Canada Days past: brought to me by Grief
“What’s one thing that surprised you about grief?” well-known grief writer, Megan Devine, asks on Twitter this week.
“One thing? I could give her 100.” I scoff aloud to Bidi and Molly, as I doom-scroll.
Perhaps the most surprising is grief’s ability to still surprise me. This happens when my roommate, Grief, who now mostly spends days in her own room with the door shut, invades my living space, uninvited, at the hint of any holiday.
As she sprawls on the couch, Grief starts reminiscing and takes me back with her to July 1, 2011. It was our second Canada Day as a couple and also the first day Jack and I went house-hunting. We explored the backroads north of Toronto, blue-skying about what it would be like to buy places well out of reach financially.
Me, practical even when dreaming: “OK, if we lived here, I could use the Milton GO bus to get downtown.”
“And we could have horses!” Jack replied, excitedly.
“Do we want horses?” I asked, curious he’d never mentioned that before.
“Maybe, anything’s possible.” Indeed. It seemed that way with Jack.
The soundtrack for this road trip, like so many, was Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life.”
“My sister sent this album to me from Canada,” he told me. “I fuckin’ loved it then and still do now.” In the car, he often recounted what he heard about Canada when he was still in Poland.
When “Sir Duke” came on, I reached for the volume, cranked it up, and started belting out the trumpet line. Jack joined in and together we hammered the syncopation into the steering wheel and dashboard. As the song ended, his nicotine stained hand grabbed mine and placed it firmly on his thigh, where it often stayed while we drove.
At a stop light, he said “buzi, buzi,” Polish for “gimme a kiss.” I happily obliged.
Grief has taken me back to a time when our relationship held so much promise, when the words “lung” and “cancer” had not yet been conjoined with each other and our lives.
I take the dogs for a walk since the best way to stop Grief in her tracks is to make some of my own. She rarely joins me and she doesn’t today. It’s good to take a break.
It’s dinnertime now and I’m dining al fresco as I usually do. Grief doesn’t often come out to the gazebo despite the space being Jack's vision. It’s so much more my space now than it was his - he died so soon after its construction. Tonight, though, as I sit at my table for one, enjoying my salad with chilled trout, Grief pulls up a chair across from me, lights a cigarette - of course, Grief’s a smoker - and launches into another July 1 memory.
In 2018, Jack’s voice was slowly fading away, the beginning of the disappearance of this whole self. He didn’t feel right. We knew there was a good chance his lung cancer for which he’d been treated two years earlier was likely to re-emerge and by summer, they’d radiated a new tumour, this time in his brain. On July 1, though, he awoke feeling more energized.
“So you’ll come with me?” I asked, brightly, eager to have a day trip together in the country to see my niece and her wife.
“Sure!” he replied, “so long as we’re home in time to feed the dogs.” Buying cigarettes and feeding the dogs were the only two things Jack never forgot.
“I promise. We’ll go, have lunch, meet the chickens, have a swim, and come home.”
The weather was hot, hazy, and humid, the best and worst of Ontario summer. Jack’s verve was holding and he ate the cheese, always plentiful at their table, with gusto and he marvelled at the hens, anticipating the freshness of the pair of eggs we were given. Then the pool.
“Oh come in Jack, it’s so cool!” I called out from my position mid-pool. He’d taken up a position in a deckchair set far from the rest of us so we could avoid the cigarette smoke.
“Do I have to? I can’t be bothered to put my suit on.”
“You won’t regret it,” I cajoled, gently shooting a bit of water in his general direction with a water gun. It landed on him like it was lighter fluid and he shot into action.
A few minutes later, he emerged from the cabana room in his once too-small European bathing suit, now fitting better since the cancer has reduced his girth. He walked the length of the deck to the deep end, listing badly, his balance impaired by the brain tumour. I held my breath. Please don’t let him fall into the water or worse, onto the concrete. I was more worried about the impact it would have on his pride than his body.
He dived in, and the man who emerged from the depths seemed momentarily free from the discomfort the cancer and treatment had caused him. Grinning, he swam to the edge and grabbed the fourth red and blue foam water blaster. He submerged it, seemingly just testing its function, and without warning began a full-on assault against us. It was a startling transformation to water warrior. We all shifted into high fighting gear and engaged in battle, accompanied by peels of hysterical laughter.
The fight was short, and the trip home a quiet one with Jack sleeping beside me. That was the last time we had pure, unfettered fun together. Canada Day, 2018.
We’re back in the living room later in the evening and there Grief is again, sitting in Jack’s chair. The closer we are to bedtime, the bleaker her reminiscences become and today is no exception.
She takes me back three years, the first July 1 after Jack died, when a friend emerged from my past with a bandage-ripping text: “I’ve just joined the 52 year old widows club.” I shudder remembering how grief poured like blood from the re-exposed wound. But I’m not going to let Grief derail me tonight; instead, I consider my gratitude for the shared experience that has brought my friend back into my life. Take that, my dear dark roommate.
Grief tries again - she goes back to July 1, 2021, reminding me of receiving the news of another joining the ranks of young widows; this time, the brother of a close friend died of cancer at 59. I’d known him for 40 years.
Nope, I’m not going there. I divert Grief instead to considering what I will do this weekend - writing, purging, cooking, hosting — all passions that emerged as a result of my time with Jack. That’s how it mostly is now - Grief tries but doesn’t often succeed in making me sad.
