What I had forgotten, of course, was my own long drift away from my own family—something that “lack of conflict” also bred.
Children growing up are sooner or later going to draw the line between their lives and their parents’ lives. And it has to be a little painful; it has to feel like a genuine rupture. Most of the time, this happens in adolescence,with the usual showdowns. But the twenties are a good time to do it too.
One summer I was out west on a month-long assignment, so Casey ended up spending that time cohabiting with his father and sharing household duties. When Brian flew out for a visit, Casey was left with the job of closing up the house.
“Dad, just to let you know,” he emailed Brian, “fridge rot does not take care of itself.”
I came back home briefly, before packing up to go to the cottage. I stepped out into the yard, where the grapevines at the back of the garden were running amok and about to strangle the lilac tree. Casey was in the kitchen, eating breakfast. He would join us later, for a few days’ holiday.
“Casey,” I said, “can you take care of the grapevines at the back of the yard? Just take out whatever’s crowding out the good stuff.” But later that week, he arrived at the cottage with the grim air of being on a mission. He said he’d “been thinking” and that he “needed to talk,”with Brian in particular. Uh-oh, I thought. Time to peel a quart of peaches and turn the radio on.
The two of them went down to the dock, where Casey sat his father down for a long conversation about their differences—and, more critically, their similarities. He was having trouble, he said, because he could see just how much he shared with us, but there were some ways in which he didn’t want to be like us. And instead of the usual slow, alienated slide away from parents, he wanted to deal with our differences. Have it out. We were all good at getting along, he agreed, but we were totally lame at conflict.
Every once in a while I’d look out the window and see Brian with his head down, solemnly nodding, as Casey leaned forward and spoke. Later, in the middle of the night, I tried to reassure Brian.
“This happens when boys grow up,” I said,whispering so as not to wake up Casey. “You’re the father, and he needs to smite you. He has smote you, or whatever the past tense is, with his sword. He’s saying that you no longer set the agenda.”
One of the things that is good about being at the lake is the utter darkness, on moonless nights. We lay there in the silence.
“Try not to take it personally,” I said.
So, not a relaxing week at the cottage. I think Casey wanted us to break out of that WASPy way of never fighting or feeling the connection that comes with honest, open clashes. He was tired of pretending that we agreed about everything just because we liked some of the same tunes.
Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher and political theorist popular back in the 1960s, had a term for this, a phrase I grabbed onto in my own seething, conflict-free youth: repressive tolerance. When all is permitted,where are the edges of things, the points of contact?
We had also given him the impression, growing up, that whatever he did or wanted in life was just fine with us. Of course, this wasn’t strictly true, and he knew it: there were unspoken expectations of him that arose from our undefined but fairly rigid set of values. Self-expression and creativity, for instance, over success in business. (Our mistake!) Friendship and community over individualism and the rat race. We didn’t talk about these assumptions but we didn’t have to; he grew up marinated in them.
I thought I didn’t have a master plan in mind for him. But it meant more to me than I realized that he finish his university degree, even though I had had no problem fleeing academia the minute I graduated. And yes, I promoted medical school too (my phantom career). I also kept encouraging him to put his musical talents out there. For years he had written and recorded a lot of songs that I never tired of listening to, even with my non-maternal ears. He would point out (as many parents might) that the world is not undersupplied with talented songwriters.
“But you like performing,” I would respond.
Since when do mothers try to persuade their sons to join rock bands?
Brian didn’t push him. He knew he would find his own way with his music. But he too put a higher value on “art”than “a career in public health.”This was the result of our having grown up in a culture where jobs were plentiful and money was not a burning issue.
But in the new world, money was most definitely an issue. Casey understood this more than we did.
In his twenty-fourth summer, Casey was trying to draw that line between us and him. This was normal, it’s how growing up works. But it gave me pause. Maybe pretending to be a happy little family is always an elaborate game of self-deception to get us all through.
Casey went down to Montreal and we stayed on at the cottage, where thoughts of the garden back home kept intruding. Why did I think a “natural”garden was a good thing,better than uptight landscaping? Wasn’t it better to be bossy with the life-choking weeds, to admit that you’re in charge and that gardens need some discipline?
How much bare soil is required for healthy growth? How much to rip out, how much to leave alone? Pruning is supposed to be healthy for plants, I knew that much, and cutting things back helps things grow, in the end.
As parents, I thought,maybe we should have weeded more. Not because our son needed more discipline, but because then our roles would have been more distinct.
In mid-August, a bit subdued by our time at the cottage, we came back to Toronto and the house that Casey had closed up before he left the city.
We unpacked the car and aired out the house. Opened the doors to the garden. I braced myself for the usual late-summer accumulation of neglect: the overgrown yard, the piled-up bills, our city life to reclaim. And . . . for what? What was the whole point of home, again?
I walked in and saw my bike panniers tucked away in the hall. Had he remembered to leave my bike key? Yes, there it was in the lock. I passed through the well-ordered house. Were the orchids dead? No, they were thriving, and had sent out new tendrils. The fridge was clean and empty. I stepped into the yard, where the red hibiscus had produced an almost grotesquely huge blossom.
