Authors: Helen Humphreys
My ex-partner, Mary Louise, and I had shared our old dog, Hazel, and after Hazel died, we decided to get new puppies from the same litter. The idea was that we could look after each other’s dogs when one of us had to go away. Because Mary Louise was on sabbatical with her partner in Edinburgh until the summer, we decided that I would pick up the two Vizsla puppies from the breeder at the beginning of May and care for them both until she got back in July. Before that, Mary Louise sent me a plane ticket to come and visit her in Edinburgh for her fiftieth birthday in February. I went, but I had just finished clearing out your apartment in Vancouver and I was so tired and weighed down with grief that I could
barely drag myself along behind her as she cheerfully marched up and down the hilly Edinburgh streets, trying to walk me back to life.
You and I had always sent each other postcards when we were away, so I sent you some from Edinburgh, picking out images that I knew you would like, telling you things I thought you’d find interesting or funny. I addressed them to you and wrote
Vancouver
as the address and dropped them into the letterboxes unstamped. I didn’t think the dead required postage.
I picked up the puppies the first weekend of May. I had had an old dog for so long that their energy was alarming, and even more difficult was the fact that there were two of them. Our carefully considered plan seemed, initially, to have been a mistake.
Two eight-week-old puppies were almost impossible to control. I had no free time at all, couldn’t leave the house, could barely even leave the room to shower or eat. I lived on the couch for weeks, sleeping there at night, sitting there with the puppies in the day. What was surprising was how wild they were, and also how desperately they tried to bond with me. They sensed, or knew, how vulnerable they were, that they needed protection, and they attached themselves to me with a vengeance. One or the other
of them always liked to lie on me, her heart positioned directly above mine so that our hearts were beating together.
The dogs are compelled towards one another. I can’t say that they love each other, because sometimes they fight with intent; they have such different personalities that they aren’t really compatible. But they’re siblings and that bond seems to trump all their differences.
I didn’t know how I would survive the puppies, just as I didn’t know how I would survive your death, and in a weird way they were similar experiences, had a similar relentlessness to them.
But now, as I write this, I have just the one dog to look after, Charlotte. She’s a year and a half now, calmer, easier to tire out. She’s sleeping on the rug after a morning spent racing through the fields with her sister. We walked through the grounds of an old estate by the lake and there’s a big apple tree there with the most perfect apples, early apples, ready now in the middle of August. I picked one and ate it as I ambled after the dogs through the fields and the woods. They slept in the car on the way home. On the way out they had wrestled and fought over a plastic bag they found under the seat, and stuck their heads out the window so the wind blew their
lips back and their exposed teeth looked both fierce and comical.
I’m not sure you would like the dogs. You always preferred cats. When I was cleaning out your apartment I found a little framed photo of our childhood cat, Sammy, who was run over by a car outside our house when he was about five. He was magnificent, could stand on his hind legs and rattle doorknobs with his paws, signalling that he wanted out. He had thick glossy black fur and had been found by Cathy when he was young. He was stuck up a tree and she coaxed him down and brought him home draped around her neck like a scarf.
You had a succession of cats in your life, as I’ve had a succession of dogs. You liked the feline grace of cats. I like the loyalty of dogs, and their crazy exuberance.
I was thinking this morning of all the pets we had when we were children. The different cats who were rescued from dire situations. The dogs with their various neuroses—one afraid to walk on linoleum, one afraid of rubber boots. The seemingly endless parade of fish and turtles and hamsters. The guinea pig who was in love with the rabbit and would try to hop like him around the yard. All of them, eventually, buried at the bottom of the garden in our parents’ house in the Toronto suburbs.
When Mum and Dad lived in England, they bred Saint Bernards. I was a toddler when their female dog had her first litter of puppies, and I staggered around the garden at Claygate with the puppies tugging on my clothes or knocking me over. I can vaguely remember the puppies trying to grab my toys through the bars of the playpen, and so I had to mound the toys in the middle of the pen and sit with my arms around them, guarding them, and not being able to play with them at all, as the puppies pushed their heads through the wooden slats.
When we immigrated to Canada, we brought the mother dog, Lisa, with us on the boat. She was too big to go into the shipboard kennels, so the crew kept her up on their deck, where she roamed freely and was fed table scraps.
I loved Lisa, and I think, on some level, I considered myself to be one of her puppies. When we moved into our house in Toronto, she would sleep in the living room by the fireplace, and when I woke in the mornings I would go downstairs and lie up against her belly. I remember that I fitted perfectly between her two sets of paws.
You were just a baby then, so you wouldn’t remember any of this. Although maybe you would remember the leather harness that Lisa wore in the winters, and
how she would pull us on a wooden sled. She was a big dog—a hundred and fifty pounds—as big as an adult, and that is what I always considered her to be.
