If you like the writing, check out Dear Bill and One Long Journey: Deep roots in Ontario, now available at Amazon.ca.
Dear Bill is a collection of real love letters found after the death of my parents. They shed some light on late teenage life in Toronto in the early 1950’s, which was really early adult life back then. It turned out that Mom wrote letters to Dad nearly every day that she was separated from him in 1952, when he left Toronto to seek work in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. We don’t have any of Dad’s letters back to her; she didn’t save them. However, making the inferences is half the fun. With over 60 photos and plenty of historical information, Dear Bill is a journey back to a time few people alive still remember.
Not going to lie – One Long Journey: Deep roots in Ontario will probably only interest family members and anyone attached to the Long family who’s researching the family’s origins in Canada. It traces our branch of the Longs on both my father’s maternal and paternal side back to the ship that arrived in Pennsylvania in 1733 with the Long family on board, and to the soldier who arrived in New France in the 1670’s who bore the name Larocque (sort of)*, and whose descendants eventually included my paternal grandmother.
Waking each morning to a mixture of sadness, guilt, and a strange sense of being in limbo, similar to the feeling I had last year when Dad was dying. Through that emotional miasma, humour rises to the surface, the humour that’s possibly the greatest gift my parents bestowed. I text my sister. “Mom never could keep anything short and sweet. It always had to be a long, drawn-out story.” She texts back laughing emojis.
Mom went into the hospital over four weeks ago now. She sounded confused and was slurring her words. We thought she was having a stroke. She wasn’t, as it turned out. What she had was a massive staphylococcus infection that had targeted her spine. An MRI revealed multiple abscesses. The infection had quite possibly raged in her body for months. The doctor said staph infections often go undetected. She had complained of back pain the week before, but said she had pulled a muscle.
The infection was causing confusion, and as it turned out, it was going to get far worse.
All relationships have some level of complexity, but I’m fairly certain the mother/daughter relationship is up there in the top three. My mother and I couldn’t be more different. She likes soap operas, vacations to casinos, and a Scotch at five in the evening. She never liked travelling alone, dropped out of school in grade eleven, married her high school sweetheart when she was eighteen, and stayed in the same Toronto neighbourhood all her life.
I like science fiction, hitch-hiking, and beer. I loathe casinos. I travelled alone to the U.K., Australia, Hawaii, and all over the continental U.S. and Canada. I had lots of boyfriends. I eventually got a Master’s degree and married late. I’ve lived in a log cabin in the northern wilderness and in various cities.
I didn’t understand her, and she feared constantly for my safety.
We always had a rocky relationship. Despite what I now know were her best efforts, our interactions usually left me feeling like I had done or said something wrong. I swear, if aliens had swooped down from the sky and chopped off a hunk of my hair for a souvenir, she would have told me that if I’d tied it up like she told me to, it wouldn’t have happened. My mom was a great one for “I told you so”. Despite all the things she told me so about, she had a lot of difficulty talking about the things that really mattered to me, and had no language for emotions.
When I was nine or ten, a friend secreted me away in her room with one of her father’s medical books, and told me in a hushed and serious tone that we’d start bleeding soon, “from our front parts”. It sounded outrageous to me. We bleed from our vaginas? No way! I was sure my friend was making it up. I asked Mom. She seemed offended and annoyed. “Well, I was hoping to have that conversation with you myself, when the time came!!” The following conversation was tense, uncomfortable, and left me with so many questions. We didn’t have the internet back then. She bought a book for my sister and me. “Your Changing Body”. And that was that.
After I left home to go to university, she sent me newspaper articles that she thought “might interest me” and sometimes comics. She once sent me a “Cathy” comic from the daily newspaper. It followed the day-to-day anxieties of a young, single, working woman – Cathy – and it was rarely funny to me. In the comic my Mom sent me, Cathy’s mother was saying, to Cathy’s mortification, “If you rinse your panties each night, those little stains will wash out more easily.” See what I mean? Not funny. The fact that my mother chose to send me that one felt like a message. She must have seen my laundry during a visit home, and my underwear just wasn’t clean enough I guess.
The underwear in the picture above is clean, thank goodness. Because it took an unplanned journey.
The first day I visited her in the hospital, she was raving incessantly about the “wrong medication”. I tried to get her to eat. She kept pushing the food away. “It’s the wrong medication! Why won’t anyone listen to me?!!” She was angry, glaring at me, her lips drawn into a tight, thin line, her icy blue eyes nearly vibrating with the effort of that furious stare. I was shocked to feel childhood trauma re-surface. This was a look I knew well, but I hadn’t seen it in a very long time. I’d almost forgotten it. Almost. It didn’t have the power to frighten me anymore, even though I half expected her to reach out and smack me, but it upset me nonetheless.
The doctor told us the infection had caused delirium, that this was quite common, especially in the elderly. Those nightly shots of Scotch hadn’t helped matters. She’d become septic, and the infection was using up the oxygen in the blood. The brain, starved for oxygen, was like a canoe bobbing about in a stormy harbour. Whatever it ran into, it jammed up against for a while. She’d fixate on something, and just keep repeating herself over and over and over, for hours. Trying to respond or break the obsessive thought pattern was impossible. “Don’t interrupt me!” she’d snap. And she’d continue with the story she’d told us fifty times already, about how she’d finally figured out that it was the wrong medication. The harder we tried to change the subject, the louder she got with her repetitions. She always had been stubborn, and now that obstinate side of her seemed magnified out of all proportion.
