Shadows

When Jess posted about death the other day, I left one of those icky, petulant comments that sometimes those of us who have suffered certain kinds of loss can spew out unwittingly. I've been thinking quite a bit about it ever since: death, that is, and my latent ability to come to terms with it, not my own propensity for petulance. The truth is, my father's death changed everything, EVERYTHING, not just my understanding of mortality.

My dad died of Hodgkins disease when I was 7. He was sick for a long time beforehand such that my memories of him are vague and few. I remember riding up the gravel laneway in the back of his blue pick up truck. There was the time he spanked me--and good--for not listening to him. I remember his sickness and the days and weeks he lay in bed too weak to move. Oh, and I definitely remember the revolting carbuncle he developed on his back. My final glimpse of him was the day the ambulance carried his skeletal frame away. He would die a couple of weeks later. That's it. The sum total of what I remember of the man who was my parent for seven years.

I have every reason to believe my dad was a good man, a decent man. That's what my siblings remember. Brusque yet funny, he identified with Fred Flintstone. His favourite song was My Old Brown Coat and Me as sung by Doc Williams. His days were completely given over to farming before he took a union job to pay the bills when he got sick. He once told my older brother, "Ronnie, I've got nothing against Led personally, I just don't like his music." Ron, I'm sure, let Mr. Zepplin know.

Through our farm, Dad represented the sole income, the sole lifeline for a wife and six children. Is it any wonder that my mom once told me that on the day of his funeral, she had an overwhelming urge to jump into the coffin with him, to die right then and there?



We sold the farm when I was 4; he was already sick by then.

On the day he died, Mom came home from the hospital and gathered us kids together in the driveway. She told us that dad had died. I didn't get it at all. I didn't understand one whit until I saw my older siblings crying. This was late June, 1973. Come fall, I headed back to school where I was passed around like bruised fruit. I had no idea why teachers gently pulled me aside to make sure I knew I could confide in them. All I wanted was to get back to class and get the week's words for spelling dictation. None of it made sense.

Throughout my childhood, our family made do. We ate. We had clothes, heat, electricity and a fairly reliable car. Somehow we made do and that's all that really needs to be said on the matter. When it came time for University, Trudeau's Liberals gave this orphan (their term on the paperwork) tuition money and a bit more besides. I really do have social democracy to thank for all I have. In fact, if Dad had lived I doubt I would have been able to afford the opportunities I received.

But here's the thing: while I was away at university, I started having disturbing recurring dreams about my dad. There was the one where I would dig underneath our house in an attempt to find a tunnel out, only to stumble upon his bones instead. In another he had never really died but came back to our family in order to block me at every step. The final dream was always violent and recurred more than the others. In it I would stand on my front lawn surrounded by all the men in my family. These men that I trusted and loved raised guns and shot at my knee-caps until I woke up screaming in pain and fear.

In my mid-twenties, these dreams stopped but I've never known what to make of them. Did it really take me 20 years to internalize his death and then let it work itself out from my sub-conscious? Was I a little too isolated and terrified as a female undergraduate, the first ever in my family? Was I becoming keenly aware of the economic and social structures that had determined my life? I really don't know.



The only photograph of my entire family. I'm beside Dad, down front.

Jess's post and Jen's follow-up brought these memories all back in a rush and I knew I wouldn't be content until I had set them down somewhere. I no longer worry about the dreams or their import. What I do fret about is that fickle beast, memory. My dad died when I was seven and I retain precisely four memories of him. My daughter is three. She is just leaving her infant amnesia years. Until now I have been her everything and yet, if I died tomorrow, she would simply cease to remember me one day--not just my smell or the sound of my singing but everything about me and my love for her. What's more, she might even learn to cope by internalizing me as a spectre, a sinister shadow that would one day haunt her dreams.