But the most striking change was that Casey had cleaned up the full width and length of the flagstones that led to the back of the yard. He had ripped up all the weeds, pried the grass out from between the stones, cut away the invading grapevines, breached the undergrowth that had caused us to give up on the entrance to the laneway.
It was such a welcoming sight. He had restored order to the garden not by stuffing it with exotic shrubs or installing “water features,” but by uncovering the structural elements that had been there all the time.
Now the plants could breathe. All we had to do was to maintain the path he had cleared for us.
That’s That
IWAS BENT OVER in Uttanasana when I saw Brian thread through the class toward me. My yoga partner, a tall guy with stork legs, was pushing down on my sacrum. The teacher said,“Come up slowly, Marni.”
Brian had a neutral but bright-eyed expression and a slightly fixed smile. A strange vision in the middle of yoga class. I followed him outside into the hall.
“What’s wrong?” I said,with thoughts of Casey first.
“It’s Clyde,”Brian said, holding me.
“He’s in the hospital?”
“No,” he said in a wondering voice,“he’s dead. ”He put his arms around me.
“I’m not surprised, I’m not surprised,” I cried. “I spoke to my mother on the phone today and I could tell she was worried about him.”
But of course, I was shocked to the core. Apart from the stomach problems he had been having for the past few weeks, my 94-year-old father was rarely ill. I never saw him in bed during the day. Trust him to make such a whistle-clean exit.
Brian and I drove straight to Burlington without saying much. A shawl of calm descended on me; I felt clear and cool. Everyone else in the family was a
lready on the scene when we arrived. My sister-in-law Kathy opened the door, and we cried together. Jori was dry-eyed, but her mouth was twisted down. Bruce was sitting on the couch in the den looking flushed.
“Where is she?”my mother said,moving through the halls. She tottered toward me with an almost ironic “Wouldn’t you know death would come along?” expression on her face. She looked short and white. I said, “Oh Mom,” and put my hands on her face. Then I held her. She appeared chagrined and rueful.
Jori’s husband, Wayne, had the flu and had gone home rather than risk passing it on to my mother. Casey was up north in Quebec, working for the owners of our cottage. I decided the call could wait ’til tomorrow. Let him have one happy day in the woods.
Everyone was in the den, drinking sherry. Brian opened a bottle of red wine and brought me a glass, a big one.
“So tell me the gory details,” I said.
“Well, we had a really good day,”my mother began. “He’d been having pain for days before, but this afternoon he told the doctor that he was feeling a little better. Then he said he wanted meat and potatoes for dinner—‘no more tinned salmon. ’We went out in the car, bought some groceries, and on our way back he decided to pay a bill at Sears. He went in alone. I thought, I ought to go in with him, but he said no, stay in the car. When we got back home I said, ‘Oh let’s have a drink. ’”
He hadn’t been drinking because of the medication he was on, she explained, but he’d been off the drug for a week.
“So we both had a weak gin and tonic. I said, ‘Why don’t you just stretch out on the couch while I get dinner?’ because he was looking so tired, and I went into the kitchen to get it ready. He was in the bathroom when I heard some sort of noise and went in. He had fallen and was trying to pull himself up. . . .”
My mother went on to describe how she helped him lie down and went to fetch a pillow to put under his head. His eyes grew wide as they looked at one another, and she knew that he knew that this was it. She called my brother, who phoned 911.
“When we arrived, the paramedics were just pulling out in the ambulance,” said Bruce. “Slowly,with the lights off.”
The calm of shock prevailed. My mother was quite present, which I marvelled at. Here we were, sitting around as if waiting for dips and dinner, in the lee of our father’s death.
Jori and I stayed overnight with my mother, who lent me the white summer nightgown I had given her years before. I hadn’t brought a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. When it was time to go to bed, I used the downstairs bathroom he had died in, aggressively. Everything had a different aspect now—the little scissors he used to trim his moustache, his eye drops, his black comb and square brush. Jori stayed in Bruce’s old room, while I slept next door to her, beside my parents’ bedroom.
When she was settled in bed, my mother put her headphones on as usual to listen to Art Bell. Whenever she couldn’t sleep, which was often, she listened to his all-night call-in program, where supernatural theories were floated and people phoned in to describe their abduction by aliens. It distracted her through the long night. I kept surfacing from sleep to hear the leakage of radio voices from her room as she patiently lay there. I woke at six and thought, “Daddy.” I remembered being a little girl, going fishing with him down along the lakeshore. I felt him swarming through the house, anxious about us.
In the morning my mother was up first, and wearing the big grey bathrobe that her grandson had brought back from Asia for her. “It’s so warm, I wear it all the time,” she said conversationally. Jori was having a shower, so the two of us sat together on the broadloomed steps in the hall, waiting for her to come out.
“It’s just like old times,” Jori laughed when she saw us. We were all without makeup and looking utterly haggard. As usual, my mother got out the breakfast cereals and the bowl of unshelled nuts. Every morning she and my father had cereal with raisins, banana, and freshly cracked walnuts and almonds on top. This we had and sat down with tea.