Mom’s condo has a rule that you can’t hang laundry on the balcony to dry. I guess draping shower towels over chairs doesn’t count, because she did that often enough, but I had a little elasticized camping clothesline and wanted to string it up and hang a couple of shirts on it one day. Nope. Not allowed. The rule seemed stupid to me, one of those snobby rules that forces people to waste energy using electric dryers.
The next time I went in to see her, she’d forgotten about the “wrong medication”, but had a new story about being left in an uncomfortable position for half the night and no nurses would come. Well, that one I could believe. She wasn’t comfortable. She was in a lot of pain, and maybe it wasn’t half the night, maybe it was only half an hour, but discomfort distorts time. Two physio specialists came in to get her moving. As sick as she was, not moving for long periods of time would result in eventual immobility and longer rehab. She screamed with pain as they helped her to move her body. I wanted to tell them to just leave her alone, that she wasn’t ready yet. But I’ve been conditioned to think doctors know what they’re doing. I let it happen. For the next two days, all she could repeat over and over and over again was how no one had told her she would be having physio (never mind that she wouldn’t have understood or remembered if they had told her) and how could they expect someone in her condition, after being left on the floor all night, (now it was the floor) to do physio, and how could her own daughters have let them do that to her, and on, and on. This wasn’t conversation directed at me. These words were spoken to the air in front of her, with a glazed look in her eyes.
Me, with a spoonful of soup. “Mom, can you eat a bit? You need to eat something.”
“And her own mother was on the floor, her own mother, and no one is listening.”
“Let’s try some soup, Mom. It’s minestrone, I think. You like minestrone.”
“And you’d think, you’d think that in a hospital – hospital- hospital – you’d think that in a hospital, someone would tell you what’s going on.”
“Mom, we understand. It was hard. But you did it. You did fine. Here, how about some juice. Put this straw between your lips.”
“And her own mother was on the floor. On the floor. All night.”
And so it would go, setting her lips in a tight line, refusing the food, insistent on telling this endless story that kept growing more horrible with each iteration. She constantly asked for ice cold water. We gave it to her.
The lack of nutrition was making the delirium worse. A CAT Scan revealed no Alzheimer’s, no dementia, and an eventual MRI revealed the infection had not targeted the brain – there were no abscesses there. I brought in fudge, ice cream, things she loved to eat. I did get a little fudge in her the first day I brought it in, but not the next. Ditto with the ice cream, but I kept trying.
My sister did the next day’s visit, giving me a much-needed break to do some cleaning and grocery shopping. I prefer to wash items nightly by hand and just leave them to dry until morning. I don’t have enough for a load anyway. I strung my little clothesline low on the balcony, so no one could see it from the street, pegged my underwear to it, and went to bed.
The following day, she had physio again. This time, there was no screaming. She seemed better physically, but she was talking incessantly, nonsense about the royal family mostly. She was drinking lots, but retaining urine. They were talking about inserting a catheter, fearing a urinary tract infection on top of the staph infection. They manipulated her into the wheelchair and once again I walked beside her as she wheeled herself down the hallway. She refused to wheel herself back.
“You can’t make me,” she said, and folded her hands in her lap primly.
“No, Mom, I can’t make you. No one can make you. You have to do it to stay mobile. If you don’t do this, you might not be able to move when you leave the hospital.”
She glared at me. “Three words!” she snapped.
(Huh?) “What does that mean? C’mon, get wheelin’!”
“Three words!”
“Let’s see you make it back to the room, and I’ll get you some ice cream.”
“You already know I can so I don’t have to.”
I looked around. A nurse she had shown a liking for was standing a few metres away. “Well, I know you can, but Johnny doesn’t know you can. He needs to see you do it.”
Johnny helpfully picked up on this and called out cheerfully, “That’s right, Lois, I need to see you do it.”
She sighed heavily, put her hands back on the wheels and wheeled herself back to the room. “Three words,” she growled again.
I texted my sister. She keeps saying “three words”. My sister texted back that she’d been saying that the day before, too. When we got inside the room, I knelt down in front of her. “Mom, what are the three words?”
“You know!”
“No, I don’t. What are they? What are the three words?”
A pause, and then, “You’re a genius!!”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if butterflies had shot out of her mouth. It certainly wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “I’m a genius?”
“It said so! In the paper!! Your name was in the paper. In the headlines. The Queen said so!!!! Don’t you read the paper?!!!
Oooookay. We were in Looneyville again. And so it went. Up and down. Sometimes lucid. More times not. Sometimes angry, really angry, especially at my sister when she visited, when she couldn’t do things Mom was demanding, impossible things to do in a hospital. Most times just ranting about nonsense. The doctor said it could take eight weeks to clear a staph infection, and the mental state might lag behind the physical one in improvement. Great. And all of this through paper masks and face shields and fogging up glasses. When it got to the point where she didn’t know us, we weren’t sure if it was because she couldn’t see our faces clearly.
