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when my grandmother was in her last years, and failing, she lost everything she cared about.

except my mother and i, who sat vigil at her bedside as her entire world narrowed to those two iron rails. but there was only so much we could do to stem the tide of what slipped from her, day in, day out.

first, the house, the house she’d been born in nearly a century before. the driver’s license she’d gotten only at 68.  her card nights. bowling.  a few years later, the apartment, independence itself. her marriage bed, her pots and pans, a lifetime of odds and ends collected over 90 years. no more fridge of her own, only a tray brought to a room in a “home”; a tray like all the other trays, a room like all the other rooms. then the health to go for drives and complete her crossword puzzles and enjoy All My Children in the afternoons. the pain began; it wasted her.

through all of it, seven interminable years of relentless, incremental loss, she struggled with despair and shame at her increasing inability to do. when you are ninety and have outlived your spouse by decades and watched your friends weaken and drop around you, your independence and strength become fierce components of who you believe yourself to be.

i suspect the rest, the whoever you might have been in the long life before, has to be left behind in order to survive the foisted cruelties and indignities of old age. nobody alive remembers that person anyway. and eventually, neither do you.

and if you are a relative of mine, it appears that at the centre of your fierce independence is the belief that you are tough enough to simply die in your sleep when you’re good and ready.

my grandmother didn’t get to do that. in the last year of her life, she lay confined to a series of nursing home and hospital beds, little bird bones poking through her skin. i watched her pull herself present through hazes of morphine to meet my gaze. she had blue eyes. in their reflection, i was always beautiful.

let me die, she would whisper. i’m done.

i love you, i would say in response, irrelevant and yet all i had to give. i refused to look away. i’m so sorry.

she was ashamed of being what she thought was a burden. i was ashamed at my powerlessness, my lack of courage to do for her what she could not do for herself.

seven years, it took.

my grandfather, from the other side of my family, turned ninety last month. his wife died nearly 22 years ago; he has lived since in the house they built together in the 1960s. every corner of it remains a testament to the glorious sleekness of the Bungalow Era. moss-green shag blends living room and family room. the space-age proto-microwave in the kitchen wall sits lonely, waiting for an opportunity to unleash the wrath of its radiation. he has not cooked since she died. not using that microwave may be the secret of his longevity.

he was a spy in WWII, a British Secret Intelligence Service agent who worked out of New York and Camp X, the commando training centre in Ontario from which Ian Fleming would later cobble together the mythology of Agent 007.  in the middle of the war, he married an 18 year old girl from the farm down the road. she had barely been to the metropolis that is Charlottetown;  three weeks after their wedding she found herself in an apartment in New York City. he was called away on a mission – Top Secret – the morning after she arrived. he could not tell her a thing about where he was going – she stayed on alone, in the city that never sleeps. it was six full weeks before he returned.

there has never been anyone else for him.

the war ended. my father was born at Camp X in 1947, while the Cold War took shape. in 1949, the British closed Camp X and burned all the records, and my grandfather turned down the offer to join the fledgling CIA . his wife was done roaming and wanted to go home. he and my grandmother moved back to PEI, bought a little brick house for $6000, raised four kids. he worked as a mechanic from that day until last week. yep, last week. at ninety, he was still going into the mechanic shop a few mornings a week. he likes his routine, my grandfather. he likes to be useful. he has no coping mechanisms for any other state of being.

my grandfather had a heart attack on Friday.

it was a reasonable-sized Cardiac Event, as evidenced by the levels of troponin in his blood yesterday indicating muscle death. he wasn’t in much pain, but his breath short and fast, and his colour gray.  he spent the night in hospital. i was there when the doctor came the next day at noon, saying “Lovenox and a few days and we’ll see and you can probably go home then.”

my grandfather heard only the “probably”. and by the time i returned after supper he was high-tailing it down the hall, hell-bent for leather on going home. NOW. against medical advice. with no chance of continuing the Lovenox once he rendered himself an outpatient.

my father arrived. a close family friend, who’s also a nurse. the three of us tried for an hour, together and separately. i made him look me in the eye, said, i love you. i’m worried about you. i know you’re afraid that this is your only way to control the situation. but i’m afraid this may mean you don’t heal enough to STAY independent.

he looked at me like a hunted animal.

we brought him home. and kept him home last night. he couldn’t breathe, he was panicky, having to struggle his way out to the cold air to catch his breath five times in the first hour. in his socks, in the snow. he wouldn’t let me put his boots on. he wouldn’t let me bring him a blanket. he was agitated, shocky, a clear candidate for oxygen and hospitalization and possibly some form of sedation.

i did not let him see the tears in my eyes.

i don’t know if the choice he made, in his own mind, was the choice to go home to die, or the flight reaction of a terrified human being who wants things desperately to revert to normal.  his face told me that either way, for him, it was a zero-sum game. there would be no argument. none of us have power of attorney, and i doubt one of us who loves him would begrudge him the end of his own choosing, would that we could only grant it.

he picked his hill to die on, and we brought him home.

but i learned, with my grandmother. life is not always so benevolent, nor ends so final. they can trail out, cutting you down body and soul with a thousand bloody, cruel little scratches. that is what i fear for this man who cannot stand to sit idle, whose heart – damage or not – is big and free, loyal as a labrador retriever.

he is home tonight, breathing a little better. the cigars sit, rejected. he had a little food. he is trying. and i sat beside him today and believed, for a few minutes, that this is not the end, maybe only the beginning of the end.  i hope it’s true.  i am not ready, never ready.

but whenever that good night does come, i hope it falls swiftly for him.  the losses all at once, clean and silent.

ours, not his.

around here, most of the Christmas lights stay up into January.

