Category Archives: relationships

inspiration, memoirs, relationships, stories

Kindness: A Porttrait in Blue

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On Tuesday, July 15th at around 12:15, we said a final goodbye to our beloved cat Blue.

“Blue-Blue”, as we called him, had been with us for about 9 years. We adopted him and his sister back when they were about five.

In June of this year, my wife noticed that Blue’s breathing had become much deeper and laboured, as if he were taking sharper breaths more frequently. He was also weaker than we’d ever seen him, walking slowly and no longer jumping up onto our couch or chairs.

Our vet checked him out, and X-rays showed a lot of fluid in his chest cavity and around his heart, which are all signs of advanced heart disease where blood is leaking out of the arteries and settling into the vestibular areas around the heart and lungs. That accumulation of fluid creates pressure on the lungs, causing them to decrease in size. His heart was weaker on one side too, and more fluid had built-up in the sack that surrounded his heart, causing pressure there too. Basically, his heart was struggling and breathing had become difficult. In typical cat fashion, he made no noise to show his discomfort. A cat’s instinct is to hide weakness and illness from others in order to not be seen as easy prey for predators. They also tend to isolate themselves if they are feeling very unwell.

The Animal ER hospital put him on oxygen and removed over 200 milliliters from his chest, and more from the pleural lining around his heart. After a scary few days in hospital, he came back home and started taking diuretics and blood thinners to help manage his condition. After that first day or two at home with the pressure relieved and the sedation worn off, his spirits bounced back and his smile returned. He looked more like himself again. If we could keep him on his regime of meds (4 pills, every 8-12 hours), we could manage his illness and keep him living a happier life. Unfortunately, Blue discovered the bitter pills that we’d been hiding in his soft treats, and he got wise that we were grinding other meds into his wet food. He refused any food that smelled of his medicine. The prospect of forcing pills down his throat against his will felt like elder abuse to me. If he saw me coming after him with a pill popper, he’d just learn to run under the bed and avoid us. We didn’t want him to fear us or have any anxiety about us, so we made the hard choice to let him eat whatever he wanted and to avoid the meds altogether. It meant that we were in more of a palliative mode with him now, accepting that his life would soon come to an end, one way or another. At best, the fluid extraction and meds had bought him 2 more weeks, but he wouldn’t accept any more meds.

The fluid extractions were done by inserting a big syringe into his chest on each side. We didn’t want to submit Blue to any more invasive procedures, scary separation, or sedation. We just decided it was best for him to live as long as he could in his peaceful, familiar home.

Blue’s decline over the next week was steady and noticeable: he got slower and seemed uncomfortable, appearing somehow both restless and tired. He would lay in our bedroom closet for an hour, and then come out to the main area to lay on the carpet. We tried to feed, brush, and talk or sing to him whenever he was up and about. In spite of his regular mild activity, we worried that he might not last very much longer. His cardiologist confirmed our fear, telling us that he might only have days left. We knew what we needed to do next, and we scheduled an in-home euthanasia from a local vet. It was so difficult to have Blue take his last-ever breath while laying in my arms, but letting him nod-off peacefully was a dignity that our gentle old boy richly deserved. I felt like we had taken on the crying and the suffering so that he wouldn’t have to. Today, Blue’s remains are in a blue urn on our mantle, along with his paw prints. He sits up there next to his sister Peaches in her little pearl-coloured urn.

Every time I looked into Blue’s face, I saw the face of a smiling little friend. In fact, he didn’t seem so little to me at all. His importance in our lives made him a major figure in our home. He made a huge impact.

Blue’s affection was always sincere and unreserved, ever since our very first introduction in 2016. With Blue, the act of being itself seemed like a form of communication. Every pose or move he made told us something about him. Over the nine years he was with us, he taught us to understand him and he watched us closely to learn how we behaved too.

Blue was a good communicator. His eyes, whiskers, and ears told us everything that the word “meow” could not. He used his whole body to communicate, pointing his eyes, his face, or even his entire frame towards whatever thing that he wanted us to pay attention to. His tail was a living punctuation mark, a barometer of his moods, pointing up when he was happy and excited, down when he felt sad or scared, or twisted into any manner of loops or shepherding crooks when he felt intrigued and delighted. I’ve never really paid enough attention to human body language, but I have learned to read “cat” quite fluently.