When I left the hospital that day, the sky was dark to the northwest. I hurried to the subway station. By the time I got to my stop, the rain was torrential, with wind bending the tree tops. I purchased an umbrella in a little shop in the station, and headed down to the bus platform. Her condo is on the twenty-first floor. I remembered the underpants I’d hung out to dry. Well, they wouldn’t be dry now. In fact, they weren’t even there anymore. Gone with the wind. Probably halfway to Lake Ontario. I finally saw the wisdom in not hanging clothes to dry on the balcony. When the wind picks up, it buffets around the little semi-enclosed space and nothing that isn’t tied down or weighs more than ten kilos is safe. I hated to say it, but mother had been right.
On the off chance that the darn things were lying on the ground below, I went out for a quick stroll in the now barely spitting rain. I glanced up into the trees, just in case. No sign of them. I ran into one of Mom’s neighbours, Kathy. I told her the story. She laughed. “Maybe they’re in a tree,” she said, looking up.
“I’ve been looking,” I said. “Maybe they landed on someone else’s balcony.” We both chuckled at that possibility.
The next day was a Saturday. Hospitals, to my surprise, seem to operate as Monday to Friday entities. All regular staff and all services disappear on weekends and holidays. No physio over the weekend. No regular attending physician, just one on-call. No medical imaging, no tests. Without the physio, Mom could do nothing but lie there. She was pretty unresponsive that day, which was actually a relief from the incessant talking, ninety percent of which was repetitive, nonsensical babble. She did come to at one point, and told me that she had travelled back in time, to the beginning of the world, where people had no gender, and all their emotions. It was a rainbow world, apparently. I say she told me, but she really told the air in front of her. I’m not sure she knew who I was, or even that I was there. Then she muttered something about the royal family and drifted off again.
She still wouldn’t eat.
The nurses kept telling us every day that she’d “eaten a little a breakfast” but I wasn’t sure. They don’t spend much time trying to feed a patient, even an elderly and incapacitated one. They’re chronically short-staffed, and all have little computer carts they sit at in the hallway, seemingly having endless online reporting of some kind to do. If the patient refuses food, they try for a few minutes, then give up and leave the food there. My Mom’s fingers were numb and nearly useless. She couldn’t feed herself. She complained to me, at first, when she still had lucid moments, that, “They just put the food there and walk away. I can’t do it!” I’ve seen that happen in nursing homes, so it wasn’t hard to believe. And we’re only allowed one visit a day, for an hour.
My sister took over for a week, one of her precious summer vacation weeks, while I drove the seventeen hours back home and we tried to figure out who would do what and when. During that week, Mom sank into a mostly unconscious state, only rousing now and then to rave about royalty or dinosaurs. There was no more physio. She couldn’t follow instructions. Sometimes she’d cry out angrily, “Stop all the yelling!” when the only person making a sound had been her. She was not eating. They had inserted a catheter and asked us about a feeding tube. Did we want to insert a feeding tube. Did we? Mom had always been clear that she wanted no extraordinary measures at the end of life. Was that extraordinary? Was she at the end of life? She was also clear, both verbally and in her living will document, that if at any point she lost the capacity to make decisions for herself, she wanted nothing to prolong life. Was her loss of decision-making permanent or temporary though? Would the delirium clear up as the antibiotics did their thing and if she had some nutrition?
Faced with what felt like the most difficult decision of our lives, my sister and I talked and texted until we finally decided that a tube inserted through the nose and down the throat to the stomach wasn’t extraordinary, although a surgically implanted one in the stomach or intestines would be. We were told an NG (nasogastric) tube, could stay in for only ten days. Okay. Ten days. If the nutrition didn’t improve her condition, the tube would be removed, and we’d be talking about palliative care.
My sister got a call at two in the morning. Mom had yanked out the tube, demanded to know why they were feeding her water and not food, and told the nurse that she was from England and knew Lady Diana. I told my sister she should have run with that one. “Tell them Earl Spencer was your great-uncle,” I said. “Maybe she’ll get better treatment.” Now they were asking us if we would give approval for restraints so that she couldn’t pull the tube out again. We gave approval, with sincere reservations, pretty sure Mom didn’t want to end her days tied to a bed with a tube in her throat, equally sure that we’d be filled with guilt the rest of ours if we didn’t give this a shot.
I flew back to Toronto, knowing my sister needed a break, knowing I wanted to be there if Mom died. Again, I settled into the condo. The view is incredible. To the west I can see the clear outline of all the downtown towers, including the iconic CN Tower, the lake dominates the southern view, and if I care to look north, on a clear day, of which there are few enough in July, I can see the distant Caledon hills. The space is just as she left it, just as I left it I guess after my first stay, but I didn’t make much of an impression on it. She didn’t know she wasn’t coming back. Teddy bears stare at me from every possible angle. Little stone ones, stuffed ones, posters of them, themed magnets, towels. I suddenly feel sad, and I think about how we just leave all our stuff, all our plans, all our notes about various things. “Window blinds” says one note on the fridge. I think I know what she had in mind with that one.