tonight, Old Christmas, the twelfth day in the ancient festival, is the end of it all.  the orange glow of electric pillar candles will disappear from the windows of the city tomorrow; the neighbour’s spruce will no longer cast a pall of sparkling blue on the snow by our driveway. the strings of outdoor lights, unplugged, will mostly hang around ’til spring, increasingly unseasonal decorative accents waiting patiently for their owners to drag them from the meltwater and retire them in favour of lawnmowers. but after tonight, few will shine.

it is Epiphany, the revelation of god become man. or the commemoration of the wise men’s visit, or the baptism of Christ, according to what sources and what heresy you go for. or the day my true love’s supposed to pony up for a whole truckload of lords a leaping, for the girl who has everything, you know.

i am a modern breed, me. no Old Christmas at our house; i stripped the tree and the decorations last weekend, before i went back to work. the outside lights are still up, admittedly, half-frozen to the rain gutters, but i have forgotten them already.

which is why, had you seen me earlier this evening in the cold, crusty wet slush of my backyard, scrabbling around under bare birch trees for a small wooden ornament shaped like a moose – and, separately and with some cursing, for the missing wooden leg of said moose – you would’ve been excused for not recognizing the passion play at hand as a Christmas celebration.

we had a storm last week. snow and rain, a mixed bag. but mostly wind. the highest winds in years, so wild the house shook and air seeped in, squealing. i loved it. until tonight, in a sudden panic, i remembered what might have been lost in that storm last Saturday and went leaping, not at all lordlike, into the snow in hopes of rescue before Christmas was officially over and i could be said to have just forgot.

every year for the past five Christmases, we’ve hung the moose on the trees in the backyard. for Finn.

i have no idea why it’s a moose.  the ornament came from Dave’s side of the combined family collection, that much i remember. he comes from moose country. and perhaps there’s something dark and ridiculous enough about the big, loping creatures, deadly yet not predatory, that seemed like a fit back that first Christmas Eve when i worked up the voice to ask him, sidelong and on impulse, if he wanted to come outside with me to Finn’s trees. his parents, visiting, had gone to sleep. i was pregnant again, tired. and so desperately sad i could barely breathe.

our first Christmas in our first house. our first Christmas after the birth of our son. and he was ashes in our bedroom, and under those trees.

the moose made Dave smile. we hung it on the maple between the birches. we each spoke our Merry Christmases, aloud.

we came inside, went up to bed. i drifted to sleep, Finn’s name quiet in my mouth, the little moose swinging from the tree. the act of including him was the most important thing i did for myself in that bleak midwinter of magical thinking.

the following Christmas was Oscar’s first. and we made the same pilgrimage with the moose, out to the trees late at night after the house had fallen to sleep.  that year i’d planned it, looked forward to it in the way of those who believe they’ve come to terms with what they can and cannot have.

the house was decked and warm, the tree laden with more “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments – all gifts – than any plastic conifer with any dignity would bear. toys in shiny paper awaited the morning, the fat baby hands, the joy.

and then we trekked out in the snow to hang an ornament for our dead child. a single wooden moose, left out in the sleet.

i wondered and worried, before Oscar was born, if i would love him enough…if i would love him as i did his brother. after Oscar was born, i wondered and worried if i would keep loving Finn.

that Christmas Eve, i came inside and sat upstairs by the little urn i hadn’t touched in months,  rocking like a child. howls came out of me, raw and ragged. i can not believe Dave’s parents slept through. but they know what it is to be bereft.

i had a baby sleeping warm and safe in the little room down the hall. and a baby whose spirit i was still close enough to my own grief then to feel, viscerally, who had no place in that house we’d once bought for his coming. i was his mother. and for Christmas, i brought him a moose, and left him in the cold and the snow.

the cruelty of grief is in the helplessness.

i have never been comfortable with the external role of the bereaved.  letting Finn slip entirely into silence and memory would have been, socially, the far simpler choice for me. even with Dave, who loved him too, i always choked a little, wary – with no reason, no justification – of being judged for my weakness, my altered status.  i feared being dramatic. i feared being maudlin.

but he was my child.  even now, when it no longer hurts to think of him, and his absence is only a normalcy to me, the spirit i once felt mostly a closed door, he was my child. my love for him still is. it never got to grow, to deepen and delight in his idiosyncracies, his selfhood, in the way it does each day with his brother and sister. but nor does it end.

that awful wonderful Christmas of one sweet boy and one frozen moose, i decided – however empty, however pointless it felt, even to me – that i wanted to hang the moose outside each Christmas, with Oscar and whatever other siblings Finn might someday have. so that his name would be said. so that his absence had a space, all its own, no matter how stupid and shy i felt carving it out.

so like a child laying out shoes for Saint Nicholas or a stocking for Santa, i trot out the moose every Christmas Eve. we round up the small ones, and we trudge to the yard and we say, quietly, Merry Christmas Finn.  and there we all are for a second in time, our little family, the ones who breathe and the one with a moose and some trees for a stand-in.

(i found the moose. and his leg. they were under the snow, damp but none the worse for wear. some glue and a dry cloth, and i will wrap them in tissue and lay them away now, for another year.)

i am his mother. it is what i can do.

i lean against a toyshelf that was once a changing table in a playroom that still contains within it an office. a child clambers over me and a sippy cup drips rice milk into the suit i never bothered to change after work, while the other child beats my head cheerfully with a hairbrush. brush mommy’s hair gently, i chirp. she pauses, cocks her head to peer at me, then swats.

jenNEE? she inquires solicitously. i beam. gently, i say.

we talk, now, she & i. we talk.

my brain flits for a moment on a memory of eighth-grade science class and a mustachioed teacher labouring over arcane powders and the mystery of States of Change. in the scene, thirteen-year-old me  sits slackjawed, nonplussed, an empty thought bubble half-deflated above her.

