I so do not want to write about this. I have put it off and put it off, and the funny thing about putting things off is that they never stay down. Like a balloon underwater that you try to sit on and just keep yourself afloat on, they roil up and upend you into the ocean and become visible and out there and noticeable. They scream “deal with me!” until it’s all you hear in your head, day in and day out, no sleep without dreaming of it, no real rest, just fitful spurts of unconsciousness.
Obviously, emotions are a big deal for me. I don’t know if that’s because they were off limits growing up – don’t cry out loud! – don’t be angry – you’re not a nice girl – there was no room for emotions, even though the room was full of emotions. It was unsafe to have any. It was like being on Prozac without being on Prozac. There were no highs, no lows, or maybe there was, I just didn’t feel them like that. It was just like being on a long pier that was constantly just above the water, no matter how high the tide got. I could walk forever and never touch the feeling, even though I knew it was there.
I was five when my paternal Grandfather passed away. I know now that my love and admiration may have been misplaced; but to me he was a great man, and at five I loved him something fierce. He would lean over with his hands on his knees and look me in the eye and say, “You’ve got a big cowlick there!” and I would say, “Where, Granda?”, and he would lean in and lick from the bridge of my nose all the way up my forehead. Every time. I never learned! I was devastated when he died; hid in closets, under beds, cried constantly. I didn’t understand death. I was excited to be riding in the big black limousine and didn’t understand my mother being so cross with me for my happiness at it. When she yanked my arm so hard it felt like it would come out of the socket as I skipped walking towards the church, I didn’t understand what was going on. When my dad picked me up and leaned me in over the casket to give my grandfather a kiss on the forehead, I said, “Granda is so cold, Daddy, we better get him some more blankets.” Weeks later, when I asked when he was coming back, there was that uncomfortable silence, and the looks between my mother and older sisters, on how to tell me he wasn’t coming back, that he was in heaven. I still didn’t get it, really. How could I? I was just a child.
My Uncle Bernie died in a mine collapse in Grand Cache, Alberta a couple years after that. Uncle Bernie was loud and gregarious, always laughing and joking. I remember sitting on the floor of their house, with the mud of the Rocky Mountains in the Spring surrounding us, listening to my transistor radio with an earpiece and him coming up to me and asking, “Can you hear me?” and me smiling and shaking my head. Then he turned around and farted in my face and said, “Can you hear that?” and fell about laughing hysterically while I died from embarrassment and mock disgust. I thought it was pretty funny. I didn’t understand why my Aunt and my cousins were so sad all the time now.
Eddie, my Grandmother’s second husband, died when I was eleven. He was a nice old man, a bit older than her, but a good companion to her. He was a Canadian by birth, which is saying something since most of Canada’s population (pre-1950) are immigrants from somewhere. His family and ours did not mix so well but I enjoyed listening to his stories and seeing the (now) vintage items in his house that I wasn’t to touch but definitely admired, like the wool carding brushes that always called out to me. One of his grandsons liked me and said hello at a football game when he saw me there. I didn’t recognize him, and he said, “My Grandfather is married to your Grandmother.” I was embarrassed I didn’t know him. When Eddie died I was again inconsolable. I remember being at the funeral mass at St. Anthony’s on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton where my Grandfather’s mass had been said years earlier. I remember the disgust I felt when I looked a few pews ahead and saw his grandsons shaking with laughter over something instead of paying attention to the mass. I didn’t understand. Now I know people have different reactions to death, different ways of grieving.
My mom’s father was next to go, when I was 17. I didn’t know him that well, had only met him a few times – in Scotland and when they visited Canada when I was 8. He was a quiet man, kind, funny, with sparkling blue eyes. I know where my mother got her sense of humor from. He would call things by the wrong names, or different names, sometimes just to get your goat. To him, ice cream cones were Pokey Hats; potato chips were crisps; and therefore Chipper the poodle’s name was Crisps. My mom picked this habit up – my sister’s best friend’s boyfriend’s name was Lloyd, but every time my mother said it, every single time, it came out as, “Floyd-or-Lloyd-or whatever-the-hell-your-name-is” in that thick, Scottish brogue. I think my eyes nearly rolled out of their sockets during my teenage years from embarrassment. Grampa Smith tried to teach me how to whistle and closed the door to my room with me in it and said not to come out till I could. But he said it with a smile. He was a great whistler. I wish I had gotten to know him better, and learned more about him. My parents traveled back to Scotland for the funeral and I wished I was going with them. They didn’t want me staying by myself so each of my sisters took a week to come to the house. I was upset AND pissed off I couldn’t stay by myself. I didn’t understand.
The first time I remember actually seeing my father being upset and sad was my Uncle Jim’s death. He wasn’t really my Uncle, but a close friend of my parents. He and his wife, Aunt Jean, were the kindest, funniest people I knew. We didn’t see them a lot, even though they only lived a 45 minutes away. Usually every Christmas or New Year’s we would go to their house, or they to ours, and each time I would hear from both sides that they needed to get together more. On occasion they would come over to play whist or cribbage, betting pennies that no-one kept at the end of the night when they won. I would sit silently and watch and listen, helping to make highballs and pour beers or bringing in snacks. Uncle Jim would whistle through his nose and it completely fascinated me; I would stare at him trying to figure out where it was coming from.