The condo came with huge, heavy, horizontal, wooden-slatted, floor-to-ceiling blinds that are hauled up and lowered down on what have always seemed to me like ridiculously thin cords for the job. My Dad liked them, and wouldn’t hear of getting easier to use, vertical ones. Mom could barely raise and lower them herself. Even I find them stupidly heavy and cumbersome. After Dad died, she started doing all the things she’d wanted to do. She replaced the computer desk, threw certain things away, moved some furniture around, converted the “tv room” into a spare bedroom for guests, and I think was finally ready to do something about these blinds. Other notes are more cryptic. “Doorbell remote” and “Cindy motorcycle”. No idea.
Mom suddenly had a good day. She woke up when I came in the room, and croaked, “Hi.” I raised the face shield, lowered my mask for a second. “It’s me, Mom. It’s Cindy.” I smiled at her. She smiled back. I couldn’t believe it. Had it worked? Had the feeding tube given her enough nutrition to curb the delirium? The restraints were gone, I noticed. She was worried about her legs. Would she be able to walk again? Was she paralyzed? I assured her she would and she was not. I worked my hands under her hugely swollen knee and helped her bend it, just a little, just enough to raise it off the bed, then down again. “Help me do it, Mom.” She did. “See? Not paralyzed. Just weak. Let’s do this some more. Both sides.” So we did. I was excited. This was a huge breakthrough. She asked about every family member she could think of. Was everyone okay? Everyone was fine. I told her about the tornado in Barrie, but that her niece and family were safe. “Oh, a tornado in Barrie! Really? But Jennifer’s okay?” “Yes, Jennifer’s fine. They’re all fine.” She was sorry for causing so much trouble. “No trouble, Mom.” She was embarrassed to think of the things she’d been saying to the nurses in her delirium. “It’s okay, Mom. Everyone knows you were sick. Forget about it.” She clasped my hand gratefully. Wow, this was normal conversation. I wanted to text my sister, but didn’t want to miss a second of it or turn away from her to use my phone. She asked about family again, then her face crinkled up with grief and she cried, “Oh, Barbara!” She had got it into her head earlier that her older sister had died. “Barbara’s fine, Mom. Why don’t we call her?” I whipped out my phone and found I didn’t have my aunt’s landline number in my contacts. Frantic texts to my cousin and sister. Someone gave me the number. I dialed, afraid any second she’d drift away again. I got my aunt on the phone. After some serious fumbling – she couldn’t understand it was on speaker phone and she didn’t have to hold it up to her ear – they had their first conversation in nearly a month. Mom asked about her favourite ball team first.
“How are the Bluejays doing?”
“They’re doing well! They’re tied 3-3 with the Yankees,” said my aunt.
“Damn Yankees!” said my Mom. A nurse in the hall outside her door, slapped her thighs and laughed. I laughed, too. It was so good to hear her cursing her team’s nemesis again.
Mom then launched into a long, rambling story about something that had happened when she was only a teenager. It was a funny story, and she kept laughing and having trouble finishing it. It started to get repetitive. Yellow warning flags flashed in my brain. She managed to finish the story, and a nurse came in to do something. We had to end the call.
She looked at me and said, “I’m so tired.” And slowly, suddenly, as suddenly as it had come, it all started to unravel. She closed her eyes, became unresponsive. When she opened them again, she was staring at the air in front of her and said, “And they, the physio, no one told me I was having physio, after leaving me on the floor all night long . . . ” She spent the rest of the visit either drifting off or chanting, “I don’t like it.” in a sing-song voice. Still, I was hopeful. It seemed like a baby step in the right direction.
It went downhill from there. She pulled the feeding tube out again the next night. I thought she was still with me the next day when she said, “There was a tornado in Barrie!”, but it was just an echo, followed by:
“Was Jennifer in the RV?”
“No.”
Frustrated flapping of hands, shaking of head. “But were they in the RV?!”
“No, Mom. They were not in the RV.”
Angry now. “But were they IN the RV??!!”
I lean close. “No one was in the RV. They were in the basement.”
Confused look. “But weren’t they in the RV?”
And it went on like that for some time until I could distract her with YouTube highlights of a Bluejays game, which only upset her when she fixated on not being able to see the number of a particular player. I’m glad she got a chance to talk to her sister. I talk to mine, multiple times a day. We share the details of her condition, talk about our next steps, continue to figure out who visits when.
I start thinking about what we’ll do with this condo. Sell it is the most obvious option, but that truly signifies the end of an era. Since the Gordons and the Lalondes and the Longs and the Forths came to Toronto around 1901, someone in our family has always lived here. The Longs came unwillingly, I think, needing treatment for their baby son, my grandfather, at the relatively new Hospital for Sick Children. They weren’t able to keep making the trip back and forth from Uxbridge. Maudie Lalonde, my grandmother, was shanghaied, stolen away from her Brockville home at the age of ten by her older, married sister who put her to work as a babysitter for her own four children. One of the many Forth sons came here from Bracebridge to work for Bell Telephone. We don’t know why Albert Gordon left the family-owned pub in Kent and sailed across the ocean with his pregnant wife, my great-grandmother. That’s over a century of family history in this city, and I feel it deeply in my bones. It’s our last major family asset, and I realize I want to keep it. I want coming to Toronto to be more of an option because I’d have a place to stay. I try not to think “free place to stay” because there’s nothing free about it. The condo fees are around $900 a month, and I’d have to buy out my sister’s half. I can’t figure out a way to do this, so I put it out of my head.