thirty-seven-year-old me ponders the conversion from gas to liquid and dismisses it.  rather ostentatiously showy, really.  hell, we’re all in a constant science experiment of State Change: life would’ve been simpler if they’d just laid THAT out in junior high rather than bothering us with all that garble about kinetics and theories of matter, whatever those were.

i am matter. my children are kinetic. never the one shall catch the others, nor keep them still and static. memorize that, kids.

world’s Slowest Ever Esprit d’Escalier. so there, Mr. Plaid Pants and Moustache.
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Dave is at his desk two feet away, lord of itunes. he is at home this month, washing my delicates and harnessing GoogleWave as a home project management tool, meaning i can sit at work and pile pearls of  inspiration like “buy baby wipes!” onto his list rather than my own sad little daytimer. we’re four days in and he is rising to the occasion with grace. i gaze at him and imagine he sits in his chair slightly differently, more aware of the house around him, of the overflowing trash can sulking at his feet.

i hum a little Rocky Horror, slightly altered to suit:

in just seven days i can make you…a wi-i-i-ife.

i thrill, and wonder if he’ll start meeting me at the door dressed in fishnets, casseroles in his oven-mitted hands.  then i realize he needn’t bother with the fishnets. i am so goddamned tired i have the libido of a wet, dead mackerel.

time change is a cruel instrument of torture dreamed up by sadists. since Sunday morning, my children have not slept past the new 5:45. at night, they’re wired, exhausted, a once-peaceful bedtime degenerating into a drawn-out circus.

dear powers that be: i’m already coping with a chronic case of State of Change. nobody needs to fuck with my clock, too.

it’s a good thing i have a wife, even temporarily. it would be better if anybody was getting anything resembling a decent night’s sleep.
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Dave reaches out an arm and scoops Oscar up to the computer, brown head and blondish one close together. Josephine beetles away from me, off to thwack her hairbrush on some unsuspecting inanimate object.

the music catches me off guard – the opening chords of the first pop song i ever loved. Annie Lennox’s voice thrums up through the synthesizers.

i want to walk in the open wind
i want to talk like lovers do

like lovers. ah, lovers.

i remember being perhaps twelve, in my bathtub, still ignorant of chemistry and States of Change but shaving my legs for the very first time, Eurythmics my soundtrack for this rite of passage.  i ran a finger up the expanse of one wet, newly shorn calf, trying to inhabit the song, to imagine – from a vantage point of utter innocence, pure tabula rasa – the exotica of whatever it might be that lovers really did do. then i looked over my shoulder, mortified, and broke down in giggles in my bubble bath.

“lovers” meant sex. whatever that was.  but…they talked? like in sweet nothings? what would i say to a lover? another empty thought bubble hung limp above my adolescent head. so much is unimaginable when the mind is young.

sitting on the floor, though, soft and tired and sticky with sippy cup spillage, i understand the lyrics for the first time.

i remember waking languidly and looking for his eyes. i remember being two, just two. i remember that once upon a time, i saw nothing in a room but him. the memory is so vivid i almost glance over my shoulder as i did at twelve, embarrassed to be caught out naked with my own thoughts.

i could spit across the room and dirty his shirt. but i barely see him. and the lovers we once were feel as far away from me as that bathtub where i first shaved my legs twenty-five years ago.

i would not trade. but oh, god, i would like to visit.

next week, we escape to Montréal for five days. just us. in a city, gray and anonymous and magical to me, sleeping late in hotels and buying baguette for breakfast.  cafés.  wine.  nowhere to be.

and maybe we will talk like lovers do, up late, lost again in a world of our own creation. maybe. maybe the constant State of Change can circle round.

i would rather that than a wife, even. and that’s saying something.

some things come easy.

it is fall again and the light is yellow and crisp and i swear i only brought her home yesterday but there she is, Josephine walking, tottering like a blithe drunk about the house, careening into everything faster than my hands can catch her.

she took her first formal steps, the first real replicable confident stutter from here to there, exactly on her first birthday. a true Virgo, fastidious and precise and on time. two weeks later, she is unstoppable, a whirlwind. she is delighted with herself. i am delighted in her.

it’s easy when thing line up tidy-like. smugness rises like cream, unbidden, unintentional. i have to slap myself.

i suspect that some poor lost Virgo – perhaps the part of me from which Josephine’s timeliness sprang - lurks under my Aquarian skin, trying to run a Prussian train line through the soup that is life. my inner Virgo wants to believe that someday all the books will not only be shelved but alphabetized, that the dishwasher will empty itself, that everything will go on schedule, that there will be an Answer.  all the things i just never made sense of in this big ol’ game of Go Fish, she’s been tallying, saving up, waiting for me to put in order.

this Virgo, she gets louder and more anxious every year. virgins are like that, i retort. she glares, haughty, above me.

but she forgets too easily, this Virgo. she lets herself believe that order=safety, that norms=virtue. she lets herself believe in the medieval laws of hermetics and falls prey to the mugs’ game of pride in random milestones, mistaking them for a promise that all will continue.

normal only means the bus hasn’t hit you yet.

normal is a trick of the mind, one that lets you believe yourself cossetted from the awfulness you glimpse now and then at the periphery of things. yet it is normal to have suffering come for you eventually, not only in the thud of mortality but in the hundred shocking ways a world can be swept from under you.

when you know this, and make yourself remember, nothing comes so easy. first steps – on a first birthday or months before or later – are a marvel, a quiet, private symphony unto themselves.

my Virgo, trapped eyeless under my skin, cannot see this. her lens turns only inward, tallying these small blessings gifted me by my children, and nodding yes, yes.  she believes she is due.
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each September for the past few years we’ve gone apple picking in the same orchard not far from the city; a wide, sloping place that veers down towards water, all small, twisty trees abundant with fruit.

there are few things in my adulthood i’ve done five years in a row…i have not stayed still long enough for that kind of consistency, ’til now.  but this local teacher-turned-farmer and his earnest operation of organic apples keep us coming.

