My Dearly Departed Significant Other has, well, Departed

In a previous post I remembered my Dad. Now assembling a proper eulogy was relatively easy for Dad; he was 91, and had been in a full-time care facility for the last 4 years following his second stroke. He'd led a full life, from service in the US infantry in Europe in the winter of 1944-45, to a Fulbright scholarship with Mom in Paris in the early 1950's, to raising a family and eventually becoming a great-grandfather late in life. Arguably we lost him when he had the stroke, even if he was still all there intellectually for those last few years.

Somewhat harder to deal with was the untimely loss of My Dearly Departed Significant Other, somewhat over a year ago now.

We had been together for almost 34 years when she passed away. We were young when we married; we worked odd jobs to put each other through university while raising two great kids and dealing with her various health challenges. We spent the last 21 months of her life working together through her cancer diagnosis. The total time we spent together represents 80% of my adult life at this point, and, to put it mildly, I'm at a bit of a loss.

To hit 60, as I have, suddenly alone after 34 years in a stable partnership, is proving challenging. You get into a groove where you do some things automatically, every day, because they meet your partner's needs or desires. It's all second nature, you've done it for 30 years, it's like brushing your teeth. But she's not here, so I don't need to do these little things anymore, that I do automatically anyway without thinking about it. And if the relationship has lasted all those years, it's because it's mutual. I can remember coming home from business trips: the plane would land and the cabin door would open, and I could almost smell the pasta on the stove from the airport, because she always knew I'd appreciate a home-cooked meal after a week of hotels, taxis, restaurants and airports. Today, coming home from work every day is like checking into a hotel. No matter how nice the hotel room, it's still empty; she's still not there.

Recently I dreamed of her. She was lying on a bed. It was an unfamiliar bed: not our big, messy bed with the red duvet cover, not the hospital-type motorized bed we had in our bedroom for the last year of her life, not the bed in the palliative care unit where she spent the last week of her life. It was a nondescript, flat white bed, with white sheets, in a well-lit, nondescript white room. She was wearing white pyjamas. There might have been a small pillow. The bed was close to a wall, in a corner. I had the impression that it was a big room, big but empty. The light was from behind me, but I didn't look back to see the source. She was lying on her side, facing me. Afterwards, when I woke up, I realized this was unusual because her long-standing back problems meant she hadn't been able to lie on her side for many years; she had slept on her back for most of our time together. Thinking back on it now, a week or two later, it seems to me that she looked younger, too, although this didn't register at the time, either in the dream or immediately on waking from it.

Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful. Nonetheless I thought she looked cold, with her legs pulled up, her feet bare, and her arms close around her chest. There were no blankets on the bed. She was often cold. She liked a heavy blanket, and usually wore socks to bed. I took a sheet and a blanket from a stack of bedding on a low table that happened to be nearby, and I covered her, carefully tucking her in the way I knew she liked to be tucked in. I sensed her relaxing under the weight of the blanket. I made sure her feet were covered. Then I went to the kitchen, where I noticed that her favourite sweater, a blue quilted one with a zippered front that she wore whenever she was cold and that our daughter has now, was hanging over the back of her chair.

So  the kids and I dropped by to visit her at the mausoleum on the anniversary of her passing, where the poem we left with her urn provided some small level of comfort, as it has so far:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye (American poet, 1905-2004)

As expected, she still wasn't there. All she needed was a blanket; she didn't need the sweater, so she left it behind. I hope to meet her again, some day, in a dream somewhere. In the meantime, I hope she is keeping warm.

I guess I'm an orphan now ...

I'm not posting anything on the bio-economy at this time as I am still employed in the field; the blog is a place holder for when I eventually retire. Meanwhile, I find myself wanting to share a couple of personal stories ... the first one is below, the second will be posted shortly.

I guess I'm an orphan now ...

Some of you may know that my Dad passed away early in September of last year.  I guess that makes me an orphan, as Mom passed away in 1985 ... so anyway the family all got together for a proper Irish-Catholic wake today, and here are some of the things I brought up.

My intention was to share a few things that Dad did for us as kids and for which I am grateful, and for which I probably didn’t adequately thank him when he was alive.

The first thing I want to thank Dad for was bringing us from Indiana to Montreal. Now I don’t have anything against Indiana, and can’t talk about Indiana as I haven’t been back since 1961. Probably the only thing I know about Indiana is that people born there are known as Hoosiers … which is what Dad would call us on occasion. Of course he wasn’t a Hoosier himself, being a native of New Jersey.

Anyway I can guess that Montreal is very different from Indiana. The co-existence of multiple cultures here, beginning with the founding French and English but also including relative newcomers such as the Italians (the 3^rd largest linguistic group in the province) mean that it is one of the few places in North America where almost anyone can grow up bilingual or even, like most of my nieces and nephews, trilingual, with the opportunity to participate in a range of activities across multiple cultures. Someone once said that if the US is a melting pot, where people go to become Americans, Canada is more of a stew where people become hyphenated Canadians: English-Canadians, French-Canadians, Italian-Canadians, and if you go to Vancouver, Chinese-Canadians or Punjabi-Canadians. Sure, there can be friction between cultures on occasion when someone stirs the pot, which leads to carrots and potatoes bumping up against one another, but eventually everyone gets back to enjoying their cultural structures within the broader context of the stew. This is an extraordinarily vibrant city and I am grateful to Mom and Dad for deciding to settle here and raise a family here. Presumably the year in Paris on the Fulbright scholarship was part of that decision.