If I had to sum up Blue’s personality in a word, “kind” is probably the best one I could use. He watched over his sister Peaches in the months when they were stuck in the animal shelter system. Peaches had a lot of fear and anxiety at first, and really relied on her brother to feel safe. They were all each other had. By the time we met them at the SPCA, they were five years old, and had been in the animal shelter system for months. Thankfully, they’d always been together.

Blue had originally been named Epo. He and Peaches had come to the Chilliwack shelter from an owner in Langley. Their owner was moving and couldn’t take them to the new home, so had put them up for adoption. They were about five years old when they entered the SPCA in Chilliwack, then the “Catfe”  cat cafe in downtown Vancouver, before going to the shelter in East Van where we met them. We all got along pretty well from the start, but they were a bit overweight and had noticeable fear and anxiety. They needed a quiet, loving home with lots of room and sunshine where they could feel secure and safe. After being cat-less for four years, we were more than ready to welcome a pair of bonded kitties into our life again.

I’m sure it was was difficult for Blue when his sister Peaches died a few years later. She’d developed a huge tumorous mass all around her heart and lungs, and it was basically inoperable. Poor little Peaches had no future ahead of her. We had to have her euthanized. Blue seemed to understand what had happened when we’d taken her to the Animal Hospital but had come back later empty-handed. We cried as we vainly tried to explain her passing to him. His pupils just went huge and he started shadow-boxing like mad on our glass patio door, “bump bump bump bump!” with his front paws.

The easiest consolation we found from losing Peaches was that we could still pour the excess Peaches portion of our love and care right back into her big brother. Over the next nine years, Blue bounced back, prospering emotionally, returning that extra love back to us ten times over.

https://ejohnlovebooks.com/true-life/tree-house/biographies/i-am-child-free-my-children-are-different/

inspiration, memoirs, psychology, relationships

Sixty years on, the scales of guilt and anger may have balanced

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As I approach sixty (in my sixtieth year now), I admit to feeling almost no remaining guilt, anger, or regret whenever I think about my parents. There are just a few whispers, but my attachments to them are long gone.

As a kid, living with them had been both exciting and scary. As an adult, I found that their deaths made me feel real closure and relief.

My Dad

When my dad died, I was 23. It was a painful, rending loss of a person whom I’d once admired, loved, feared, and finally pitied. A year or so after he died, I learned about the full extent of his abuses in my family and I grew to bitterly despise him, his hypocrisy, and his total lack of accountability. He’d raised me with words like respect and responsibility, but his nature contradicted that: He tended to want to sweep his failings under the carpet rather than face them and try to fix them. His narcissistic and authoritarian character ultimately destroyed any fatherly image he’d tried to own.

I took many lessons of his life into my heart. Whenever I need to bring out a strong, authoritative voice, it’s his voice that emerges. He could be sweet, caring, and gentle, but his good moments are forever in risk of being eclisped by his bad ones. That scale is inherently biased: violence, whether psychological/or physical has a denser molecular structure than peace and love. One nasty, violent act, if unredeemed, can overshadow fifty acts of kindness.

I really had to hate the man to truly let him go. When he died, I grieved, but I also felt calmer in the realization that my obligation to him was finished.

My Mum

When my mum died, I was 29.  I felt such a mix of regret and relief. She’d been remote, like a stranger to me, for as long as I could remember. She’d been an enigma, hard to know, and even harder to reach. Her depression and alcoholism were terrible barriers for her to hide behind, but that was her passive, withdrawn way. As a family, we did nothing to intervene. The elephant in the room was illustrated blatantly in a TV commercial I saw as a kid, and that simple phrase and image has stayed with me all my life. We never acknowledged our elephants. Nothing was to be spoken about it.

Over eighteen years of awkward visits in whatever hospital my Mum was living in, I could never really know if she recognized or saw me, even when I was standing right in front of her. She’d left her family to be mired in her own dead end existence, without physically going anywhere. It was no life for her.

I decided to try to preserve her best qualities within my own values and actions and to never punish her for her lack of mothering. Being a mother was never in her nature. She needed mothering and support herself. She was a victim of forces that I couldn’t understand.

Some break-ups just take a long time. Forty years on, I’m still learning from my parents’ examples.

psychology, relationships, stories

Fear of Becoming Her

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Today, my day went flat in more than a few places. Although I think I’d had a good night’s sleep, and our morning and breakfast were fairly bright and happy, my energy became low and lethargic, and  by noon, I felt both irritated and emotionally flat. I didn’t feel much enthusiasm for anything.