My own back has been sore, partly a result of bending over in awkward position for too long in the vegetable garden before I left, and partly from bending over Mom’s hospital bed. Self-care is important. I book an appointment with a chiropractor referred to me. Yonge and Eglinton is a literal hot mess when I climb up out of the subway. Construction. Noise. Smoky, dusty air. Sidewalks closed on one side. I keep my mask on. The chiropractor turns out to be a leftover from the New Age. His feet barely touch the ground when he walks. I half expect to see his aura. He closes his eyes and holds my ankles to “read” me, sounds a tuning fork over my head, but also does a couple of actual chiropractic adjustments that feel okay, and I have to say, they worked. I’m better the next day.
Once back down in the subway, I hear music that sounds real. Pillars and staircases block the view. It sounds like a saxophone, but not quite. I wander down the platform to the far end. A man with a sign that says, “I’m A Refugee, And This Is My Job Right Now” is playing a sweet, slow jazz version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” on a clarinet. He’s way too good for a subway platform. Coincidentally, that was my Dad’s favourite song, the one my Mom played for him at the hospital the day he died. I have five dollars in my purse, and tuck it into his cup. He beams at me sweetly, makes a bow out of a long, low note. I stand there until the last possible minute.
The doctors keep changing. Her original doctor went on leave because his partner had a baby. The doctor the next week didn’t meet with us until the Friday. We only saw his assistant. Then he disappeared and the latest doctor had to have the whole case explained all over again. The nurses, too, seem to change like the weather. Every other day, a whole new staff on that wing, all of them always having to learn what my Mom’s about, some more sympathetic than others to her endless babbling that apparently often gets loud overnight. One nurse said to me one day, in a tone that suggested I should be able to do something about it, “The patient in the next room is complaining because she’s so loud.” I felt so utterly helpless at that moment. What did she want from me? An apology? “I’m sorry my mother is so critically ill that she can’t understand that the person yelling is her.” My helplessness turned to anger, but the nurse was already gone.
I came home from the hospital one day, exhausted as usual, guilt at leaving her there at war with elation at being out of that place for the day, and found a text message from Kathy. It was a panty shot. But the panties were mine. The pair that had blown off the balcony in the storm. What??!! Where??!! I text back. Turns out their mutual acquaintance and elderly neighbour had called Kathy to come over to her unit. She pointed and said, “Look what’s on my balcony.”
I’m still in Toronto. The gentle restraints didn’t last more than a few days. I’m not sure she really knew they were there. The feeding tube comes out tomorrow. The doctors aren’t sure that Mom can remain conscious enough to eat, although she seems to be able to swallow. I’ll keep going in every day, try to coax some food into her, wet her mouth, do whatever she asks, if she actually speaks to me. I’ll rub her feet, talk to her, or just listen to her raving lunacies. This isn’t how she wanted it. It isn’t how any of us want it. How she would laugh if I could tell her about the underpants, and who found them. Then she’d say, “Well, I told you not to hang any laundry on that balcony.” If she could get in one final “I told you so”, I think she might be satisfied.
My father is dying. His death is a natural part of life, and I accept it.But already, I miss him, and that’s just weird. For nearly two weeks, we’ve been trying to remember to speak of him in the present tense. The last thing I did was press a tissue into his hand as the paramedics prepared to wheel him out of his bedroom, the room in which he’d hoped to die before insisting we call the hospital after a particularly rough morning. He clutched it gratefully. “I want a refund,” he managed to whisper, always the joker. “No refunds, no regrets,” I replied, the tears rising. I knew, because we can’t visit the hospital, that I would never see him again.
For most people, the idea of a loved one dying during the Covid pandemic will remain just that – an abstract notion, something that sadly is happening to others. Up until two weeks ago, I was one of them. Now, for us, it’s a hard-hitting reality.
I’ve thought a lot about Covid as I sit in my parents’ condo in Scarborough, supporting my Mom who can’t be beside her partner of 67 years, a person she’s touched every day of her life since high school, knowing he’s there alone, maybe scared, certainly uncomfortable. We made sure to tuck a cell phone and charger into the baggie with his meds, his instructions to staff, his DNR order. He calls us from the palliative care wing of the hospital. We talk, and laugh, and cry. Not for too long. He gets tired. Sometimes he’s annoyed or upset about something, often he’s worried about something we don’t want him to worry about, like whether anyone remembered to arrange for the snow tires to come off the car Mom will never drive. We tell him not to worry, but he laughs and says, “I don’t have anything else to do.” Mostly he just wants to hear her voice, my Mom’s that is. It’s not the same as being there, not even close.
From bizarre theories to rational analyses, everyone has a Covid opinion to share. I braved an excursion to get some groceries. The masked and gloved woman in line ahead of me pointed to a couple walking by outside the store windows. “Look at them!!” she exclaimed. I looked, not sure what I was supposed to find remarkable. “No masks! Are they crazy?!”
“Well,” I ventured, through my own stuffy face mask, “I don’t wear mine when I’m just walking outside either. Only in stores and such.”
