The Dark Season Illuminates

            My love for life is thorough and complete. There’s nothing else I know that gives me as much pleasure. I sail through the days and years of my existence, prow out. Experiencing, discovering, searching, feeling—I am filled with joie de vivre. Every part of me—mind, body, soul—can feel this bliss. Alive, I am wired for delight; touch any part of me and I will sing. And not only that!  

            And yet I am aware that one day I will die.

            That life and death go hand in hand drives me crazy, or nearly so.

            I know, I know—believe me, I’ve studied it, heard it, thought of it—it is exactly this, the awareness of the finite nature of my life, that makes my life so precious.

            Yes. Sure. Okay. Fine. Be that way.

            But that doesn’t make it any less devastating to consider that one day I will not wake to experience the trajectory of the earth’s spin, that at some point I will not be able to wrap my arms around my husband’s body and hang off him like a happy monkey, that I will not be able to take a sneaky sniff of my son’s heads and know the match of their DNA with mine, nor feel the minty touch of cool November upon my cheek.

            All the things that I love—the friends and lovers I’ve lost along the way, each one as precious as the moment I first loved them, the ones I’ve kept and love now, my brothers and sister and their kids, my cousins by the dozens, the songs I’ve played on repeat for hours, the leagues I’ve walked, the days and weeks I’ve danced, and this earth, my native home and lovely land, with its scents and secrets and sacred soil—I cannot imagine their absence.

            I don’t want to imagine it.

            Yet in this dark season, I am reminded that one day it will end, my passionate love affair with life cannot be guaranteed, no matter what vows I make, what foods I eat, what practices I engage in.

            My dad died in the year 2000. 

is he my dad, or what?

  His presence in my life—and his absence—impacted me to the core. Obviously, we share genetic code and the imprinting of nurture.

            I was angry with him most of my life. What I knew of men—and the patriarchy—from him played out in my life choices, in my sexuality, in my parenting, in my career progression.

This month, as the days shorten into long, velvet nights, I passed through another veil, and I knew my father, just for that fleeting millisecond, as a man wholly unattached to me, and my interpretation of our experiences together. And I knew love for, and from, him!

            He became ill before he died, and bore his pain stoically.

            He did not complain. He did not whinge. He didn’t moan.

            Zana says he sat quietly, looking out the window over their acre of backyard in what was once Carolinian forest in the Niagara Peninsula. A creek formed their boundary, and beyond that, a stand of broadleaf trees, birch, maple, ash.

He watched as the trees went through their yearly cycle of bursting birth, life, flaming bloom, and winter death.

            He sat quietly, for hours, for days and weeks. Watching the birds, busy among the luxury of leaves in that thicket, he asked one day, “Why now?” He was only sixty-five, due to retire that year, after a lifetime of hard work, manual labour, many jobs taken to support his family of six children.

He was a man of the earth, born in Stalinist Ukraine, a boy when Hitler’s army rolled into his town. He recalled a billeted soldier named Willi who gave him Schokolade. Peter was ten when his family vacated their home, and followed the retreating German army through war-torn Europe to a mythical Vaterland, which was in pieces when he arrived in Berlin.

he LOVED cool cars

His grandmother, a midwife and bonesetter named Margarete, bossed her brood out of the divided city’s Russian sector and into the freedom of the American domain. Other cousins, too weary to make that final journey, were repatriated to Siberia. My dad came to the Niagara Peninsula in 1949.

Fifteen in kindergarten, he graduated from grade eight when he was sixteen. Five years later he was a mechanic enamored with the cars of the 1950s, and married to Susanna, the quiet but feisty daughter of Russian Mennonite émigrés.  

early days

There’s obviously more, but by the end of his too short life, he had become the man who planted trees. At all his properties he had replanted land that had been cleared for settlement and orchards. He also grew vegetables and flowers in a climate that was friendly enough to sprout most seeds fruitfully.

           

His baby, a '57 Chevy with a customized plate that read: "Schmok"

The feature of many, I’m sure, photo albums in Japan, he sported a bushy moustache, muscle shirt, shorts and steel-toed lace ups as he watered the hanging baskets that helped make Niagara-on-the-Lake Canada’s Prettiest Town in 1996. Usually there would be a banana in his pocket, as my dad loved (and needed) his snacks. And he could be found regularly at the Niagara Coffee Shop on Queen Street at 10 am, with his town cronies, sipping coffee and swapping stories.

            A couple of these same colleagues were with him as he died, driving the ambulance that transported him from the Hotel Dieu in St. Catharines where he had received dialysis on his last day, to the palliative care facility in Niagara-on-the-Lake that had become his home when my mom couldn’t take care of him anymore.

the two of them

            Just that day, he had made the decision that he didn’t want to continue with treatments. “You know what that means,” the doctor had intimated. My dad made eye contact with my mom, then turned his head away and closed his eyes.

            They waited together for hours in a hallway of the hospital, my dad in a bed, my mom in a chair at his side. Finally the ambulance arrived. The drivers asked if my mom wanted a ride. She said no and drove herself the fifteen kilometers home, to meet him at the hospice.

            She got there first, and waited in the dark parking lot. It was July, and warm, even at so late at night. She’d thought about stopping to get a bite to eat as she drove past their house, but decided instead to tuck my dad into his bed before heading there herself.

            She’s so glad she did.

            She saw the ambulance turn up the road toward the hospital, noted the flash of lights, heard the siren’s whoop. It stopped quickly, the doors flew open and the paramedics ran to the back of the ambulance. She hurried to meet them.

            “He wanted to see you,” said Terry, a town employee who’d shared his breaks with my dad at the diner, throwing open the back doors, and wheeling my dad out.

           

Zana, wife, life partner

My mom said she found her husband’s eyes. Met them. Nothing was said.

            She sat with him as he breathed, and after a long, soft exhale, it was silent.

            He just wasn’t there any more, she says.

            I was walking Snowy beside the train tracks when my mom told me that story the other day. I’ve heard it before, but that time I really heard it. I fell to my knees, sobbing, the kind of crying that’s as powerful as orgasm, and as cleansing.

            What a gift my dad gave me; to die with such grace.

            In life we struggled, he and I.

July 19, 2000: his funeral day was the kind of day he loved, sunny and hot

            Happily I have lived long enough, and have had enough time—and I hear time is said to heal all wounds—to witness how, if we pay careful and loving attention, personal evolution may culminate in forgiveness, which is at its core, powerful and healing compassion.  

            So those are my thoughts, this November.

            I’ve been writing in the dark. In the dark there is so much to see.

The whole fam-damily, with Margarete, whose leadership brought the family all the way to Kanada.