Maybe you liked cats because they hung around the piano when you played, kept you company. A cat could sit on the stack of piano music on top of the baby grand in our living room—Mum’s piano, her wedding present from her parents that she had shipped over from England when we moved. (The piano that she was always going to leave to you when she died, but which now, of course, she can’t.) A cat could sit on the piano and swish her tail to the music, or sometimes step down and delicately walk across the keys.
I think of you playing the piano throughout our childhood, often for eight hours a day. I can still see your thin straight back, your long, dark curly hair, and the arch of your hands over the keys. I hear so many pieces now—on the radio, or through the open windows of city houses—that I recognize from your playing them, although I often have no idea what they are called or who composed them.
And I think that you weren’t afraid to die (even though, of course, you didn’t want to) because you had spent all those years turning away from a room full of people, turning your body and best attention to the page of notes in front of you. There’s something about
that particular loneliness that is similar to the loneliness of dying, of leaving a life full of people behind.
Today I went up to fertilize the fruit trees at my cottage, where I’m trying to grow a small orchard. It was raining, which was good because it’s been such a dry summer this year, a dry summer following a bitterly cold winter that meant my trees didn’t produce any fruit in the spring.
It rained and I mixed the fertilizer with river water and soaked the roots of the trees. The dog ran after frogs, ate something disgusting under a fir tree. I tried to keep an eye on her because sometimes she squeezes under the fence and ends up trotting down the main road. But I guess I let my attention wander because I suddenly heard a sound like thunder and I looked up to see a herd of horses in the field over the river, galloping full tilt, and at the front of the herd was the dog, running like stink. She reached the river first, threw herself in, and swam back to my side, leaving the horses snorting and stamping on the opposite shore.
I am constantly surprised by the moment I’m in.
On the way home I stopped to get some food at the grocery store, and when I came out, I found a small black, plastic horse lying on the sidewalk in front of the store.
When I came with you to chemo in Toronto, that fall after you were diagnosed, I would often drive back to Kingston the same day because of commitments I couldn’t shake or alter. You would always give me two of your CDs to listen to on the way home, and I would play them non-stop that week, until I drove back to see you again.
One week, when I was driving home listening to an Oscar Peterson CD you’d lent me, I was about to merge onto the highway when I saw a big green grasshopper crawling up my windshield. It crawled onto the roof of the car, where I could no longer see it. If I got onto the highway, I knew it would be blown off, if it hadn’t been blown off already, so I pulled over quickly. I was near the entrance to a park we used to visit when we were young. We rode our bikes there to swim in the creek that flowed out to Lake Ontario. Once, in a rainstorm, when the creek waters were high, your red Queen’s Jubilee towel that Granny had sent you from England was swept away. That time too, one of our friends tried to swim across the creek and was rushed downstream in a swirl of white water. He snagged on a tree root in the bank and managed to climb out, a good half mile from where he’d started.
I drove down the hill to the creek and I got out
of the car. The grasshopper was still on the roof. I picked it off and put it carefully down in the grass, then I drove back up the hill and onto the highway. When I got home I looked up “grasshopper” and found that it was a symbol of the musician. I took that as a good omen that you would be taken care of by a benign universe. I was desperate for omens.
I told you that story when you came to my house for Thanksgiving. You listened carefully, not moving. When you were listening carefully you never moved a muscle. You listened carefully and you said,
You saved me
.
Your response made me realize how irrefutable birth order was. I would always be your older sister, and it would always be my job to protect you—your job to believe that I could. When I got home from the cottage today I looked up the symbolism of the horse. In some cultures, the horse is seen as a mediator between heaven and earth, between the dead and the living.
You would have liked your memorial. It was held at the dance studio in Toronto where you used to play for ballet classes. You spent years playing for such classes, both in Toronto and in Vancouver, but this studio was the one where you spent the most time, where you had the longest history. The owner of the studio was a close friend of yours.
White curtains had been hung at the back of the stage area. There was a podium and a piano. Across the front of the room was a long trestle table filled with food. Everyone had brought something. There was wine and mineral water. Your CDs of Chopin and Janécek had been reissued and were for sale. There was a slideshow projected onto a blank wall,
photos of you as a child and as a man. It was hard not to stand in front of the images as they flickered past, wanting to see you again and again.
So many people came. It would have made you happy to see how many loved you and wanted to remember you. Even our childhood neighbours came, those children we used to build forts with and skate with on the pond opposite our house. Everyone looked remarkably the same, as though forty-odd years were nothing at all.
Your ex-students played the piano, one—who has become a concert pianist herself—so brilliantly that it made everyone forget, for an instant, that you were dead. A little ballet student danced for you. She was only about six years old, but had wanted to do something in memory of you. She called you
Mr. Martin
. You were her first death, and her dance was sweet and sad, a little halting in parts where she forgot her footing or became overwhelmed for a moment by the crowd.
We all said something short. No one wanted to start crying in the middle of a speech. Your first employer, from another ballet studio, talked about how you’d applied for the job when you were fourteen and she’d doubted that you were old enough for the work, but you convinced her otherwise, and she was not sorry
she’d hired you. (We worked young, remember? We had paper routes from the age of ten, and part-time jobs from fourteen.) You wouldn’t like the fact that the church that housed that ballet school is now being turned into condos. I drove past it just last week and the hoarding was up all around the building.
