.

Death in the Family

Some of the cousins, circa 1973. Anne is seated in front of my mother. My dad is not pictured, but Jim is. We are the children.

Am back home after 4 days at Mark's place. I dropped Pearl at school and now I am trying to warm up the house and office. It's always a bit lonely and dark when I first get back home. Today is a little worse as I am reflecting on the recent death of Anne Ironside. Thoughts of death and loss abound. I'm tripping on them.

She is not technically my aunt. One of our long-running family exchanges featured this discussion about how we called them Uncle Jim and Aunt Anne for convenience and we would lapse into the discussion of the second cousins once removed thing which was the accurate description of our familial relationship. Jim is my dad's first cousin and I think their relationship was more brotherly, they have always stayed connected, their mothers were sisters. They both went to the University of Edinburgh. Jim was a surgeon, my dad went into Anesthesia. Jim married Anne after he moved to Vancouver in the 60's and she is the mother of my two girl second cousins, Andrea and Cybele. Andrea is my age and I have always known her. So Anne was my second cousins wife and she died on Saturday of complications associated with liver disease, many sad complications. She was 72.

Today I am wading around in this knowledge that she is gone and now Andrea is just like me, motherless. It was hard to call her to offer consolation because really there is nothing that can console this particular loss. You feel it in your body, in your DNA, in your womb, your bloodstream, around our brains, and in our lungs. It's so deep and feels so endless and enormous. A big empty hole blasted through your whole being.

Gently, somewhere in the journey of this horrendous realization, the pain steps away and in it's place is love and deep human connection. It hurts so much and is simultaneously so beautiful.

Blue Boots

These are my blue boots. I got them for my birthday last year from my dad, who is now 81 amazing years of age. I think buying a person a pair of shoes would be a daunting task. I would never take it on but my dad is an adventurer. Add to the difficulty of this task the fact that I have unbelievably huge feet. I am not talking twelves here, I wear a whopping 14, a shoe size that is unavailable to most women, unless you want to look like a transvestite. I actively try to avoid looking like a transvestite.

So dad decides he wants to get me these boots. He doesn't know my shoe size (how could he, I keep it a secret mostly). We were recently in New York City and I had purchased another pair of fabulous leather boots which were being altered to accommodate my sturdy calves right down the street from his house. He had been involved in getting said pair of boots from my house to the shoe mender. His plan was hatched, he went into David's, asked to see the boots belonging to his daughter, and traced by hand on paper the outline of the boot.

I can never adequately express the depth of my feelings when I opened my gift to see these fabulous boots and then feel that cringe of "oh shit these will never fit, how could he", I put them on and lo and behold the bastards fit. Needless to say I have been having a great time wearing them and I have my most excellent dad who seems to know me extremely well to thank. Thanks Dad.


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