Anniversaries are strange, especially when they are marking time going not towards, but away. Time is only what we make of it, and if we made nothing, then 12 months or 12 years since an event would be just another day. Yet we do give it the meaning to define life, and so as I look ahead to the last days of August, each one comes heavy.
We are into the one-years now, since my dad’s sickness and death. One year since the last photo he sent me. One year since the day he told me he was struggling with a bout of asthma. On Sept. 9, it will mark one year since he went into the hospital; on Oct. 4, it will mark one year since he died.
It feels strange to keep writing about this, to keep Tweeting about it, to keep weaving it into my time with friends. I worry it’s too repetitive; I worry that nobody wants to spend time with my grief, now that the grace period has passed. Time heals all things, as they say, but time moves differently depending on what we are leaving behind.
A year ago is a long time, but I can still see the light in his dancing blue eyes.
But it’s not just for my own sense of coping that I write. It’s also that I still don’t really understand grief, which keeps me wanting to plunge deeper into its heart; mine is also a curiosity. I need to know it, to name it with the words it deserves. I haven’t found them all yet, but every day that passes brings them more clearly into the light, and I begin to see this new country of which I have become a reluctant resident.
Grief is often described as a journey. To me, it is more like a whole world. There is no destination, and there is no single path through. But it does have its own topography, its own peaks and valleys, its own geographic features that heave up from the earth and, once in awhile, lead you out of the lowlands and into a spectacular view.
Lately, I have found myself in a new part of this country. It stems back to the moment when, in the early days of dad’s four-week battle in the ICU, the doctors came to us with bad news. It wasn’t looking good, they told my sister. He was in respiratory failure. It would be very hard to treat.
We struggled to understand it, then. Dad was still awake, and so strong, and in good spirits. He was still being an entertainer, still keeping his visitors laughing with a cock of his eyebrows or a tweak of his body language. He was in massive physical discomfort, despite the drugs that aimed to dull the pain, but he was so resilient.
Later that day, the doctors gently told him the bad news.
“I don’t want to die,” he told them, writing his thoughts on a little pad of paper he kept near his bed. “There are so many things I want to do. But I am not afraid.”
I’ve said this before, but: it was then that I realized he was the strongest person I have ever known.
— — —
On Aug. 20, Canada marked four years since the night the Tragically Hip played their final show, in Kingston, that indescribable moment that saw a whole nation share one night holding onto life with a dying man.
Two months later, in October of 2016, Gord Downie gave what would become his last interview, a sit-down with CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge. Downie was still making music then, and not in pain, but the glioblastoma that was slowly ravaging his brain meant that he forgot lyrics, and forgot names. Although he’d known Mansbridge for over 25 years, he’d written “Peter” on his hand to remember, just in case.
Mansbridge opened the interview by asking how Downie was doing.
“I’m doin’ good,” Downie replied. “Everything sort of seems to make sense. I am learning how to do it, because I’ve never done it before. And it’s tricky, but I have beautiful friends I’ve built. I’m so lucky.”
The first time I heard those words, they shook me, because they captured something so true and yet rarely heard: I’m learning how to do it, he said. Because I’ve never done it before. We never talk about dying as a skill, as a practice, as something that has to be learned; in fact, in this culture, we rarely talk about it at all.
This seems like a major omission. So many resources, both familial and societal, are invested in helping us learn how to walk through each stage of life. We are taught how to read, and how to write; how to work, and how to play; we are taught how to be real grown-ups, at least where that means how to conform to the expectations of the world around us. But we are never taught how to die, despite the fact that this — more than parenting, more than home ownership, more than how to file taxes — is the one skill that all of us will need to have in our lives.
But this culture’s discomfort with death, and specifically with dying, is so profound that it prevents anything like an honest discussion. In 2016, I wrote one of my most cherished features of all time, a profile on Andrew Henderson, who died of cancer mere days after making his own dying into a live art performance. In our short time together, we spent several hours talking about this phenomenon.
"Everyone is so sensitive around me," he said. "This is what’s happening in my life right now. You gotta be able to come to the graveyard with me and sit there and have a cigarette and talk about what my tombstone’s gonna look like.
"But death becomes such a scary thing for people, that I’ve found that I got put into this untouchable category."
He sighed. "It’s not like what it was, where we would talk about what’s going on in our lives and there’s more of a flow," he said. "It’s very much a pity party for me. And I’m like, ‘F--- no, I’m having the time of my life.’"