Some people couldn’t talk. Your friend Ward stood at the back of the room in his suit, tears running down his face. You and he looked the most alike, remained looking like your younger selves, with your masses of curly hair. You wouldn’t have wanted Ward to be so sad, but I think it would have touched you to see how hard he cried.
I talked about how I’d been looking through your address book after you died, trying to find the numbers for people who needed calling and I came across an entry under
S
for
Steve. Nice guy on flight from L.A. who’s going through a hard time
. It struck me how
you
that was, to strike up a conversation with a stranger and take his number. And that you would have called Steve at some point, maybe late at night, after work, to check in and see how he was doing. Because you genuinely cared about people—strangers as well as friends. And this is what I said, that the empathy that made you such a brilliant musician also made you an extraordinary human being.
Even that last phone conversation we had, as you were being wheeled into the operating theatre at the hospital, was as much about me as it was about you.
I remember that conversation so clearly because when the phone rang, I was just pulling up in front of my house in Kingston. I had already had the call early that morning that you’d been admitted to hospital, because the cancer in your abdomen had eaten through your intestine and ruptured your bowel. I had already booked my flight to get out to Vancouver the following day. As I parked my car outside my house, the surgeon told me you needed an emergency operation. I told her to pass along the message that I’d be there tomorrow, and to tell you I loved you, and she asked if I wanted to talk with you. At the time I thought this was a generous thing for her to do, to get a portable phone and patch us through, and it surprised me—but now I can see they were worried you would die on the operating table.
That conversation was full of logistics, as almost all of our conversations were. We were always trying to figure out how to get what we wanted in motion. I needed to find out what you wished me to do about your situation. You needed to say how you wanted things handled. We were both afraid you would die, although neither one of us mentioned death. But I
kept saying “Goodbye” when I meant to say “See you tomorrow.” And you said,
Make sure you have a good life
.
Your empathy was so acute that you would enter a room full of people and immediately be attracted to the most needy, the one with the highest emotional temperature. And so your own needs were often neglected in favour of pleasing others. But I’m glad you said those words to me, almost the last words you spoke, because I think about them all the time. I
am
trying to have a good life, although I’m not always sure how to go about this.
When you were dying, after we’d had the machines unhooked and the breath was struggling out of you, I put my forehead against yours because I thought that I could absorb the last bit of life from you and take you in through my skin, that in that moment, and going forward, you could continue to live through me. But instead what happened was that a part of me went with you, swift and unrecoverable.
This past week I was canoeing in Algonquin Park, something I do every summer, something I love to do. It was a mixed trip, some rain and a great deal of wind in the first part of the week, and then a perfect, sunny day near the end. We saw a moose and heard the wolves howling; we lay out on a rock by the water and watched the first stars spark in the August night sky.
On the way back, over the last portage, Charlotte cut her paw. At first it seemed like nothing, and when I put her in the car at the access point, after the gear had been loaded in and the canoe strapped to the car roof, I didn’t give it another thought. She was exhausted from living outdoors all week and slept soundly in the back seat. I was driving out of the park, listening to politician Jack Layton’s funeral on the radio. He died of cancer too, and it was difficult not to think of you when he went so quickly. You were the first person I wanted to call after he died, because you liked him and had voted for his party. I was listening to the funeral, a state funeral because he died in office as the leader of the official opposition, something else you didn’t live to see but would have appreciated. I was listening to the funeral and driving out of the park and I looked back to see how the dog was doing and she was sitting in a pool of blood.
I drove to the Freshmart in the tiny town of Whitney, because I thought I could buy something there to bandage Charlotte’s paw. Inside the Freshmart I asked the woman in the produce department if she knew of a vet nearby. She said the cashier had a sister who was a vet. The cashier called her sister, who worked at a practice an hour away, and
the sister phoned the vet on call for me and I made an arrangement to meet him at the clinic.
The dog had to have an emergency operation because her paw had been cut so deeply she’d severed a vein. Because there was no vet tech, I had to help with the sedation, holding Charlotte’s head up when she was unconscious so the vet could put a tube down her throat for oxygen, holding the mask over her face.
She tried to fight the sedation, as you had tried to fight yours, twitching and shaking her head to clear the confusion. The vet had to use more than the normal amount of anesthetic. “She’s a fighter,” he said. “Look how she’s fighting me every step of the way.”
I wept over the prone body of the dog, her tongue hanging out of her mouth, her head lying in a puddle of drool. I had to step out of the room when the vet put the ten stitches in her paw. She wasn’t in danger of dying, but I felt that she would die, and this, I think, is the legacy of your death, is part of how it lives on in me—that I will be, and am, brought to my knees any time something bad happens to a person or a creature that I love. I can’t stop myself from fearing the worst, because the worst has happened.