Authors: Helen Humphreys
When I look back at your dying, I am still astonished by how quickly everything moved, how much of a scramble it was to adjust to the rapid and unrecoverable changes.
At the end of July you were diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, stage 4B, the cancer having metastasized into your liver. Your symptoms prior to this had been a backache and some acid reflux when eating. The first doctor you went to see prescribed muscle relaxants for you, never thinking to send you for a CAT scan because you were so healthy. By the time you went to see the second doctor, everyone had convinced you that you probably had an ulcer, since you had had one when you were a child and your
stomach still sometimes bothered you when you ate.
At the beginning of September you started chemo, in hopes it would shrink the tumour on the pancreas and take away some of the pain, and extend your life by a few months. Your initial diagnosis had been death in three to six months, but there was a possibility that you could survive a year or two.
At the end of September you went into hospital in Toronto for a weekend to treat a bowel blockage. You were dosed with morphine to unclench the bowel, and rehydrated because you kept refusing to drink any water and were always suffering from dehydration.
At the end of October, when you had a bit of a reprieve and weren’t feeling quite so ill, we went to New York for a few days.
At the beginning of November, after the first round of chemo had ended, you moved back to Vancouver. On November twenty-second you went into hospital. On December third you died. On December tenth you were buried.
At each stage you struggled to keep up with the changes the disease was causing, and we struggled to keep up with you. The ground was always slippery. Sometimes things would remain the same for a few days, but then they shifted again, and again, and the landscape became completely unfamiliar. You said to
me once that the cancer felt like a wild animal was eating you from the inside.
The doctors who treated you also used metaphors to describe what was happening, and it made me realize that they had fashioned these metaphors to avoid having to say anything directly, probably to avoid feeling their patients’ raw pain. A metaphor is once removed from the experience. It’s safer. It’s a story, an image, something to focus on to avoid thinking about what it really means.
The doctor who gave you the initial diagnosis, after the first CAT scan, said, “The horse is already out of the barn.” You said,
What exactly does that mean?
and he just repeated the phrase to you, instead of having the courage to say, “You’re dying. There is no hope. You probably only have a few months. You can do chemo to reduce the symptoms, but it will not change the prognosis.” He did say, “You should probably get your affairs in order.”
The pain doctor at the hospital where you went at the end of September said that there was a big difference between dying when elderly and dying in the middle of life. When you’re old there is a natural winnowing of life in preparation for the end, a slowing down. “But when you die in the middle of life,” she said, “it’s like a train going off the track at full speed. You don’t know how to slow down.”
The ICU doctor at the hospital where you died had a metaphor that I could tell he was very proud of, a uniquely Canadian metaphor. Sitting on the edge of the conference table where he had gathered us to talk about your condition, he mimed a canoe stroke.
“We’re all in the canoe together,” he said at the beginning, “and we’re holding our own against the current, even though we’re fighting our way upstream.”
At the end he said, “The current’s just too strong. We need to think about letting him go.”
After you were dead, from the corridor I saw the doctor through his office window, miming the canoe stroke for another rudderless family.
When you were in hospital for the first time, at the end of September, you were happy. The pain you’d been feeling from the bowel blockage was eased by the morphine. Your dehydration was cured with a fluid drip. You had a private room with a whole wall of windows and your own bathroom.
I could live in here
, you said when I came to visit. I knew what you meant, that all you’d ever really wanted was a small, clean, bright, orderly space in which to create.
The hospital was perched on the edge of a valley and the windows overlooked the tops of the trees and the wide swath of green that continued over to the opposite ridge. We couldn’t see the river at the bottom of the valley from the windows, but I knew
that it was there because we’d played in that place when we were children. The river was where we had swum and caught fish, where your Queen’s Jubilee towel got swept away during the flooding after a rainstorm.
You kept the blinds fully open, night and day, and you awoke each morning at dawn, and for each of the two days that you were in that hospital, you wrote a poem about the sun coming up.
You had not written poems before, had not undertaken any art form aside from composing for and playing the piano. But there was no piano for you to play at the hospital, and I think that creativity was a force in you that had to be satisfied, and that while you were lying on your back in a hospital bed, writing a poem about the dawn was something manageable.
I am no different. I once went to an arts colony for a month to finish a novel and abandoned the novel the second day I was there. The live-in studio I had been given, in the middle of the woods, had a piano in it because the space was meant for composers as well as writers.
All around me, in all the other cabins spread out over the 450 acres of the arts colony, artists were happily industrious. At dinner people were abuzz with their own genius and productivity. There were
endless stories of endless brilliant ideas and I was soon sick of all of them.
I didn’t do any writing, but I was seized by a sort of rogue creativity, the spirit of the place perhaps, where artists had been coming to paint and sculpt and compose for a hundred and fifty years. I didn’t write, but I started to play the piano in my studio, even though I hadn’t played since I was seven years old. I made up short, mournful songs and called my friends on my cell phone when I knew they wouldn’t be home so I could record these on their voice-mail. I didn’t think about my characters, but every day I sketched the old stone wall outside my studio, noting the slightest changes in the weight and shape of the new-fallen snow.
I become obsessed with the stone walls that were scattered like broken, human music across the estate, and spent hours following their weave through the snowy woods. They were made from clearing the fields, were used to mark boundaries. They were built using large rocks, often glacial till, for the base. The size of the stones got progressively smaller as the wall got higher. All the walls were thigh height because that is as high as a man can lift a stone without strain, without having to raise his hands above his heart.
Spring never came at the arts colony. The snow continued to fall. Deer came out of the heavy snow of the woods to walk on the main road and were hit regularly by the cars that travelled the slick winter distance between our town and the next.
