Authors: Helen Humphreys
As children we spent a lot of time fishing. As adults, we wriggled like worms on a hook in our intimate relationships—twisting this way to please, that way to avoid telling the truth of how we really felt.
Your death has given me no choice but to slow down. This has meant that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I know what I’m feeling when I’m feeling it, that I’m able to fully experience the present moment.
This may be why the completely unexpected happened and I fell in love again. It saddens me that you’ll never meet Nancy, and that my new life is so far removed from my old one. And it feels strange to me that your death is the hinge between those two worlds, the point at which everything changed.
I felt you partially leave two days before you died. I told the nurse on duty that I thought something was different, but she checked your stats and said nothing had changed. Maybe nothing had changed externally, but something had shifted in you. I could feel that you were less present, that you were unhooking yourself from life. Not that you were giving up, because you were someone who never gave up or lost hope, but that you were less attached to the moment everyone else was existing in.
When my first dog, Hazel, died a few days after I got back from Vancouver, in the same week as you, she approached death in a different way. She lay awake at night, staring off into the darkness, as
though she were waiting for something, with a look in her eyes that I’d never seen before.
She waited for death. You left when you sensed it was coming.
In the end, you can step out of the room or you can’t. The body leaks or it holds.
Your body was constantly leaking. Your blood vessels wouldn’t bear up, and the smell that lifted from your skin was the smell of the drugs they were continuously pumping into you. The smell was sweet and cloying, a bit like decaying flowers.
I remember how Grandad hated lilacs because he said they were exactly what death smelled like, what dead bodies smelled like. But I found the scent of flowers on your skin a comfort. It wasn’t a bad scent, and it wouldn’t have bothered you if you had been able to smell it for yourself.
But you would have hated how your body looked
after the operations. There were bags to drain the incision in your belly, and bags to collect your urine and fluids, bags to drip fluids back into you. There was a PICC line in your neck, a nasty hole bored right into your jugular vein to expedite the injection of drugs. This hole was always bleeding a little and looked sore. Your whole body was swollen because your kidneys weren’t functioning properly, which made you look so strange because you were also skeletal. Never anything but thin, you had dropped to under a hundred pounds with the cancer.
Most of your body was draped with a sheet, to spare anyone from seeing the gruesome incision and its attendant bags.
Your face was just a skull covered with skin. I hadn’t realized that there was fat around the temples until I saw your temples caved in. There was sweat on your forehead from fever because your body was fighting the infection that came with the perforated bowel. The ventilator split your lips and made sores at the corners of your mouth. Of all of it, the ventilator was the worst, because it prevented you from talking, from telling us what you wanted, from having a voice. At the beginning, after the first operation, when we were hopeful you would recover, we were told that the ventilator would be coming out
any day, but that day just kept getting pushed back. I wish now that we had insisted they remove it from you, or that you had managed to tear it out, as you tried to do before they increased your sedation.
But even if we had insisted, I’m not sure that the medical staff would have taken you off the ventilator, that we could have made them do it. They controlled the mechanics of your body.
The hopeful scenerio was that you would beat the infection caused by the perforated bowel and the ventilator would be removed and you would be able to go home. You would still die from the cancer, of course, but later, in the spring, perhaps as late as your birthday. It seems fair to say that this would have happened if there hadn’t been a further perforation in the bowel that they didn’t catch in that first emergency surgery. When they told me that they’d have to operate again, I just stood at the nurses’ station and cried. I knew that although you had the strength and will to survive one major operation, you probably wouldn’t survive two.
In the late winter, ten months before you died, when my life was still a life I recognized, I woke early one morning in my old house and came downstairs to make coffee. That house had French doors that opened out onto the garden. I saw a movement outside and walked up to the French doors to see, on the other side of the doors, a hawk devouring a songbird.
The hawk was right up against the glass, six inches from my living room. I was able to sit down in a chair right in front of the bird and it didn’t notice me there.
It was late February or early March. There was still snow on the ground, although it was constantly melting and refreezing, so the snow was uneven and hard. The hawk had the songbird pinned down in a
hollow, one talon holding the body prone, while it methodically ripped the feathers from the bird with its beak.
It was a slow task, and the hawk was deliberate and focused, intent on stripping the bird and then eating it. The removal of the songbird’s plumage reduced it to a generic piece of meat, and I wondered at the time if it was important for the hawk to obliterate the identity of the bird before consuming it, as though a bird that was recognizably a bird would be harder for another bird to devour.