She glared at me. “But it’s in the air!” she said.
I demurred. “I don’t think so.”
“Where do you think it comes from?!” she demanded.
“From other people,” I said.
She snorted and turned away. Clearly I was just one more fool in her books.
She can believe whatever makes her comfortable, but I think if Covid were just flying around in the air, we’d all be sick by now, especially we idiots without face masks outdoors.
We won’t all die from this. Most of us won’t even get sick. And not just because we’ve taken precautions and put restrictions in place. That’s simply how viruses work in a herd. They sicken a lot, kill some, but spare enough to let the herd survive and produce another generation. It’s in the virus’s best interest to let some of us survive. Science. It’s not warm and fuzzy.
This is what Coronavirus has shown me: We are not entitled to special status by virtue of our species designation. We are subject to the same rules as every other species on this planet. As an acquaintance is fond of saying, “We are all a part of the convention of prey.”
Viruses live here, too. We don’t like them any more than we like mosquitoes or poison ivy, but they are a part of the web of life on Earth. The planet doesn’t seem to have been designed with our exclusive comfort in mind.
My father isn’t dying from Covid-19. He has lung cancer. But he’s dying without his family there to help him and hold him because of the Covid restrictions, restrictions that are in place because we fear death, and we particularly fear it on a large scale. If not death itself, we fear the horrific conditions that exist when a plague runs rampant – the overwhelmed hospitals, the inability to keep up with the disposal of dead bodies, the colossal scale of the bereavement in the population that is spared, the cessation of services and the unavailability of goods as so many dead, dying, sick, and traumatized cannot sustain the economy. Pandemics suck. Not being able to sit with my Dad, hold his hand, share these final days – it’s breaking my heart. This protocol goes against the grain. It runs counter to every emotional instinct, every familial and societal convention around dying. It should not be this way. But I understand why it has to be.
I’ve spent several days going through cartons of old photographs and memorabilia. It’s been something to do, a way to pass the hours. He never threw anything away. Our old school report cards, a letter I wrote to him on my new typewriter when I was seven, a postcard from Paris, the instruction manual for a slide rule (seriously, Dad?), photos from the 50’s of my Mom, looking young and wild and gorgeous. Mom’s been reading old letters she wrote to him when they were separated shortly before their wedding because he had to go for work training in Montreal. He kept every one of them. I found a photo of him, lying propped up on one arm in the grass, a cigarette dangling from his lips, imitating James Dean it looks like, or maybe James Dean was art imitating life at the time. I never knew this man, the one who existed before I was born, and now I want to know him more than ever.
I’ve sat in hospitals, sat vigil with the dying. It’s no fun, but I’d give anything to be able to do it now. When this is all over, both my father’s death and the pandemic, I want something better. I hope we’re learning from this. Let’s not just go back to business as usual. Can we take the time to consider what would really help us to live more sanely, to spend more time with our children, to be healthier and more empowered in our communities? Let’s build stronger and more beautiful neighbourhoods. Let’s build a better world. I think Dad could get behind that. If we end up feeling like life wasn’t worth it, there are no refunds.
What do bats in China and toilet paper in Thunder Bay,
Ontario have in common? Nothing, usually. No one changing a roll was likely to
think of a bat. Certainly no bat flapping out of its cave at dusk gave much
thought to the cleanliness of a human crevice. Yet here we sit, lamenting our
lack of two-ply, and a small, furry, winged, Asian mammal might be to blame.
The Butterfly Effect refers to the potential for
complicated systems to change in unpredictable ways because of some previous,
minor change in conditions. Ray Bradbury explored the concept in 1952’s A Sound of Thunder. Later, in 1961, a
meteorologist named Edward Lorenz was testing a weather model, and discovered
that by rounding off a number early in his calculations, the eventual outcome
was drastically different from what it would have been had he used the full,
unrounded data. When he failed to provide a title for a talk he was presenting
in 1972, someone suggested, “Does the
flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” It
stuck, and so did the term “Butterfly Effect”.
The Domino Effect refers to a more direct chain of
mechanical events. Line up some dominoes on their ends within touching distance
of each other, and tip the first one against the next. All the rest will fall
in a predictable (and entertaining) fashion.
Neither offers a good metaphor for the COVID-19
situation. The implications of this
pandemic are still emerging, but so far it has affected everything from local climate
to individual working conditions half a globe away. And, yes, toilet paper
supplies.
Professor John Bryson, who specializes in enterprise
and economic geography at the University of Birmingham, has noted that the
changes in human behavior resulting from COVID-19 have already altered air
quality for the better in China and neighbouring countries, and may cause
corporations to re-evaluate their internationalization strategies as a
protective response to potential future pandemics. It’s probably too early to
begin eulogizing globalization, but in my small city of Thunder Bay, where no
cases of the Coronavirus have been reported yet, people are feeling somewhat
protected by our isolation from larger urban centres, and by our ability to
rely on local supply chains for many of our needs.
Many organizations have offered their employees the
option to work from home during this outbreak in the hopes that social
distancing will reduce the virus’ ability to spread easily. The advantages for
both employees and employers – consider the cost savings of not having to lease
office space – might lead to a permanent increase in remote work arrangements.