For a while I stopped going to dinner in the main house because the other artists were spooked that I had given up writing my novel. They were afraid it was catching. I hoarded the lunch food and for a number of days dined only on fruit and cookies and carrot sticks.
At the time I didn’t know what to say about any of this. Giving up my novel was mysterious and terrifying and yet there was a freedom to it that I don’t remember ever having had before. I would lie awake at nights in the studio, the snow unfurling against the window by my bed—the woods lit up like an X-ray—and I would listen to the hammering of the sculptor who was in the studio next to mine and liked to work late. The sound was rhythmical, each rise and fall of his arm like the rise and fall of my own breath. The noise filled the night, fitting it so perfectly that I couldn’t imagine a better answer to the stars or the owl or the moving shadows of the deer out among the snowy trees.
On one of my last days at the colony I went to
help another sculptor with her piece. I had started to lend myself out to the artists who were still engaged with their work. We were in her studio, a replicated Italian church. I was holding the sides of her sculpture together so she could close it with wire thread. The room was bright with morning as I stood there, pressing my hands against the metal in the exact position of prayer, and she passed the needle through one series of holes and out another, the wire stitches like sutures.
And in this way she mended me. In this way, I was mended.
Just because I was good at writing, and you were good at the piano, didn’t mean that we were immune to the other arts. It was creativity in general that raged in us, and although we found a place to put it, a place where we could answer it best, I think that whatever our circumstances we would have found a way to express that creativity, and that was the real gift. That is what made us and kept us free.
Your first poem about the dawn was about light and movement, about the contrast between the artificial light of the hospital room and the natural light of the world outside the window. Some of the language was formal, but there were places where you sounded exactly like yourself, where your voice rang through.
I felt sorry for the dawn. It is so beautiful, / fragile, but yet badly respected by the day
, you wrote.
The weather on the second morning was stormier, and you talked about the grey clouds and the turbulent sky. You wrote,
The grey and white colours are evenly dispersed. / Today we are happy with the black and white movie
.
Creativity leaves a mark. It leaves words, music, for those of us who have stayed behind after you’ve gone. I can listen to your CDs in my car and the essence of you is suddenly there with me as I speed along the highway towards Toronto, or meander up the country roads to my cottage.
The fact that you spent those two days at the end of September when you were in hospital writing poetry fills me with admiration for you, and with optimism. It is not that the creative urge transcends death, but it is something to shore up against it, and it keeps its meaning, right to the end, to the very last breath. Art is always about the possible, is its own form of hope.
Somewhere a door has opened and somebody has / begun their day
.
I have been to so many of your concerts over the years, Martin, that I can no longer list or remember them. I used to have a file folder where I kept the various programs and ticket stubs, but at a certain point I gave up adding to it. Now, of course, since you’ve died, and since you kept everything, I have access to all of this information again.
One of the concerts I enjoyed most was at the National Physical Laboratories in England. A group of scientists had organized a lunchtime series at their workplace. They invited various musicians to come and play for them in a lecture hall cum concert hall. The acoustics were good, and I remember sitting up near the back of the rise of seats and watching the
scientists in their white lab coats, quietly eating their sandwiches and listening.
Afterwards we sat outside on a bench, having a cigarette as the scientists scurried back and forth between the buildings. You must have been living in England then, and I was over for a visit. I don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. There was a lot of overlap to our lives in those days. We were made of each other then.
The National Physical Laboratories don’t seem to have concerts any more. Maybe they don’t feel the need to continue to celebrate the connection between music and science. Maybe they are too busy doing what they do, as the U.K.’s national measurement institute, which is to apply “the most accurate measurement standards” to science and technology.
The river that was at the base of the valley you could see from your hospital window at the end of September was not dissimilar to the river at my cottage, although I never thought this before you were dying. But it makes sense that I chose to own a piece of land that echoed a place where we had spent time as children, where we had felt wild and free.
After you died I spent a lot of time at the cottage. I barely had any energy to move, but I could sit by the river and watch it.
The river wraps around the land, like two bodies spooning in bed or the symbols for yin and yang, one in motion, one still. When the river is low, the land seems predominant—you stand on the land and
look at the river; the land is safety, high ground, the stable, constant world. But when the river is high, the land seems fragile, about to be washed away, the fast-forward motion of the water suddenly seems dangerous, and it feels as if the land will not protect you any longer. But the river is always allied with the land that borders it. One creates the other, and the lesson of the river is to learn when to be the river, and when to be the land—when to push forward, and when to remain perfectly still.
The river makes no sound when it is fully flooded. It has filled its voice. The surface is dark, and the current moves the water forward in one long, undulating ribbon. But when the river is low, it is all noise and gurgle, rocks exposed, a small waterfall that bubbles and churns. The water rattles with its own emptiness.
Some people can stand beside a rushing river and feel restless, feel that the relentless force of the water wants to move them into action. But when I stand beside the river, I am grateful for the forward surge of the water. It allows me to remain motionless because the water is doing the moving for me.
Shortly after you were diagnosed, you came with your girlfriend to the cottage for the weekend. You sat in a chair on the grass in front of the river, but
you didn’t see it. You were so distracted by the fact of your cancer, and by your task that weekend of having to phone your various employers to let them know that you were terminal. These conversations were hard ones to have and so you punctuated them with walks up the road and cups of herbal tea.
The truth is that if you hadn’t been about to die, you still might not have noticed the river. You were often restless and distracted. Not so much when we were young, but increasingly so as you got older and busier. It was hard for you to be where you were, except when you were working, when you were playing the piano.
Dying brought you back to the present, although not entirely. You were still distracted, but you were also capable of existing in the place where you were situated.
You were never again at the cottage, and I wish that day that you had been able to relinquish enough fear and control to watch the river, to let it carry your burdens away.