Grace and I did a Sunday drive out to Lafarge Lake, bypassing Riverview Hospital as we drove down Lougheed Highway.

I enjoyed the sunniness of the lake and the surrounding park, watching the ducks and the pretty scenery. It was a happy but only momentary distraction from my flat mood. Grace noticed my flatness and I’m sure it likely dragged her down too.

I apologized to her when we got home. She decided to book gym time right away and go get her system cranked up with some cardio. She invited me, but I just said “have a good time” and stayed out on our balcony rocking in our patio chaise and playing solitaire in the remains of the afternoon sun.

As I sat there rocking, I remembered that my cousin Jill had recently recounted a visit she and her family had to visit my family some time back in the 70s. Jill had recalled that throughout her family’s brief visit with us in our living room, my mother had just stayed in her armchair near the back of the room, rocking compulsively and twiddling a lock of hair around her index finger. Mum didn’t seem to react to anyone, and by that point in her depression was pretty much withdrawn into her own mind.

Even almost fifty years later, being reminded of my mother’s  dissociative behaviour and that it had been witnessed by my cousin and her parents, the memory shocked me all over again. Mum had been self-medicating with alcohol for a year by that point, I guess. She didn’t want to see anyone or do anything, and in her deep depression, the compulsive rocking motion and anti-social lack of response was probably her only way to create a defensive shield or a psychological distance.

I didn’t understand it at all as a kid. Indeed, her behaviour was never confronted or even acknowledged by any of us at the time; it was just part of my family herd of deeply dysfunctional elephants that followed us through every room.

I considered all that while I ironically sat compulsively rocking on our patio. I don’t want to have even an outward similarity to my Mother’s depressing behaviours, but there it was. In passing 59, I intend to stay aware of my moods and the ways I might counter-balance any isolationist tendencies. I’ll probably always need my alone time, but I won’t indulge it in a way that hurts the people I love.

I will apologize to Grace when she comes back up from the gym, and then maybe we can figure out what to do for dinner tonight.

history, memoirs, psychology, relationships

Add water and get stirred.

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My parents have now been dead for over 30 years. About five years ago, I realized that I’d started to see them more as my ancestors than my parents. It’s begun to feel like my life with them happened a long time ago, to somebody else in another lifetime.

I maintain a large family tree database that goes back about 250 years, and my parent’s names now seem to sit quietly like all the other names and dates on the leaves in my tree. The personal bonds, the feeling of knowing them first-hand, the familiarity I once felt when I used to see them, it all seems to have withered away. The warmth I used to conjure up in my heart when thinking about them seems to have disappeared into the wind now too. It just feels like I’ve lost something special, that my blood connection or association to them has gradually faded. Maybe now they’re more like ghosts than ever before.

I never saw this coming. Worrying about preserving my memories was what originally motivated me to start writing about them back in 1995, not long after my mother passed away. At that time, I wondered if my family memories would fade away, and the stories I remembered would be lost. I knew those things had a shelf life, but still, I suppose that I always took my memories for granted.

It seems now like my stories are still tucked away in the folds of my brain, but perhaps my perspective on them, the glasses through which I review them, has changed as I’ve aged and grown farther away from the original events. Maybe emotional detachment is inevitable and just comes on with time. Maybe the pendulum on my folks has swung over from subjectivity to objectivity.

Sometimes, if I’m sharing memories about our parents or past family times with my sister, I get that old connected feeling back again. It feels comfortable. I think we’re probably as tight as a brother and sister can get, with everything that happened to us growing up. I only have her with me to remember our mother and father the way that we knew them, and I’m so grateful that talking to her helps me recapture my feelings of being my parents’ son again – the feeling of having a childhood and a family home. Even more, I’m grateful if talking to me helps her to reconcile her own side of our family traumas. Sharing is caring, as they say…. 

Another part of the parental remoteness I felt is the distance I experienced growing up: the long generational space that always existed between me and my parents. I had somewhat older parents than my peers. My Dad was 45 when I was born, and probably 15 or 20 years older than most my friend’s dads. As a kid, differences in age always felt very significant.

My Dad was born in 1921, over a hundred years ago. My Mum’s centennial birthday will come in 2031. They were both kids before World War II. Their world back then was all analog, rendered in radio waves and photographic film. Their telephone calls crackled and sounded shitty, people wrote letters not emails, and a loaf of bread cost about a dime. And I’m sure that everyone grew up smoking and drinking in their teens, because it was cool.