It’s possible that the resulting reduction in commuting could lead to pressure
on city councils to re-zone currently homogeneous, auto-oriented, suburban
neighbourhoods for mixed use so that people working from home have pleasant,
walkable options for lunch, groceries, or for picking up office supplies. Or, perhaps
suburban living will come to be seen for the soul-crushing, parasitic drain on
urban resources that it is, and some of our languishing downtown cores will
once more become desirable residential areas, giving people the option to do
the majority of their work from home, while having easy access to communal
office space for projects that would benefit from face-to-face interaction, and
to places large enough to host annual general meetings or conventions.
Focused as we are on the short-term fallout from
COVID-19, a few are positing long-term consequences, including a possible baby
boom. In an article in Fatherly, Cameron
Leblanc wonders if “an army of Sagittariuses” will emerge at the end of the
year. A good deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that when humans hunker down,
they get busy.
On the flip side of that coin, any strain on social
services that might have been caused by an aging population could be reduced.
Despite my age, I don’t object to the joking moniker “boomer remover”. Dark
humour is one way we cope with crises. If the people who once told us not to
trust anyone over 30 can’t take a joke, we have far bigger problems than a
pandemic, and it’s hard to blame millennials who can’t afford to purchase a
home for taking a shot at those whom they perceive garnered some of the last
benefits capitalism had to offer the shrinking middle class.
Speaking of economics, the short-term effects have
become obvious. Those of us with RRSPs have watched our lifelong savings vanish
in the wink of an eye. I filled up my
car for less yesterday than at any time in the past five years. And when
billionaire airline magnate Richard Branson asks for social assistance, you
know the seas are rough. The long-term effects are fodder for much speculation.
Although the IMF is happy to lend billions to member countries at risk of
hardship due to COVID, what that will look like in terms of countries
restructuring their economic policies in order to climb out from under that
debt for many years to come is an open question.
In the future, we might refer to long-lasting,
dramatic worldwide repercussions initiated by something as unremarkable as the
conditions in a live animal market as “The COVID Effect”. As for toilet paper,
perhaps North Americans are about to discover the bidet.
On the night of January 28, 2017, Brayden Bushby was a passenger in a vehicle cruising about in the east end of Thunder Bay. As the vehicle passed two Indigenous women walking along the sidewalk, Bushby flung a trailer hitch out the window of the vehicle. The heavy hitch struck one of the women, Barbara Kentner, in the abdomen, and Bushby yelled, “I got one!”
Kentner was seriously injured. Months later, she died in hospital.
Bushby has been charged with second degree murder and is awaiting a trial that has been delayed twice.
In the months following the incident, much commentary appeared on social media, and a theme emerged, a theme that reinforces the narrative of Thunder Bay as a racist city. The comments I read, some of them unbelievably cruel, can be summed up as follows: Kentner was a bad person and had it coming.
In other words, in the view of several Thunder Bay residents who made the comments, and all the others who gave them a “thumbs up” with a malicious tap of the “like” icon, the victim somehow deserved to have a trailer hitch thrown at her in the night. Bushby was just a random factor, a mechanism for some kind of Karmic justice.
According to some who claim to have known Kentner, she had a hard life. She had an alcohol addiction, was part of the rough scene of the city’s south core, had committed at least one assault, and was known to police.
But here’s the thing: Bushby didn’t know that. He didn’t know Barbara Kentner, a mother, a sister, and a friend. He didn’t know who he was attacking that January night. He saw two Indigenous women, and he made his decision. He threw a trailer hitch at a random person targeted because of her ethnic appearance.
And the only reason some White people in Thunder Bay are not condemning him is that they, because of their ethnic appearance, are at zero risk for that particular type of violence. That is what White privilege means. Bushby would not have thrown the trailer hitch at two White women walking down that street. We all know that. If he had, no one would be taking his part. That’s why Thunder Bay is racist. Because some people think Brayden Bushby’s actions that night were justified. Just business as usual.
It’s a culturally specific question, assuming a societal structure in which woman marry, assume the surname of their husbands, and henceforth carry a “maiden” name, their former identity, hidden in the back folds of purses or tucked away in drawers in the form of original birth certificates and high school memorabilia. Who were you before?
The question is fraught with assumptions, not the least of which lie lurking in the word itself – maiden. However, this isn’t about the patriarchy, not this time. This is about the unintended invocation of Nana every time I transact business with the bank.
My mother’s maiden name, a question I’ve been asked countless times for verification purposes since the 90’s, is, of course, my grandmother’s married name, the name she went by the entire time that I knew her. I never addressed her by that name nor her first name, sometimes still referred to as one’s “Christian” name, or “given” name. I knew her as “Nana”.
Nana was about as far removed from banking as frogs are from deserts. As far as I know, she never made a banking transaction in her life. Her father handled financial matters until she married, at which point her husband took care of such things, and when he died, her adult children managed her “affairs”, as they were termed. I don’t think she had a single encounter with an ATM, and she never even touched a computer. I tried to explain e-mail to her one day, but it was pretty clear that I wasn’t getting anywhere. “Well, how do you put a stamp on it?” she kept asking me, meaning, in her own way, who benefits from this transaction? My grandmother wasn’t dumb – she knew that if there was a service, then somehow, somewhere along the line, someone was making money from it. That’s true, of course. I’m guessing a lot more money is made from sending emails than sending letters in envelopes with stamps stuck on the front when you take into account what we pay for the devices we use to send messages, and what we pay to the service provider for our internet capability.