Mornings are not good for my mother at the best of times. Her hands shake and she is at low ebb. We talked about who to phone and what to do. Jori knew all their friends, the ones still alive at least, and she would call them. My sister was the haircutter for most of them. I would put the death notice in the local paper. I was the writer.
My mother got dressed and, with hands that trembled more than usual, sat trying to read the Globe. I composed a death notice to my mother’s strict, Quakerish requirements. No flourishes allowed. Then the curiously mundane details of dealing with the body of someone who has died carried us along from one hour to the next.
The director of Just Cremation was vacuuming when I happened by. It wouldn’t do to have dusty surfaces in this line of work. The shop was a small storefront affair, handily across from the Egertson Funeral Home, where my father now reposed.
“I’ll be right with you,” the director said. He had large, liquid brown eyes. I sat down in one of two winged Victorian armchairs that faced his gilt-edged desk and took one of his business cards. Armand Alazzi. A Lebanese or Armenian name, unusual for Burlington, where I had grown up without encountering a single dark-skinned person. The director had a full brush-like moustache and smooth, thick, springy hair. He smiled apologetically as he moved the mouth of the vacuum back and forth over the broadloom, and we shared its high-pitched, indignant noise.
My mother for years had instructed us that there was to be no funeral service, and no fuss was to be made of their deaths. Always in the plural; having done everything together for 68 years my mother and father assumed they would die together too. It would be like the two of them finding a parking spot at the mall—she was the spotter, he was the driver. Whenever I came home to visit,my father would open the bottom drawer of his mahogany pull-down desk to point to “the arrangements,” as he always called them.
“You only need to make one phone call. Call Egertson’s, and they’ll take care of everything.” He knew that tidy business arrangements and planning for the future were not our forte.
“I don’t want any strangers gawking at me,”my mother would always add at that point. She had a horror of funerals with an open casket, and of trays of crustless sandwiches passed among the curious. She had already embarked on a course of electrolysis because, as she put it, “I don’t want to have a stroke and be lying in some hospital bed with hairs sprouting out of my face.”Being seen dead was a concern.
“Just send us up the chimney and come home and have a glass of sherry,” she would say with a kind of gay irritability whenever we tried to protest. But now that some of my friends were being picked off by cancer, I began to find the conventions of funerals reassuring. Someone thought to make sandwiches, another friend could be counted on to say the wrong thing, so-and-so would get drunk and stay too long—it all kept you clasped in the present. The mundanity of funerals said that life with its pots of tea and mixed motives would go on.
But burning a person, it turned out, was not as simple as a phone call. There were laws about human remains, and the question of scattering, or interment, and then the business of what to put the ashes in, and who in the family would keep them. As murderers and widows come to learn, it takes surprising enterprise and a certain amount of work to truly rid yourself of the body.
I think my mother was in shock. The fact that my father would leave her side forever and ever, just as a hot dinner was about to be served, was not something she could quickly grasp. So instead of weeping and falling apart, she applied herself to this practical problem—the recipe, as it were, for her husband’s ashes. As with a casserole, first came the matter of choosing the appropriate dish.
After an urn-tour of the house, we settled on a rather eccentric swirly blue ceramic vase, something my mother had made. My sister had fashioned a lid for it by gluing together several plywood discs that I had bought at the craft store. An ad hoc sort of urn. I delivered the vessel to Just Cremation, and my mother and I retired to the den with large glasses of sherry.
There would be no service, just the family, and a brief “visitation.”
“Well,”my mother said,“that’s that.”
But that wasn’t that at all.
A Serious
Little Mountain
THE DAY AFTER my father died, I called Casey in Quebec to give him the news. During that first night it comforted me to know that he was up in the woods with his surrogate family, engaged in the safest, most bucolic activity imaginable— making maple syrup.
It reminded me of the phone calls from Brian’s mother, who at 91 is frail but still living in her own home.
“So Marni’s fine and Casey’s fine?”Yes, Brian tells her.
“So everyone’s okay.”The mantra we need to repeat.
Another consolation was that my father had died without ever being aware of the dangerous episodes in my life. I hadn’t told him about that little sea plane ride where I watched the co-pilot poke a broom through a hole in the cabin to get the landing wheels unstuck. Or how our South American bike ride ended in the Atacama Desert of northern Peru,with chest pains and the world’s longest taxi ride to Lima.
With Casey, of course, it was the opposite—we knew all too well what he was up to. Or so we thought. A few weeks earlier, after the school term had ended, Casey had told us that he was heading out to the Maritimes on a camping trip with his girlfriend Julia. They were going to climb Gros Morne mountain in Newfoundland. An easy day trip in good weather, according to the website. They planned to hitchhike there, but this was eastern Canada not Nevada. I paid scant attention.
However, things did not go as planned. I was spared the details until sometime later, when Casey decided to write an account of their trek up Gros Morne. Here is part of it:
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