There’s a real psychological distance at work. Maybe as parents and kids, we never really knew each other as well as we could. My parents were adults, and I was raised to believe that they actually knew what they were doing, despite regular evidence to the contrary. I wouldn’t know much about their behaviour habits, their values or ways of thinking until they were already too far in the rearview mirror.

Lots of kids grow up thinking that their parents must have come from a whole different planet. We couldn’t know how much they were or weren’t in control of their lives. Maybe “family” was just a survival construct for adults who were hanging on and getting by in life.

In practical terms, the parent-child relationship has been lodged in my past for over half my life by now. So why did I miss them so much tonight that it came out in little convulsive sobs? Where does that new hurt come from?

I’d thought that the past had been compressed down inside all the little stories I’ve written, told, and sold to myself. Maybe I was just believing my own bullshit. It seems like real regret and loss can unfold old, seemingly-collapsed memories out into new equivalents of depth, like a kind of self-revealing reverse-origami. Maybe my flattened emotions and Cole’s Notes summaries of memories can be reconstituted like condensed orange juice, brought back into their full bitter flavour, with just the watering of a few tears. Add water and get stirred.

inspiration, memoirs, relationships, stories

The Good Father

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In my childhood, two men personified fatherhood for me: my father James Evan Love, and my grandfather Ernest Huntley Clarke.

I believe that people are neither inherently good nor evil, while absolutely being capable of the whole spectrum of good and bad behaviour. It’s on that spectrum that I try to place my father and grandfather.

As a kid, I’m sure I had a simplified view of morality, of good versus bad, and perhaps I even excessively idolized my grandfather. I didn’t know about moral relativism or any of the conflicts or ambiguities that adults actually faced. My early values were probably rendered in the black and white and primary colours of the sunday newspaper funnies that I loved to read. Adult lives and motivations remained mysterious, and it would be years before I’d start to understand the contradictions that a dispassionate universe would impose upon grown-ups. The universe didn’t seem to care about right or wrong; it was up to each person to know the difference.

One thing I learned early-on as a defining characteristic of a good adult was how they dealt with responsibility, obligation, and consequences. Good grown-ups took their responsibilities seriously and were reliable in fulfilling them. Good grown-ups owned their mistakes. Bad grown-ups, on the other hand, were unreliable and inconsistent. I had seen that some bad ones even tried to avoid consequences altogether. Some adults could not be trusted.

So, that’s the lens through which I look at my grandfather Ernest and my father James. Ernest had seemed to me always reliable and responsible. He’d always held a quiet dignity, kept a regular schedule in his activities, taken good care of his health, and managed his affairs with care.

When we lived with him for two years in his house in Victoria, I observed how my parents seemed secondary to him. It was more than the respect that a guest gives to their host. It was like a deference that my unemployed parents granted. Ernest became their de facto landlord while we lived there; they paid him rent. Looking back, I’ve wondered if this grated on my father’s strong sense of self determination. Dad had always been a proud and headstrong man, but it was proper that under Ernest’s roof, James was not the boss of the house.

Ernest Huntley Clarke came to Canada from England at around twelve years old, as part of a group of Salvation Army Home Children. As he grew into his teens, he worked his way west from Quebec through Ontario, to Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. At eighteen, he enlisted in the Northwest Mounted Police, which a few years later would become the RCMP. He was a Mountie for thirty years, and was honourably discharged in Esquimalt, BC in 1948. After that, he held a variety of occupations in his later years, and in his early seventies was the manager of the Yates Hotel in Victoria, still working full-time, when we came to live with him.

“Mister Clarke” (as the hotel’s elderly residents called him) was a well-liked and respected man. I never saw him drunk, and never once did he seem to really lose his temper or lose control of his emotions. He led by example, stood with quiet dignity, and I admired him like nobody else.

In contrast to Ernest’s humility, my Dad seemed to have an active ego, and a need to prove what he knew in front of others. I think Dad needed to be seen as the smartest guy in the room, and to be seen to be in the right. I never saw him assert his intellectual dominance around Ernest though: I suppose that my Dad genuinely respected his father-in-law.