Aunt Jean called one afternoon after I had gotten home from work at the Steel Mill. It was summer, blazing hot and I had been napping. I was so glad to hear from her, and excitedly asked how she was. “Not very good, hen…is your Dad there?” I told her he was picking my Mum up from work. “Oh, OK then… well can you tell him that your Uncle Jim has died?” I immediately burst into tears; first from the shock of losing Uncle Jim, but then from feeling stupid that I didn’t innately know that something was wrong. I waited for my parents to get home, and I told them Aunt Jean had called… and Uncle Jim had died. The look on my Dad’s face… I never want to see that look on anyone, ever again. Like a wounded lion…I saw the knowledge register on his face and change him. He was incredulous; disbelieving. “It cannae be, it CANNAE be!” with his voice cracking and tears pricking his eyes, dialing the phone and finding out that indeed, it was. Uncle Jim was buried in a plot 50 feet from Granda. You can see his beautiful black marble headstone as you stand looking at Granda’s grave.
Which brings me to why I’m writing today. All of these deaths were men that were important to me, help shaped me in one way or another.
The last six or eight months have been grueling emotionally for me. We lost power for a week in a huge windstorm right after Thanksgiving. I had to cancel my annual Holiday Tree Trimming because of it. The house was freezing because we had no heat, which contributed to my pinching a nerve in my lower back and being in excruciating pain for weeks, and completely out of it from the pain meds. Christmas and New Year’s are a blur. I didn’t get to do the things I liked to do at that time of year, and I’m resentful of it.
We usually get a card from our friends Pat & Jeff up in the Bay Area. It includes a letter of all that’s gone on for them during the year. I like getting it because they lead interesting lives that touch a lot of people, and travel a lot of places. I remember I didn’t get it this year; I didn’t understand.
I look up to them and their marriage; it helped me see what I wanted from my own marriage. They were Sean's and my witnesses when we took our vows at City Hall in San Francisco; doubly happy for us because we got married on the same day they did, seventeen years prior. Pat and I had worked for the same company; she in San Francisco and I in Los Angeles, and became friends on the phone first, then having dinner or lunch together when she was down here, even after we both left the company, and I would stay with them whenever I got up to the Bay Area.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was still hung up on a man I knew in Boston who moved at the same time to become a Navy SEAL. I carried a torch for him and tried many ways to get in touch with him – even though he was deep in training and unreachable. Pat suggested I talk to her husband Jeff about it – he had been in the armed forces and might have some ideas that would help. So I called her one evening and she introduced us over the phone. Jeff and I talked for about an hour and a half that night, about men, the Navy, about marriage, and everything in between. He gave me the tools I needed to get a message to my “him”, and we did end up getting back in touch. It wasn’t to be, but I am glad I was able to shut the door on that instead of always having that niggling, “what if?” to eat away at me.
I loved being with Pat & Jeff so much, I drove to San Francisco on Christmas morning one year just to have dinner with them. There was such an ease about him, a manly way of confidence, it was enjoyable to just sit in his presence. He loved mystery novels, TV shows about serving – whether in the Armed Forces, or in the police or fire departments; and he loved Tom Petty. He loved to cook, and he loved martinis and good red wine, and he loved his comfy leather armchair and ottoman to watch his shows from.
After Sean and I got together, we loved spending time with them finding new out-of-the-way cafes and bars. They were always up for enjoying life. One Saturday we all decided to get a pedicure. Sean was not into this at all, but Jeff told how when he served in Vietnam, the first thing he did when he got time off was to take care of his feet. There’s nothing worse than trouble with your feet, he said. And Sean was a convert after that. Especially after seeing how the (usually) Asian women totally fawned over Jeff and him when they walked in. Pat and I were collateral customers.
Sean and I traveled up to San Francisco in October last year to see a CAL football game, and had dinner with Pat & Jeff. Looking back, there are always little signs that something’s about to change. You just have to listen for them. While waiting for the valet, Jeff mentioned his first wife. I thought he meant the woman before Pat, whom he had children with, but he meant the Vietnamese woman he married while over there and lost in a firefight soon after. I was shocked, not for the content, but the fact that he had brought it up. Jeff was an extremely private man who didn’t talk about that part of his life very much. If you asked him a question about it, he would haltingly answer, but you knew not to pry too much. We had had an amazing dinner with excellent martinis and headed home in our car. As we went to say goodnight, Jeff asked us to come up to share a bottle of wine and more conversation. I thought in my head, ugh, those STAIRS!, as he and Pat shared a condo that to get to, required oxygen and crampons and belaying. Not really, but I was tired and wanted my hotel bed. I felt bad about saying no but they understood. We said goodnight, and that was that.
The first week of January, I got a call on my cell. I didn’t know the number, but the area code was 415, so I knew it was San Francisco. It was a friend of Pat’s on the line, and she let me know that Jeff had died of a heart attack on December 16th. I knew exactly how my Dad had felt when I told him about Uncle Jim. And the pain of not climbing those stairs like Hillary climbed Everest to have had one more hour to share in Jeff’s life, has left me broken. Not just of heart, but of life. I am lifebroken. The whys, the unfairness, the sadness that I feel, and then coming round to the realization of the depth of my friend Pat’s pain. I don’t understand death. I never have, I never will.
So what’s the lesson on austerity here? There are some things that you should never, ever be austere with. The first is your love. Love is all there is. Love is all you need. Love lifts us up where we belong. Trite, but true. The second is your time. You will never get any of it back. You will never get another chance. It may be a different chance, but it will never be the same chance, to share your life at that moment, with another human being that you love. Do you understand? I do.