Oscar’s first year in the orchard he slept against his father’s chest, cheeks like apples peeking out above the carrier. two years ago he was just big enough to ride on the little apple basket trolley without toppling. last year, he batted at the trees and filled the basket mostly with half-eaten remains of all the apples he tried, while i carried eleven-day old Josephine in her sling and tried to pick one-handed. this year, even my baby girl took a chomp at temptation, her cheeks shuddering when the tartness hit.

the first year, though, we went without children. a friend dragged us out in our crappy old station wagon, her energy buoyant enough to break through the cloister we’d imposed on ourselves those months after Finn died.  i was newly pregnant with Oscar, as fragile and closed as an eggshell, emotionally, but the apple-picking pleased me, comforted. the small trees and the low-hanging fruit were easy, the first thing in that long season of drastic change and adjustment that seemed to come without undue effort. we filled baskets, the sun shone, i smiled. and then we paid and drove away and our friend said i know the prettiest country road.

isn’t that how Deliverance starts?

we were playing Lucinda Williams on the stereo. raw, reckless, rollicking Lucinda, wailing I think I lost it, lemme know if you come acrost it, lemme know if i let it fall along a back road somewhere… the only song i seem to remember from the haze of bewilderment and grief that had been that summer of ‘05.  our friend Christina, with pipes like a church choir, competed with Lucinda from the back seat. i droned happily in my three-note warble.

and then a bang and a metallic ripping sound. the car bumped gracelessly to a halt. the scenic red-dirt lane had torn the ass-end straight out of our vehicular lemon and we were a good few miles from nowhere without even cows to gaze upon our distress.  Christina sacrificed a belt to try to tie the necessary underbelly back onto the car, to no avail, and Dave plucked at a barbwire fence for the same purpose. i did nothing. i had, with the very first bang, gone under.

normal may be an illusion, but there are times the human brain can only sustain so much of its absence. i just moved continents, been airlifted and lost my hard-scrounged job all in the same breath, had a child and had that child die in my arms. but it was our poor old fugly station wagon – bought for a baby who never rode in it – that sent me off the rails.

i didn’t do much. you wouldn’t have known, to see me. i sat by a ditch, patting my bag of apples, still singing Lucinda Williams. but inside something had snapped, gone rogue.

the Virgo had been telling me all my life that if i just worked harder, tried harder, was better, things would work out. the universe, though, was seemingly expending all its energy thwarting my need for any sort of positive outcome or expectation of normalcy whatsoever. or that’s how it felt, then, at the side of that dirt road.

and so for a minute, i gave up. i dropped my head to my knees and breathed deep and jagged and stared into the red mud puddle between my feet and forgot, briefly, that i was verklempt and bereaved and hopeless and apparently cursed of god and Hyundai, both.  i picked up a shiny, crisp apple, fresh from the tree, and bit it.

my brain said, this is nice.

the Virgo heaved and gnashed her teeth. i heard her, vaguely, through my chewing. you are sitting in a mud puddle! lost in the backwoods! your baby died and you’re broke and your ridiculous life makes no sense at the moment! and you had such POTENTIAL! did i mention that tow truck is going to cost a fortune? and that you’re IN a mud puddle?

i looked at Dave, ten feet away, trying to clean the barb wire rust off his hands. i looked at Christina, fearless in the face of our sadness, who had befriended us when we had nothing to offer except need. i looked at my apples and decided i could walk back to civilization on apple power if i had to.

i thought, these will possibly be the darkest days of my life.  i felt almost eager, thinking it, delusional and free, like a glimpse into some other time usually veiled from my eyes. i watched the sun play on my hands and realized i was going to live through these rotten, ludicrous days, even if they didn’t come easy.
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states of grace never last, at least not for me. i told the Virgo to fuck off, and it was good. but she was back the very next day.

the places in me where she is woven deepest i still rise, indignant, at any sign of my own bad luck, any sign that i am again cast beyond the bounds of what i deem normal for folks to have to bear. i know better, and still i fall for it, the old line that i have somehow paid my dues and am exempt from future suffering.

someday, if we are lucky, we will all be old. and we will suffer. to be old is to ache, to lose one’s loves, one’s friends, one’s independence. i sometimes wonder if we have our goals straight.

but for right now, in this gift of my neglected functional body, and the healthy maelstrom of short legs that is my children’s sweet solidity and simple, easy development, i am replete. the Virgo be damned. i see blessings.

razors pain you
rivers are damp
acids stain you
and drugs cause cramp
guns aren’t lawful
nooses give
gas smells awful
you might as well live
- Dorothy Parker

i have always thought myself a cat person. and by some alchemical trick of metaphysics and assumption, my medieval mind has occasionally, therefore, convinced me that i am thus – metaphorically, of course – a cat.

it is only when things change drastically that i am forced to notice one significant problem with this little identification of the heart: penchants for napping and sloth and shedding notwithstanding, i am no feline. felines, thrown through the air, make graceful arcs and solid landings, all twenty-plus paw pads absorbing shock.

pretend felines, thrown through the air, claw and shriek and flail, spinning paws in mid-air like old LooneyTunes characters discovering the earth has given way beneath them. then they go splat.

both kinds of felines, the real and the ones with pretensions to cat-ness, then retire to corners to lick their wounds in private.  when one is not a cat, this can take awhile.

all this to say, i have been quiet, learning yet again that i am not a cat. and that landing on one’s feet is not a graceful process, when one is not a cat. seismic shifts disrupt my comforting routines and leave me anxious, unstable, vulnerable.

uh, yeh.  who, me? a tissue? don’t mind if i do.

but then this strange new world begins to take shape and its reflection in the mirror grows less foreign and i begin to understand the ways i can be competent with this, the ways not all is different, the gifts and possibilities of what this new will be. and my equilibrium recalibrates and i find my balance and stop kicking in midair, stop licking my raw spots.