I would never have associated Nana with my banking, but that question kept coming up. What is your mother’s maiden name? As I responded repeatedly to this prompt, over telephones, on websites, thoughts of my grandmother would enter my head each time. Often my neurons would just fire a fleeting image of her remembered face into my mentis oculi. Other times, a specific event or conversation would be recalled, such as the time she deftly plucked out and ate the strawberry from my ice cream cone when I was showing it off to everyone, or the way she would hum unrecognizable tunes in the kitchen when no one else was in there with her.
Predictably, my mother’s maiden name became my password for certain things, or at least part of my password. In the early days of online sites, security was less strict. Passwords could be as short or as long as you liked. The restrictions regarding length and type of characters used didn’t come along until later, after the less scrupulous had managed to correctly guess enough banking passwords to cause banks, and now just about everyone who runs an online site requiring sign-in, to force their clients to choose something that is a little harder to guess easily.
Nana was there every time I transferred funds from one account to another. She was there when I applied for a mortgage. She was there every time I dealt with a branch of the federal or provincial government online. She was there when I signed up for a pension plan, and she was there when I married. (I kept my “maiden” name.) Nana, a woman who never had a password in her life, and never had anything to do with banks, has become inextricably linked to my own financial institution history and present day reality because that name still makes up part of some of my passwords. How could it not? It’s not like I can forget it, and we don’t want to ever, ever forget our passwords in this modern world.
Nana married into a family that ran a bakery, and she knew her way around a rolling pin. For all I know, she had those skills before her marriage; I never thought to ask. The strongest and most persistent memories of my grandmother involve her supervising my budding skills as a pie-maker. We had a sour cherry tree in the backyard, and each summer, before the birds and raccoons could devour them all, I would pick enough for at least one pie. “Roll the dough, don’t stretch it,” I remember her telling me, along with warnings not to over-handle the dough because that would make it “tough”.
She loved to play cards, and I am pretty sure that she spent many hours teaching my sister and me the ins and outs of Go Fish, Gin Rummy, and eventually Cribbage, as we sat around the dining room table, struggling to master the skill of holding several cards in one hand, fanning them out just enough to see their values without dropping any or inadvertently tilting them so other players could see what we had. I remember being surprised to learn that she had once been in a bowling league and had won a trophy or two. Nana just didn’t seem like a physically active person to me. Beyond ironing, or hanging laundry to dry outside on a rack that unfolded like an inverted umbrella to reveal four concentric lines strung in squares on branches that emerged from a central pole, I never saw her engage in anything more strenuous than an evening stroll.
Nana died the way we all imagine dying – of old age. There was no illness, just a fall from which she never really recovered fully. She simply grew older, physically weaker, and mentally less present. Eventually, she slept a lot until that final breath sometime between her 95th and 96th birthday. You would think I might remember her by some piece of inherited jewellery, or each time I pull out some cherished recipe, and I do. Those things do bring her to mind, but it is banking that most frequently conjures up Nana.
If nothing else, this explains why, after checking my account balance online, I sometimes feel the sudden urge to make a cherry pie.
[Note: I realize fully that some dedicated sleuth could uncover my grandmother’s name, but so what? My passwords are not that simple, and for anything I want to protect seriously, I have more than one level of verification.]
All my teeth are falling out, not whole, but in little pieces. I keep spitting small chunks out of my mouth. As soon as I spit out one mouthful, I have to spit again. In one hand, I am carrying a Ziploc baggie full of bits of my teeth, so full, in fact, that it seems impossible that I could have any teeth left in my mouth, but I do. This all started yesterday, when I was visiting a new dentist. I was telling him about some troubles I had been having with my teeth, and as I spoke, they started breaking and loosening from my gums right in his office as I was trying to explain my difficulties. It was his assistant who gave me the baggie. He couldn’t help me right at that moment. He had other clients. I made an appointment for a later time, and left. I rode my bicycle to my former dentist’s office, and parked it in the alley under the second floor walkway. I remember parking it carefully, taking easily stolen items off it to thwart thieves, putting them in my small backpack, locking it securely to the iron pole that supported the stairway. I was still spitting tooth fragments as I climbed the narrow staircase. At the top, outside the single-paned glass door to the clinic, an assistant stood on the landing, peering with concentration through the door, as if watching some proceeding inside. She looked up as I approached, and said I couldn’t go in. But I showed her my baggie full of teeth, and she let me in. My old dentist was surprised to see my teeth in fragments in the baggie, but as we spoke, I became aware of someone behind me. I turned. It was the new dentist. Smiling. It occurred to me that he looked like the real estate agent who had come to my door earlier in the day. He said he figured this was where I was coming. I shrugged. So I wanted a second opinion. It was my right. He smiled, still, but said if I let my former dentist treat me, not to expect that he would help me. Fine, I said. Whatever. I left that office, too, with my teeth in a bag.