We never made it to the follow-up interview we’d planned. Just a few days after we’d last spoken, Andrew died. When I heard the news, I broke down in my car and cried. Then, although I’d only known him a week, I had the strangest thought that still feels right: he’d have thought it was perfect, and sort of funny, that he died before we could finish our story.
In the years since, I’ve thought about Andrew often. He was an old soul in so many ways, but also a new one, resplendent and fully aflame with the full potential of life, even as his own was almost out of time. It was, in part, that experience that inspired me to write about Christmas at Jocelyn House hospice; Andrew had wanted me so badly to understand that it’s okay to talk about what it means to die.
There are efforts to improve this. There are death doulas now, and this is a beautiful service, but I think, were we not so collectively uncomfortable with learning how to die, we would not need to create a special niche for this work; it would be a skill we would have all been taught as we’d grown.
Still, starting the conversation around it is something. Near the end of that interview with Downie, Mansbridge asked what scared him; I didn’t know it at the time, but his answer there would become very relevant to my life.
“I don’t want to die because my son is 10, my youngest son, Clemens,” Downie said. “And that really scares me. Obviously. But I sure want to do this right on the way out so that he’s not worried. Not too worried.”
The strength a parent can hold, to lead the way for a frightened child.
— — —
One night, not long ago, I sat on a park bench with a friend, and somehow found myself once again rehashing the last days of my dad’s life. I’ve come to terms with them now, mostly. But there is still a question that whispers in the shadows of my brain, forever unanswerable except through faith.
Did he hear me, on that last night?
It was a Thursday evening, around 8 p.m. The ICU ward was quiet; its lights had been dimmed. The nurse gave me a polite smile as I tip-toed into my dad’s room, alone. It was the first time I had gone to visit him in over a week, and though he’d had some improvements — he was almost ready to breathe on his own — he was not waking up.
I sat next to his bed. I tried to coax him back to consciousness. I tried to beg him back towards the waking world. I told him that I still needed my dad, but only silence came back, and as I slumped into the chair I realized I wasn’t saying the right things at all.
In my article about losing my dad, I wrote about what I said next.
So I pause, and gather my thoughts, and I tell him: you don’t have to worry about us anymore. The kids, we’re flung across North America, but we are still in this together. We have group texts and phone calls and we’re holding onto each other. He would be proud of us, I murmur, and we’ll tell him the whole story someday.
His eyelids don’t flutter. His breathing does, shifting in syncopated rhythms. Message delivered, I decide.
I remember what else I said: “do what you have to do, Dad,” I said. “I’m okay.”
That night, my dad’s breathing, so easy when I had visited, collapsed. In the morning, the ICU staff were kind, but frank: they were ensuring that he was not suffering. They would try to keep him alive as long as they could, so that family could fly to Winnipeg to say goodbye, but we could count that time in just a matter of hours.
He died that afternoon, around 4:30 p.m.
In the 10 months since, I keep replaying the last night, when I told him we were okay, that he could do what he had to do. I keep wondering whether he heard me. It seems too coincidental that, after days in which he had been hanging on fairly steady, his body should finally collapse within just hours of my speaking to him.
Was he just waiting for that? Did he hear me? Was he hanging on until he knew I was safe, and until I gave him permission? Is it wrong that, even though science is fully non-committal on the question of how aware he could have been, my heart and my gut are both fully convinced that he understood every word I was saying?
Under the twilight that fell over the park, my friend said he believed it.
“He was being a dad,” he said.
All of a sudden, everything made sense. The pieces I couldn’t quite fit together before now found their match. It was so simple to hear it said, and yet somehow it had never quite clicked. Even after he was no longer conscious, my dad finished the job he had started: he kept being a dad, right to the end.
And I thought about how my dad had endured all the trauma and indignities of ICU with humour; I thought about how he had told them he was not afraid. I thought about how he gave me a thumbs up, when I asked him to promise me he’d never stop trying. I thought about how, even as the last of his strength ebbed before they placed him in a medical coma, even as he began to fade, he still bore every minute with grace.
It was just like Downie said about his own child, in that interview four years ago: my dad didn’t want me to be worried. Not just right then, for the ending of his life, but also for mine. Everything I know in life, I learned from my father, and not just from his instruction but his example. What I see now, but didn’t fully realize at the time, is that the final lesson he set out to teach me was how to die.
There is a whole world to explore on this yet. For now, I just want to admire this view, and rest.