when one is not a cat, one sometimes realizes one is an old dog, struggling yet again with these damn new tricks.
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Friday, 3:56 pm
with a little wincing grimace that means, “i’m really sorry i’m leaving with a pile of painfully tedious data entry left to do so students can register Monday especially since i already left early Wednesday but Dave’s in Vancouver so i HAVE to go get the kids ’cause the sitter’s on summer hours” i wave happy weekend at my poor, patient, beleaguered boss – left sitting in the disorganized pile of new Soviet prison furniture dumped in my office earlier that day – and race out the door.

starting work has been easy, really.  the office is both familiar and welcoming, the culture there affirming and social and all i’d hoped and remembered it would be when i took the job. i’m taking over from a person who is tidy of mind, and working for a person who’s been the closest thing to a mentor i’ve found since i moved back here four-and-a-half years ago. my bestest friend, lifelong, is in the office next door. the data entry part of things literally nearly blew my brain wide open for a couple of hours until i pried it open and personally lobotomized a few errant and unnecessary bits i wasn’t using much anyway, but other than the fact that they have no couch for me to recline upon and Gulags R Us designed the gray aesthetic anaesthetic that passes for new desks there, i’m happy.

the rest has been harder. Dave was away. kids weren’t sleeping, either at the new sitter’s or at home. time was suddenly chewed up like an all-day pizza and come 9pm i’d find myself at the end of a long, long road of supper/tidying/bedtime/laundry/prep for tomorrow and staring down the prospect of watering my poor sunbeaten pansies and tomatoes and wanting to wilt myself for want of sweet downtime.  Oscar grew dawdly and i found myself frog-marching him through our hours together, trying desperately to get me and two kids dressed and fed and out of the house with all we needed for the day by the hour that two weeks ago meant we’d be sitting down to breakfast. Posey cried whenever she saw me, and my heart ached and fretted and pined for her, for the impossible assurance of a good decision made.

Friday 4:09 pm
i wedge the children and their daycare bags and the dirty-diaper bag and my own work bag (which is, ahem, actually still my regular diaper bag/purse/chasm of magical disappearance) into the sun-stroked, stifling car. four years ago, when we bought the cheapest car on the market, paying $1000 extra for A/C sounded like the most ridiculous idea i’d ever heard. now, of course, the most ridiculous thing i’ve ever heard is the whimpering of my sweaty baby slowly cooking in the back of a non-air-conditioned car because her mother is a cheap sow, but i digress.

the baby’s dress, i notice as i strap her in, is covered in a sticky brown substance that is unmistakably either Fudgsicle or chocolate ice cream. Oscar cheerily informs me that he didn’t nap today because a movie was on during quiet time.

my brain conflates these two pieces of information and comes to the logical conclusion that my children spend their days drinking Coke and watching soft porn and will grow up to skin kittens with their teeth. my spirits slump on the steaming, filthy car mat.  i wallow in the certainty of my own failure.

Friday 4:25 pm
the hot little car of misery and chocolate stains arrives at my grandfather’s cottage, because PEI actually is only three apples wide.

the cottage – and i use the term loosely, as “rustic plywood shack” might cover it better in some estimations – is a living testament to my late grandmother’s foray into creative needle art of the 60s and 70s. the curtains are faded brown and orange op art specials, the walls plastered with crewel work depicting owls, turtles, boats, and various other flora & fauna. souvenir ashtrays abound, relics of guests long since forgotten. the faded patchwork couch, a Coat of Many Colours for the furniture set, was replaced two summers ago by well-meaning family friends who meant to surprise my grandfather, but i think he misses the zany, threadbare thing. i do.

Rusty greets us at the door, from a prone position in front of the fan, towel laid over his hind end. in German Shepherd years, Rusty is about 107. he’s my father’s dog, though my grandfather’s soft spot for him is notorious and deep. they are the patriarchs, my grandfather and Rusty. he calls Rusty noble, and i sometimes wonder if he isn’t fishing for the compliment to be returned.

i met Rusty first as a pup in the Yellowknife airport in the summer of 1996. it was early August, tail end of the midnight sun, and i was flying back north for a second year of teaching. i crossed paths with my father’s clan on their way back from PEI to the town they’d called home for ten years. my half-sister had sweet-talked them into a puppy, and he sat bouncing in his cage, smiling at me.  when he licked me, i laughed, and was surprised.

Rusty still has the same open gaze, the same trusting brown eyes.  i’m not a dog person, have never been a dog person, but Rusty’s sweetness charms me. and even splayed on the orange shag rug in my grandfather’s cottage, his bounce long since gone, he charms my kids. Posey puts her hand on his nose and he bats his eyes at her like a scene out of Disney.  Oscar, upon discovering that Rusty can no longer swat flies away with his tail, fans them for him dutifully.

Rusty is a dog on borrowed time. his left back leg stopped working awhile back, and on Wednesday my father and stepmother had planned to make that last sad trip to the vet to put him down. there is a point after which sustaining life is no mark of love. but mercy is a tricky thing. when Rusty perked up and started enjoying his food, stopped showing pain, they decided a last week at the shore might be nice for all concerned.

at 89, my grandfather has to pick his way down the crooked steps to the beach with a cane. my father brings the old sky-blue motorboat in from its mooring, readies it, helps his father in. but once in the driver’s seat, my grandfather drops thirty years. he is still the best waterski driver i’ve ever seen – patient, smooth, able to read the pull on a rope and adjust accordingly.