Whatever the reason, the hawk carefully pulled all the feathers from the body of the songbird and then ripped open the chest cavity and dipped its beak inside. Holding the bird firmly with the one talon, the hawk started to pull out and eat the entrails. Blood dripped from its beak and stained its chest feathers and the snow on the ground beneath the little songbird.
Around this time, Hazel came downstairs to see what had become of me, and the hawk caught the movement of the dog through the glass and started. It grabbed the limp carcass of the songbird in its talons and lifted over the snow and the backyard, flapping up and over the fence, presumably to land in another, more private spot in which to finish eating.
Never, in my years of living in that house, and my years of living in previous houses, had anything like that happened before. It was strange on two counts—not only because it happened in a city yard, but because it happened right up against the glass of the French doors. It unnerved me, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that the carnage was for my benefit, that death was coming to my house.
And, of course, it did.
You died within that year, and Hazel died, and the winter after you died was an Ontario winter you actually would have liked—not like the previous two cold and snowy winters that you had had to endure when you moved back to Toronto—but a mild, practically snowless winter that pretty much ended in February when the crocuses and snowdrops started to bloom.
After I came back from Vancouver the second time, after cleaning out your apartment, I stood in the backyard one day, calling for the new dog to come in, and I looked down and noticed that there were still the feathers of that murdered bird on the patio by my feet, that there were still spots of blood staining the flagstones.
The day you died there was a full moon. It was a December moon, the moon with the highest trajectory across the sky because the midwinter night is of much longer duration than the day. The sun has a low arc at this point in the year, and the moon is visible overhead for a greater length of time.
After you died we walked out into the cold of the parking lot. The sun was setting red behind the mountains, and the moon had already risen. We drove, with your friends, to the pub where you used to go for a beer, and being in different cars, some of us got lost on the way and we all arrived at different times.
The pub was called the Mountain Shadow Inn, and it had the look of a Swiss chalet, lots of carved
wood inside, a balcony on the outside that hung over the entranceway. The eaves were decorated with gingerbread trim, some of it painted red and white. The building sat by itself on a patch of land just off the highway. There was nothing else around, no other buildings. The moonlight made the grass look silver as we walked across it.
Upstairs, where you used to like to go, there was a large-screen TV overtop of a fireplace, and lots of nooks and crannies to sit in.
We waited for you, all of us, and we turned towards every person who came up the staircase, full of anticipation. Because it was like you to be the last to arrive, overbooked and hurrying from one assignation to another, your briefcase stuffed with music and overflowing, your long legs practically running because you knew you were late and didn’t want to be.
We waited for you, because it was still too soon to break this habit, to fully accept that you had died, that we had left your body behind in the hospital, that we were doing something you liked without you.
All the moons in a year have names. October is the harvest moon. May is the planting moon. January is the wolf moon. The December moon is known, across most cultures, as the cold moon, or the long night moon.
I’m in the West again, in Banff, on my way to Vancouver. I’m on a book tour and today is a layover day. I’m at the arts centre, a place where I’ve been before, both as a resident and to teach. It’s a place I always encouraged you to visit, but you never were able to organize a break from your busy working life.
You would love it here, Martin. The mountains are all around, ringing the town, so that wherever you look there is bare rock and trees, sheer cliffs, and snow on the summits. The mountains are jagged lines against the sky and look particularly spectacular at dusk.
There’s a small mountain by the arts centre, a big hill really, but nice to wander up. Usually when I’m
here I walk up it every day, but right now there are three cougars living on it and it isn’t safe. There’s also been a grizzly spotted down by the river near town, so it’s not possible to walk there either. Apparently last week one of the cougars ate an elk on the lawn in front of the dining hall.
You always attached yourself romantically to anywhere you travelled, and came home wanting to move there. You travelled widely, but you only ever lived in three places—Toronto, Vancouver, and England. For all the opportunity you had to live abroad—an EU passport, the fact that music is its own language and you could have found work anywhere you went—you were never able to fulfill your dreams of living in Paris, or Prague, or Vienna.
I think we both thought of the place we had come from, Scarborough, as a place to leave. I moved there with Mum and Dad, straight off the boat from England, into a newly built suburban split-level on an unfenced, lawnless lot. Our parents put down grass, planted trees, made gardens. They planted a tree for each of us, although mine had to be pulled down quite early on as it had been positioned too close to the house and the roots had crawled under the foundation and interfered with the sewage system. Your tree is still there though, a huge red maple
standing sentinel in the northwest corner of the backyard.
When we were growing up, the rural bones of the place still showed through. There were fields and ponds, an old barn down the road, an inn from the 1800s up the road. The William Wallace Inn was a dilapidated brick house by the time we arrived and was used for various strange business enterprises. There was always a German shepherd on guard and barking hoarsely from an upstairs window.