The second thing I am grateful for is the opportunity to discover books. The house was full of books; they lined the hallways and filled most rooms. In fact I remember one of my nephews being astonished that there were even books in the bathroom on his first visited my sister's place, but of course we find this perfectly normal. So anyway one day at the age of maybe 12 I randomly picked a slim volume off the shelf and was immediately hooked. The book, simply called Ficciones, was a collection of short stories by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges never wrote anything longer than about 10 or 15 pages, and each of his little masterpieces was a window into an alternate reality. He always said he had lots of ideas for novels, but never had the patience or time to actually write them; rather he would pretend the novel had been written, and would then quote from it, or maybe write a review of it.

I would like to read for you one such ‘story’, really just a paragraph, which he claims is extracted from Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes (‘Travels of Wise Men’, according to Google Translate), book 4, chapter XIV, Lérida, 1658. I found this used as the frontispiece of a book called ‘Creep and Relaxation of Nonlinear Viscoelastic Materials’ (don’t worry, I won’t try to explain nonlinear viscoelastic materials to you), and is called ‘Of Exactitude in Science’:

...In that Empire, the Craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single Province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive Maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a Map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of Sun and Rain. In the western Desert, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or Beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

(Reported by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares in Historia universal de la infamia, Emecé Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires, 1954. Translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni: Jorge Luis Borges, Universal History of Infamy, Penguin, 1975.)

 So in a paragraph he has conjured an entire empire run by Cartographer Kings, and how the obsession with Cartography led to their downfall. What a beautiful little window into an alternate reality.

I kept that book and took it with me when I moved out, and I still have the very copy that Dad bought, presumably read and left on a shelf for an impressionable 12 year old to stumble across. It is dated 1962 which means he could not have purchased it in Indiana, since we moved to Montreal in 1961, which is unfortunate as it could have provided proof that they actually do have books in Indiana … just saying.

If Dad opened our eyes to the world by moving to an international city and stocking the bookshelves with literature from all over the world, he also made sure that we had a solid appreciation of American folk music. Beginning with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and moving through Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee (who I remember seeing at a coffee house near McGill University), he then moved to the Mississippi delta singers such as Robert Johnson and Lightnin' Hopkins. From there he moved on to electric blues from Chicago, Memphis and Detroit.  I was especially excited when he started bringing home music by electric blues bands from Chicago and elsewhere.  One of my favourites is the disc called Fathers and Sons by Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield; again I still have the very copy that Dad bought and which, like Borges, somehow made it into my stuff when I moved out.

The American blues canon has served as a basis for an enormous range of music. While not a musician, over the years I have tracked the influence of these few basic chord patterns to directions as varied as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix and most of the British Invasion. Miles’ most famous disc, called Kind of Blue, includes 3 tracks that are based on blues chord progressions, and a fourth is a flamenco number, so only one of the 5 tracks is truly dissociated from some historical folk tradition. At the other end of the spectrum, Buddy Guy once called Jimi the greatest blues guitar player ever, and if you doubt that, I encourage you to drop by some evening for some listening. In fact the chord progressions that Robert Johnson learned from his West African slave ancestors have now come back to West Africa; today you can find the West African dance diva Angelique Kidjo doing a version of Jimi’s Voodoo Chile, African beats superimposed on Jimi’s version of the basic 12-bar blues riff. She also does a wicked version of Gimme Shelter...

To continue with the multi-cultural theme, Dad also brought home the classic disc by Robert Charlebois and Louise Forestier. I played it at home some time ago and was astounded that my son had heard of it, even though it was recorded almost 25 years before he was born; one of his teachers had played it for his class as it is a classic of French-Canadian culture. And the chord patterns, by and large, are unrelated to American folk music.

The final artifact I have to help remember Dad surfaced after Mom died back in 1985, and we went to Pennsylvania to clean out the house where she had grown up. The house was packed with stuff and we handed most of it over to an estate agent to dispose of, but I stumbled across a copy of Dad’s PhD thesis and brought it home. It is a slim volume of 120 pages dated 1956, entitled “Theories of Convention in Contemporary American Criticism” and inscribed to my grandmother as follows:

“To T’s grandma, with many thanks for different kinds of help with this book”, where T is me, aged 1 at the time.

Now I admit I never read it, as it is pretty esoteric, just as (I suspect) he never read my thesis which deals with nonlinear viscoelastic materials, and what makes them tend to creep or relax. It is interesting that he was able to get a degree on the basis of such a slim volume, especially given the volume of my own thesis, which is quite a bit thicker in spite of bigger fonts, wider line spacing and being printed on only one side.

So maybe you think your old man is a jerk, but my advice would be not to wait until he is gone to make an inventory of what he did for you. You could be surprised ...

I am writing this while listening to Louise Forrestier’s vocals on Lindberg, with a glass of good Irish whiskey by my side. What a voice. Dad, your legacy lives.