Friday, 4:45 pm
Rusty can no longer go down the steps to the beach. when the crew make their way down the sandy red cliff – Oscar included, life-jacket-clad, in my stepmother’s arms for his very first boat ride ever – Posey and i stay behind with the old dog. he whimpers at them leaving. he is a water dog, a people dog, part lab, part shepherd.  this being left behind alarms him, say his big brown eyes.

i look at him and feel as if i’m looking in a mirror. i feel grizzled with exhaustion, with heat, with the anxiety of inexorable change and my own inability to keep up, to land easily on my feet anymore.  i reach out and rub Rusty behind the ears, where he’s still soft. i coo a little song of “we’re here, buddy, it’s okay,” though he is long since deaf. and we are companionable, two old dogs; one who thinks she’s a cat, one who’s sure he’s a person.

then i hear the boat grumble to life down in the water and i forget Rusty because it is Oscar’s first boat ride and i want to know that he is okay, want to mark with my eyes that he once rode in the boat with my grandfather at the helm so i can tell him someday. i step out the old screen door with the baby in my arms and it slaps shut behind me and i am peering, craning out to see the small form in the seat beside my grandfather when i hear the door creak again and it is Rusty nosing it open, unwilling to be alone.  he pauses at the small threshold between cottage and porch and then leaps, old strong front legs carrying his bulk despite the dead hind end and he crashes down beside me apparently unfazed and my jaw hangs open and i turn my head in strange respect so he will not see my tears.

Posey claps in delight.  and my grandfather’s boat speeds away over the water like it has done every summer since i can remember but this time with my son in front, so small and riding away from me, wind in his hair. and i sit with Rusty in his reprieve, in his last days, and ruffle his fur.

when one is not a cat, all you can really do is get through today and keep leaping, no matter how graceless your landing.

back a few years ago, when i was still frequently startled to discover that there were other people out there in this online thingy box, i woke up one morning to find i’d been given an award. i was more delighted than was strictly necessary, but the world of memes and blings was still a vast untrodden snowfall for me, and it looked right pretty. the bestower of said award had honoured not just me but another writer, so, curious, i clicked the link and wandered over to check out the company i was keeping.

and that was how i first stumbled across Vicki Forman. Vicki wrote a column called Special Needs Mama, part of the Literary Mama e-zine family, about parenting her son Evan.

in an ensuing email exchange the likes of which i never seem to engage in anymore, alas, i discovered that Evan’d had a twin, Eleanor, who died a few days after birth. and that Vicki’s elder daughter was Josephine.  had Finn been a girl, i wrote back, he’d probably have been Eleanor. or Josephine.

it was early 2007. it was the first time i had seen any shadow of my own reflection – in name tastes or in loss. and i found the idea that Vicki was out there somewhere immensely comforting, normalizing. i also found it thought-provoking.  she brought dignity and unflinching matter-of-factness to her narratives of Evan and her role as parent to a significantly disabled child. she did not pander to people’s pity, or expectations of a fluffy, inspirational happy ending. reading Vicki, i began to take steps towards writing my way out of a box i’d seen no other other exit to.

one of the most surreal parts of having lost Finn, for me, was the silencing effect it had. it created a space around me that felt filled with cotton batting, or a choking kind of insulation.  a dead baby is the conversational equivalent of a cement truck. i did not know how to introduce the subject in relation to myself, did not know how to negotiate the weight it carried without feeling awkward or skinless or somehow miscast. i was neither serene nor destroyed, which were the main culturally available motifs for my new role. i was simply…messy, then.  too messy and too vulnerable to even begin to invite attention to it all. and so this tremendously important part of me, the struggle with my grief and anger and fear and sorrow, became isolating and…unspeakable.

i was lucky, in that i was surrounded mostly by kindness. but people who knew me and knew of Finn skirted the subject, probably afraid of hurting me with reminders, probably afraid of saying the wrong thing.  i understood that. but in the midst of all that well-intended ignoring of the elephant in the room, i sat smothering under the silence and the elephant itself; the face i presented to the world a mask that ellided everything underneath.

i’d allowed my grief to be socially relegated to a little airless box, and i was choking in that box.

so i started to write about it, face-on, to allow myself to begin to explore here the things i desperately wanted to and needed to, but couldn’t, not aloud. and in doing so, i started to integrate my inner life back into the face i wore to the public, even this small, semi-private, semi-anonymous public out here online. it was enough.  i believe writing here kept me from suffocating  in my own bewildering loneliness and sadness.
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mostly i think i’ve absorbed Finn’s death. sometimes, though, i’ll catch a scent in the air at a particular time of year, or read a story, or hear a pregnant woman dismiss risk as if she were immune, entitled, and scenes crash in on me, the horror reel of it all going wrong.

the grim neonatologist who came back to the delivery room to tell us, bluntly, that he would not make the night and then walked away. my baby’s tiny, punctured chest, only an hour old and already his body breached and bloodied while we were not even there to comfort. the machine-gun gasp and pound of the ventilator.  the  nurse who told me his blackened fingers and toes were a sign of something congenitally wrong, then the other nurse – when i finally got up the courage to ask – who stared at me surprised and said, no, he’s perfect, it’s just oxygen deprivation. the swell of fear and rejection that backed up in my throat the first time i saw him there in his isolette, splayed out, red-raw, so compromised, and how my mind hissed you’re going to die at my newborn son before my hand reached out without me and touched his and his fingers wrapped around mine and i was lost, in spite of myself, to wonder and tenderness, to loving him. the confusion of it all, the helplessness. the feeling of somehow having being stripped of the right to compassion by the crisis, and stripped of the right to hope.

all these swarm in and punch me in the gut and i am left gasping, stunned by what my memory has secretly stashed away.

i thought maybe i was crazy, the kind of closet cat lady who looks perfectly bland from the outside but one day snaps and ends up on the nightly news because the picture bombs in her head finally exploded.

apparently not. apparently it’s just my amygdala, a part of the brain “so ancient and original it’s present even in lizards,” where the raw fight-or-flight emotions triggered by significant trauma are preserved and kept alive. the brain cannot integrate or defuse those emotions. there they sit, preserved in neurotransmitter amber.