Once the inn was a Plexiglas factory and we could go up there at night and collect bits of the discarded Plexiglas from the big piles of sawdust out back. Before the building was an inn it was undoubtedly a family home for wealthy people and they would have owned the surrounding land, which included the land our suburban house had been built on.
An old pear tree stood outside the big brick inn, and for years after the house had been pulled down, I would collect pears from this tree on my way home from school. The tree was eventually torn down to make way for a new housing development.
But this was the landscape of our childhood, these bits of the old countryside—ancient fruit trees, ponds and streams, thickets of sumac, and fields of long grass. The people in the houses on our street
used to dump their leaves and grass clippings at the edge of one of these fields, and periodically one boy or another would set them on fire.
We dug holes in this field to shelter in. For years we trod a path through it on the mile walk downhill to school. I remember the rabbit warrens in the banks, the worn dirt of the ground, smooth and slick in places as the leather in an old saddle.
We were always a mile from school, always the farthest away from both primary and secondary institutions. We walked together to school when we were young, sometimes trudging four miles a day if we were coming home for lunch. You started this walk earlier than me, because I was older and expected to look after you on the journey. You were probably walking that four miles from the age of six.
Across from the road to our primary school was a curving downhill trail called the cinder path, which led between the houses to the streets of the village that unwound a level below our suburban streets. This community was also a suburb, but had the name of a village. Our parents, having come from English villages, thought that because the suburb was called Guildwood Village it would resemble the villages they had known, and this made them decide to live there.
The cinder path led down to streets that, in turn,
led to a park on the edge of the bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario, the feature that defined our particular patch of the world. The park is one of the few things in our old neighbourhood that is as it ever was, with its small copses of sumac trees and open meadow before the sheer three-hundred-foot drop to the beach below. The boiler of a sunken ship used to be visible from the top of the cliffs. Swimming out to it was a popular thing to do when we were teenagers.
The park was always a place to party. I remember being there one night with a group of older kids, when I was about fifteen, and seeing juddering lights moving through the darkness towards us, realizing, too late, that it was a police car driving over the bumpy ground of the field.
The bluffs are still spectacular. It’s exciting to stand as close to the edge as possible. Being up so high means that you look down on the seam where the water meets the sky, not across to it, and the two appear to be one fabric, as if there is no divide between lake and sky.
The moon looks amazing when seen from the top of the bluffs, and it’s hard not to believe that this was the place you imagined when you were writing your musical, when you were planning the lovers’ duet taking place on a clifftop.
You and I went to the bluffs many times. I remember walking there with you once late at night, in the middle of the night, and we sat on the curb in front of the park entrance, smoking cigarettes and talking about our parents. We used to look back at our childhood as a mystery that needed to be solved, when really it was just that we were no longer children, that our childhood selves were unrecognizable to the people we had become.
I remember the brands of the cigarettes we smoked—Player’s Light for you, Craven “A” for me (because I liked the word
craven
). I remember that you sat on my right on the curb, as later you sat on my right at the performance of
South Pacific
in New York. I remember we were wearing jeans and T-shirts, that the night was warm and expansive, that there were no sounds except for our voices, that the sky was full of stars, and that we looked at the stars often, heads tilted back, or lying down on our backs in the grass.
You walked down to that park when you were staying with Mum and Dad during the course of chemo. You had bought yourself a cap to wear in case you lost your hair (although you never did lose your hair) and one of your friends took a picture of you, standing on the edge of the bluffs, wearing that cap. Your
face is skeletal in the photo, and when Mum wanted to include it in your memorial slideshow, I told her not to because it didn’t look like you. But really, it did look like you. It just looked like you dying.
I never thought we came from anywhere because the landscape we lived in as children changed all the time. Houses were built in the fields. Anything old was demolished. Ponds were filled in. Trees were chopped down. Most of the landmarks from our childhood have completely disappeared.
But now I see that where we came from is the space, not the individual objects. We came from the sprawl of the suburbs, where each back garden was half an acre and each driveway was big enough for a full game of street hockey. We came from the long horizon of lake, and the dark summer sky, full of stars. We came from wide streets, from fields with grasses arcing taller than our heads, from creeks that frothed and raced after a spring rain, from the train trestles we used to run across, from all the trees we used to climb.
And that is what we carried with us into adulthood, this desire for space, for the empty horizon. When you drove across Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto, you took photos of the journey. Most of those photos are of the landscape—fields and lakes,
open sky, train tracks, the long stretch of highway in front of your car. I know what the long view felt like to you, because it feels the same way to me. It feels like freedom. It feels like coming home.