The trouble with a person who needs to be in the right is that often they cannot admit when they’ve done wrong. That was my Dad all the way through: admitting fault or (heaven forbid) apologizing for a wrong were things I never ever saw him do. All he did when confronted with a past bad action was get defensive and angry. I never once saw him apologize for anything.

My Dad did lots of good things for me and my sister though: he raised us alone after our mother had almost died and gone to hospital, he stayed employed and made sure that we always had food, clothes, and a roof over our head. He brought us new bikes for Christmas. Occasionally, he took us out for McDonalds or KFC, or drove us out to the airport to watch the planes land at YVR.

Dad did try to impart values of self-reliance to me and my sister Kim, but even his attempts at constructive lessons were framed by his bitter memories of childhood betrayals or grisly experiences in the army or as a firefighter. To him, the world was challenging, unfair, and absolute: you had to know how to fight to make your way through your group’s “the pecking order”. Dad taught each of us how to throw a punch, but not how to discuss or compromise.

My Dad was not in control of his demons, his addictions, or his temper either. He could be volatile and frightening when drunk. He could be violent, and we learned early that it only takes one violent and unrepentant adult to break your trust and undermine your belief in heroes. That’s why my grandfather Ernest remains so important to me: he seemed to balance the scales in life and remain in the light, even when my Dad was at his darkest.

history, memoirs, relationships

A Ghost in you…

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There’s a song by The Psychadelic Furs that really got under my skin when I was 19 (it’s still in there).

“The Ghost in You” made me think of the important people who were not with me, most significantly, my sister Kim, and my Mother Angela.

Both of them were alive at the time, but separated from me for different reasons. My sister and I had been pals and playmates until we were about nine or ten. We were often separated as a consequence of family tragedies, misplaced loyalties (mine), or other people’s stupid, selfish decisions (our father’s). As the boy, I aligned with my father, mainly out of fear. As a girl, Kim would have been aligned with our Mother, if our Mother had been there and had been a factor in our lives.

Separation from my mother was permanent and irreversible. We had no relationship to speak of with her from about the ages of nine or ten, as she gave up on her family and escaped her life in situ, drinking herself into alcoholic abandon until her liver quit and brain damage and memory loss became her new abnormal.

She didn’t come back to us, mentally or physically. Once her memory got disrupted, her personality broke as well. She truly left us years before she ever left home and started living in various hospitals and became a ward of the province.

My sister Kim has survived, stayed alive, and made herself a life. She’s dear to me and I’m proud to be her brother. We talk regularly and we care about each other’s lives. I think that’s probably about as good as life can get: knowing someone who always wants to hear from you, and who always wants you to hear from them.

My Mum lived in the long-term care ward in Riverview from 1980 until 1995, where she died after struggling with pneumonia for a week. To me, her life was one of unrealized potential. Now all we can do is try to celebrate her beauty and recognize the traits, attributes, and abilities that she left us.

Memories are my constructs, my proxy rewards for the absence of real people. That’s where my ghosts live, preserved in my heart, freeze-dried in their best, most happiest personas. I greet them gratefully and warmly, like familiar old friends.

The Psychedelic Furs - The Ghost in You (Official Video)

 

history, relationships

Fatherhood

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My wife’s uncle passed away recently. He was a lovely man, surrounded by a loving family. His passing made me reflect on his reputation as a devoted father and member of his church. He left behind a family fresh in their grief, steadfast in their appreciation, and re-affirmed in their love.

My father died when I was in my twenties, leaving behind a fractured family, a dozen unresolved issues, a legacy of regrets, and no last will and testament. Over the past 35 years, I’ve become used to seeing his failures, arrogance, bombast, and violence in the foreground of my memories. It’s amazingly easy to stay inside the habit of bitterness, self-pity, and resentment. Those reactions were fairly earned at some real cost, and still valid to this day.

All the same, those particularly bitter truths obscure other less-familiar truths, like a dominant popular narrative that doesn’t tell the full story.

It’s common to focus on the negative and painful events to the exclusion of the positive ones. We learn from mistakes (our own or others) but not so much from our happiness and successes. So, I continue to mentally sift through my past, finding and polishing little moments worth celebrating that evoke pride in my father’s successes and joy in contemplating his warm moments.

I’m slowly separating the good man he could be from the toxic selfishness and anger he demonstrated. It’s really hard to separate a person from their actions, but I’ll keep trying to see both my parents as full-rounded people struggling with their demons.