i have Vicki Forman to thank for the comfort of the amygdala, because Vicki published a book this summer, a book called This Lovely Life: a memoir of premature motherhood.  and i ordered it and ate it up and found myself reading it half in her world of the summer of 2000 and half in my own of spring 2005. and then she explained the amygdala, and i felt…once again…just a little more able to breathe.
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Vicki’s book is not an easy read.  there’s no enlightened, illumined mama guru enriched by the smiling happiness of her disabled child. rather, the book tells the story of the trauma of the twins’ birth, Ellie’s death, and the unfolding story of Evan’s blindness, seizure disorder, and survival in a light that most of us would shrink from shining on our egos, our mother roles.  it is one of the most honest and troubling and beautiful stories i’ve read in a long time, and though Vicki is the figure at its centre, it is the evolving relationship between her and her son that the book stands as paean to.

in one of the cruel twists that life deals out sometimes, it seems that Vicki had just finished this book and landed a publisher when Evan, days short of his eighth birthday, died suddenly and without warning.  i read the book knowing that the child whose survival seemed so uncertain would grow to become the boy his mother wrote about at Special Needs Mama, but also knowing the heartbreak at the end of the story, the coda that even the writer of the reflections in its pages couldn’t see.

i want to thank Vicki for sharing Evan. i want to thank Vicki for consistently, at Special Needs Mama and in This Lovely Life, carving out a space of words and dignity that has helped me with my own processing, my own healing, my own understanding of how vast and fraught and boundless the word mother can be.

i want to encourage you to read this book.

she had white carpet in the entryway.

there was a mirror there, but i have no recollection of my reflection in it, only the shock of the blood seeping into the white quilting of my new shirt, proud-bought just days before with the month’s babysitting money. it was the very last morning of my first summer job.

but I was not there, at that tall gray house with the two little boys, three blocks up a hill and right at the stop sign. i was in a stranger’s hallway, spilling blood onto her carpet, scraped hands trying to catch the bright, thick drops that splatted quietly into the plush.

i grabbed at them like gumdrops, willing them back, attempting to unmark the snowy surface and wind time backwards as if the trail could lead me back through her door whole.  the white foyer yawned, a witch’s mouth, and i scrabbled for escape.  my body melted, would not cooperate.  i leaned into the doorjamb and made a bloody handprint on its creamy surface.  everything was white and red.

i gave her a number. she called my mother. i could not make my mouth move properly and a tooth hung like a cat door, teetering back and forth, fascinating my frightened tongue. she spoke into the phone hesitantly, Are you Monnie’s mother? it was not yet eight in the morning.

then we were in the car and speeding across the city, my mother and i, my mother who is cautious and measured in every action. we still had trains then, here, in that long ago summer, and blocks before the hospital there came the ding ding ding of the crossing and we were no longer moving and the sun poured in on the black upholstery. suddenly it was stultifying in that little Toyota and the train rumbled on forever and my mother, my upstanding mother, hissed Jesus Christ, fuck, come ON, and i thought absently that i must be dying.

i do not remember any pain. that only came later, when the technicians tried to lie my on my back over and over and over again for head x-rays, and the piece of my jawbone that had snapped in the centre and at the hinge kept falling back into my eardrum. they will not radiate a head like that, today.

i had my period, still a novelty at thirteen, and somewhere between the stitches and the torture sessions at x-ray and the trip across the city again to the orthodontic surgeon’s office and back, my mother propped me up in a tiny washroom in the ER and proceeded to induct me into the arcane mysteries of the belted maxi pad, long out of date even then but all that the hospital dispenser provided. and i sat there, trussed and broken, nose packed with gauze and wondering how many more holes my body could stand to lose blood from before i would myself would fade to white.

then there was the blur of anaesthetic, counting backwards from one hundred, and the waking to find my face encased in bandages and jaw immobilized with hardware and then the pain, oh the pain and won’t you shake hands, sweet sister morphine? and then nothing is clear for weeks except a memory of finally coming home and seeing beetles emerge from under the radiator in the swelter of an early August bathroom and losing my shit, a sudden phobia emerged full-blown on the heels of trauma and withdrawal and my mother holding my full-grown body, bigger than her own, in her ams like a baby while i screamed in terror with my mouth wired shut.

and every time she changed those bandages more gravel emerged from my face, black spots in the red-brown stains on white gauze.
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i think i have told some of this story before.

what i did not tell is that on a hot summer day when i see bicycles with long-legged children on them darting into the road i see splashes of red against white backgrounds, like Pollack paintings or blood drops on white carpet. i see my Supercycle, frame twisted, lying in the middle of a torn-up street with my retainer next to it in the gravel as it was when i pulled myself up and stumbled bleeding into the doorway of the woman who had been out retrieving her paper when i sailed through the air in front of her.

Dave started biking last year. it is healthy, earth-friendly. and i have essentially not been on a bike in almost 24 years.

yesterday, i stopped at the toy store. and there in front, on the grass, was a shiny red Radio Flyer first bicycle, with training wheels and white handlebars. it was beautiful, and just almost exactly the size Oscar will need next summer.

and i took a deep breath and told myself i will buy it in August when it goes on sale.  like throwing salt over my shoulder, i will pretend that it is not the colour of blood and i will teach him how to pedal.

and i will put this story away, forever, because the stains it left do not belong on him.
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tell me your stories of bicycles, instead. when did you learn to ride? what colour was your first bike? what are YOUR memories of hot days and bicycles?

on Sunday afternoon, at the park with the kids, my bracelet broke.

online friends made the bracelet for me shortly after Posey was born last fall. an ornate art deco clasp, and three strands of silver beading, each with the name and birthstone of one of my children. Oscar & Finn, April, crystals. Josephine, September, sapphire. it was gorgeous. and i cried when i opened the little package, because this bracelet made and sent by semi-strangers had all three of my babies’ names on it, the only thing in my possession linking the three so visibly.