Aside from my Dad, I also have to add that there have been a number of surrogate father figures in my life, who’ve provided support and positive examples of what fatherhood could look like at its best.

My maternal grandfather, Ernest Huntley Clarke (“Poppy”) was especially loved by me and my sister when we were young. He led by example every day, through his quiet, good-humoured, and dignified way of being.

I’ve prospered through the support of teachers who took the time to see and guide me, to help cultivate talents they thought were worth developing. The most impactful teachers I’ve known were when I was in art school, when I was slowly becoming mature enough to begin to appreciate them. Their attentions and challenges grew my confidence and self-worth every day.

My father-in-law, Honesto, provided a quiet kind of love and dedication, gradually accepting me as part of his family, and letting me help him when I could. His actions and sentiments to me were always uncomplicated and sincere.

memoirs, relationships, research, stories

Stories that aren’t mine to tell

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It’s good to be reminded of the ethics of storytelling involving other people. I’m talking specifically about family or friends who could be embarrassed or hurt by something I write.

I’ve always felt ownership over the stories from my life, but who really owns a story, and what right do I have to tell it?

Nobody’s life is lived in a vacuum. There are lines one can cross when telling tales that involve others. What can you say without asking someone for their permission or participation? It’s probably a risk that journalists deal with all the time, but being an amateur writer, I’ve tried to find the ethical boundaries on my own, and to think hard about tactics and work-arounds to keep a story on-point without risking someone else’s privacy and peace of mind. It can be a real balancing act.

Here are some filters I use to guide my personal story writing, when dealing with sensitive topics:

  • Will telling the story do more harm than good? There’s a line between telling an impactful story with a point, and telling a dramatic story to get attention. Just because there were various abuses and mental illness in my family background, that doesn’t entitle me to tell similar-themed stories of other people I know. Other people own their own stories, and unless I get their permission or participation, their story is not one I should be telling. For example, one family member straight-out asked me not to write about an incident that had personally affected me. It had affected them much more than me, and they wanted to avoid embarrassment. It was a fair request, so I’ve never written about it.

  • Did the event happen to me personally? This simple filter can help to keep me steered towards relevance while avoiding causing pain to others, just by respecting boundaries of privacy. I despise gossip and would never want to be seen as a spreader of hearsay just for the sake of spinning a colourful tale.

  • Is the person who might be hurt by your storytelling still alive? If the subject of your story has died, this may seem to cancel-out the factors listed above, but it really may not. What about other relatives who are still alive, who may take exception to your rendition of the dead subject?

  • Is your portrayal of a person or event reasonably balanced? I’ve found that an all-negative portrait of someone is never accurate in any case, so balancing negative perceptions with some positive ones helps to build a more-well-rounded portrait, and may balance the scales a bit. Still, be careful.

  • When dealing with sensitive topics, can you get permission or participation from the the main subjects, or their rights-holders? Try to do this. It’s ethical, respectful, and can save you from getting into all kinds of legal hot water. In my case, I asked my sister if it was okay for me to relay some painful stories from our shared past. They involved me directly, but the underlying pain she’d gone through and was still going through was primarily her stories to tell. Between us, we worked out a timeline of events and the people involved. I let her approve my final edit and told her that if she ever changed her mind, the story could easily be pulled off my site. There has to be responsibility and trust, and I’m grateful that she trusted me to render some extremely difficult moments. It was very brave on her part.

  • Existence is subjective, and everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story. I may feel like the world revolves around me, but that’s just my ego and one-sided perception. Be fair-minded and balanced.

It helps to remind myself that I’m just a microscopic mote in a world which has meanings and motivations that are so much bigger than me and my little life. Underneath each series of events can be found deeper patterns that often relate us to each other. Those shared patterns are the things really worth writing about.

memoirs, relationships, stories

Moonlight and Blue

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Tonight, I found myself sobbing over the age of my cat.
In calendar years, he’s about 12 or 13,
In human years, maybe almost 60, I think.

Maybe he’ll live another 7 if we take good care of him.
I’ll be 64 and he’ll be gone, just like his sister, Peaches,
whom we lost just a few years ago in 2019.

We’d lost two brother cats in 2011 and 2012
after raising them for 20 years,
from little kittens.

One day, Blue will be gone forever too, I cried in my head,
keeping my little convulsions silent
so I didn’t wake up my wife.

I walked out gingerly in my bare feet
to our enclosed balcony
where I knew Blue would be while we slept.