it made me smile.

the strand that broke last Sunday was Finn’s. i scrabbled in the early spring grass, trying to contain the beads as they rolled brightly away and at the same time keep Posey from swallowing the ones i retrieved.  i found a few of the crystals, found the F, the two Ns. but the little square bead with the I escaped me. i got down on my hands and knees, traced the dirt with my fingertips. gone.

the strand of my broken child, always so elusive, broken. the wind blew my hair into my smarting eyes.

then i caught myself. i raised my head to the sharp gust and the dry leftover leaves skittering. he is not in a bracelet, i told myself. he cannot be lost again. he is everywhere, dust, in these leaves, in his brother and sister. he is written on you.  i stood up, spun my head around almost as if i expected to see him there, some little colt-legged shadow with a brown bowl cut.

hello, you.

i left that bead somewhere in that playground, lost like the child himself, relinquished to the world, the universe. it is there, somewhere, in that grass. i just cannot see it.

it is fitting, the bracelet perhaps more honest with its broken strand than it was before.  this is my family picture, three children, one floating free, without an I.  and on his birthday this year, i do not sorrow any more. where once there was a hole where he had been, a gaping wound, now time has left mostly love, indelible, stronger than death.

happy fourth birthday, my Finn…my wee one, my shadow baby, my son. i smile at you.

with  trepidation, i’m planning to send this letter later today…to the hospital where Finn was born and where i did all the bedrest with O and the legion of ultrasounds with Posey.

i’m struck every single year by the ridiculous way in which this fine institution handles its fundraising. i’m not a fan of telethons in the first place, as the emphasis on “look at the cute little hard-luck children and their miracle stories!”  makes me uncomfortable in that eerie 1950 flashback way…but the annual mailout of miracle stories to a population that inevitably includes many bereaved families seems grievously insensitive, even this year when i’m feeling pretty healed and pretty equivocal.

i could use feedback – how does this come off? i want to make my point while still sounding positive and…um…uncrazy. help? please?  all suggestions/constructive criticism welcome. (deep breath).

and yeh, this is the real institution – the blog has been too public to insert false anonymity now. if you’re local, please don’t consider my critique a reason NOT to support the hospital – rather, i’m hoping to inspire them to revisit their fundraising strategies so that more families can support them without being brutalized by mail every spring.

April 28^th, 2009

Dear Mr. Shaw,

I received your PEI Cares Telethon newsletter/solicitation in the mail this week, and needed to write to you to explain why your institution’s fundraising efforts unintentionally but regularly raise my hackles.

Mr. Shaw, four years ago tomorrow my son Finn was born at the IWK. I’d been airlifted to Halifax a few weeks earlier, when my water broke at 24 weeks gestation. Finn was born at 26 weeks and a day. He weighed 2.2 pounds, and had brown hair and his father’s nose. He did not make it through his first night; he died in my arms early in the morning of April 30^th, 2005. He was our firstborn.

I was and am incredibly grateful to the IWK for the effort expended to try to save Finn’s life, and for the care shown him and me, both then and in my subsequent pregnancies with his younger brother and sister. We – along with some family and friends – have made memorial donations to the IWK every year in Finn’s name and memory, and plan to continue to do so. I recognize that fundraising is an integral part of the ongoing operations of the hospital, and that it is a significant challenge to mobilize the necessary funds to keep the standard of care at the level of excellence Maritime families have come to rely on.

But, may I suggest that including bereaved parents in your regular fundraising mailout is insensitive and in poor taste? Last year, one of the children featured in the mailout and on the telethon was a little girl from here in PEI who was born at the exact same gestation as my son, at only ¾ his weight, on his actual due date in August 2005. We happen to know this little girl and her family personally, and celebrate with them the fact of her survival and healthy development. But it is painful nonetheless to be faced with the public spectacle of that “miracle,” particularly as part of an emotional appeal designed to raise money. It creates a discourse wherein the children who do not have the happy ending or the camera-friendly story are further negated, in a culture which already treats infant and child death as the last frontier of horror. The telethon only reinforces the isolation of bereaved parents by reinforcing the “Oh, I couldn’t possibly imagine” response.

I give in my son’s memory because he mattered to me, and because I wouldn’t want another family to go through the same grief that we did if it were at all avoidable. But I can assure you that being confronted with intentionally emotionally manipulative mailouts asking me to “imagine” the difficulty of having a child in hospital does not make me at all more generous.

If your hospital were a cardiac facility for adults, I suspect you would not solicit donations among the widows of lost patients by sending smiling pictures of happy heart attack survivors: “This is Fred. He had a massive coronary but what a precious champion – he’s a fighter and today he’s back golfing again! Fred never gave up. His wife Joyce is just so grateful to all of you who made this miracle possible through your generous gifts.” It would be understood, implicitly, that such a mass fundraising strategy would be offensive, salt in the wounds of those whose partners did not survive their heart attacks. Losing a child is no less difficult than losing a spouse. Please show me, my family, and the other bereaved families whose children have not been lucky enough to leave the IWK healthy the same respect you would accord us if our loved ones had been adults.

Perhaps a separate database could be established, Mr. Shaw, wherein families who’ve made memorial donations for their children could have a simple, tasteful, “We’re fundraising and would very much appreciate your continued support in memory of your child, should you feel so inclined” letter sent, instead of the standard telethon-focused “miracle” onslaught?

I genuinely want to support the good work the IWK does, and would be happy to volunteer my assistance in revising your fundraising strategy amongst bereaved families. I ask you to please consider doing so, and in the interim, to please remove me from your mailout list. I will continue to donate, but on terms that respect my son’s memory rather than erase him from view simply because he was not, in telethon terms, a “miracle.”

Yours sincerely,

Bonnie Stewart