He was sitting on our table staring out our big window,
just looking at the moon and night sky.
He loves sunlight and moonlight equally.

He was still high off a little catnip that
we’d given him earlier, and he greeted me
with an enthusiastic head-butt.

I talked and he purred, and I stroked him
and he head-butted, and showed his joy
in all the curls and waves that his tail could tell.

His joy in the moment of moonlight sharing
made me forget my future fear and worry,
and just enjoy a beautiful now.

I was glad to meet him where he was
share his moon moment with him,
and have all the moments
that we can have
for now.

memoirs, relationships

Parental Memories Become Parental Archetypes

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Not long ago, I fretted over my fading memories of my parents, James and Angela.

This is part of my age and distance from them, but it also feels like the farther away I get from the years when I knew them, the more I need to compensate by filling in that distance with my own words and images. So, here I go again, I guess… 

My dad, James Evan Love, was my archetype for manhood and  manliness. I knew from a young age that I’d never become as much of a man as my father was. I imagined that in his best years, my Dad was as “wagons ho!” a trail boss as John Wayne, and also as dignified and authoritative a speaker as Gregory Peck. Dad loved to tell stories of his glory days, and to portray himself as a sacrificing hero, or a justified rebel.

He was born in 1921, over a hundred years ago. His many occupations included gambler, miner, welder, truck driver, marksman, stablehand and horse groomer, military policeman, firefighter, wheat harvester, dog trainer, RF engineer, and electronics technician. He was also a husband, a father, an alcoholic, a smoker, a bully, a hero, a fighter, and a survivor of a heart attack and multiple strokes.

My mum, Angela Huntley Love, was my archetype for womanhood. She couldn’t really speak for herself after a certain point in our lives, so it took me a long time before I understood just how skewed my framework for womanly virtues actually was.

At her best, my mother’s humour, joy of living, and inner beauty could eclipse her already-glowing outer beauty. I held her on a pedestal, just like her jealous husband did, and as many of her school friends had once done. I might compare my mother’s singing and musical abilities to one of her generation’s silver screen idols, Judy Garland. Her physical beauty also masked an intense inner turmoil and anguish, not unlike another famous actress, Vivian Leigh.

These hollywood comparisons are just my kind of rapid shorthand, to show how I can elevate and mythologize parental memories. It’s a tribute and a reflection of pride which feels good to polish, like a small piece of antique furniture, and remains familiar and comfortable to wear, like a warm old coat.

Before marrying my father, Angela had a varied career in music and on the stage. She competed as a vocalist, sang pop tunes and opera, she could play the piano, violin, or ukelele with vigour, and she acted and sang in musical theatre with the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and the Starlight Theatre Company, in her beloved hometown of Victoria. She was a talentedl artist, but fell in love and did what she, her parents, and her society wanted, getting married and having kids and probably sacrificing some of her own dreams.

Throughout her life, Angela bore the burden of mental illness, struggling with bipolar depression since her teens. Alcoholism arose too, likely as a way to self-medicate or insulate, and maybe in response to a lack of inner happiness or peace. (I’m making some broad assumptions here about her values or intentions which could be quite wrong. I’ll never know what she wanted from life, or what her dreams were.)

My observation has been that Angela seemed more suited to being a child than raising them. She was not really cut out for motherhood. She seemed enamoured with her children as babies, but might have become less interested once the kids got older and parenting became more complex. Nervous breakdowns and depression overtook her, and she was institutionalized after almost killing herself from alcohol poisoning. She only lived with her children for their first ten or eleven years, and that’s how she remembered them while she spent her last decade and a half in residence at Riverview Psychiatric Hospital.

For decades now, my father has been represented by a small ronson lighter on my bookshelf (an engraved memento, recognizing his role in helping to launch Victoria’s CHEK-TV in 1954). There’s also his beat-up wooden cane standing next to my bed. My mother is represented by a faded perfume atomizer sitting next to Dad’s lighter, dozens of snapshots in my photo albums, and some of her sketches in various sketchbooks. All the stories and drawings I’ve made from both of them are like my filtered memories borrowed from rare moments together.

Seeing them like archetypes is probably as close to immortality as they’ll get. Telling their stories again and again is like singing a beloved song because of how it makes you feel.

Maybe memorialization is also an antidote to the pain of losing their reality. I can pull out a frozen slice of time and thaw it out whenever I need to enjoy it again.

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