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.

As a little boy, one of the figures I remember learning to draw was a Treble Clef. I thought it was just a funny spiralling capital “S” that had something to do with music.

I’m pretty sure that my Mum taught it to me. She could read music, and had once been a talented pianist and opera singer. I’d seen a Treble Clef in Sunday newspaper funnies whenever Schroeder played Beethoven on his toy piano. I could recognize musical notes in drawings, but I didn’t know what they actually said or meant. They were part of some mystical other language – and judging by the old music they usually represented, the language must have belonged to olden times.

There were little reminders of a musical past in my maternal grandfather’s house in Victoria too: a tiny black toy piano, or a ukelele sitting in the corner gathering dust. Down in his basement, my grandfather had a full-sized upright piano that had been damaged years earlier when his hot water heater blew up. It was covered in boxes, and other than a couple of pokes of its keys by his curious nine year old grandson, it hadn’t made a sound in years.

Around December of 2021, while going through files of my mother’s early photos and papers, I rediscovered a high school handout from her early music training. It was a collection of ten typewritten pages that might have been a correspondence course of some kind. It mentioned preparation for a provincial exam, and it covered musical notation, scales, and staffs. In it, I finally read the explanation of the Treble Clef (known as the “G Clef”). As I read on, I was delighted by the idea that at 55, I was finally tracing some of my mother’s youthful footsteps.

I remembered enjoying learning the notes in Grade 6 music class, and trying to play the recorder, ukele, and guitar. In the forty years since, I can still recognize quarter, half, and whole notes, but I’ve forgotten everything else. I could probably learn to play music by ear and practice, but sheet music itself had never come to life for me – it had remained a silent visual language from a culture I’d only visited or observed, but had never lived in. I felt regret in that realization.

So a couple of weeks ago when I started reading my Mother’s old high school music notes, I wondered why I hadn’t tried to learn to read music years ago. Could I have become a musician like her? Looking at her pages, at the grand staff and its two sets of bars, I started to understand how the layout of a piano keyboard matches the staffs in sheet music. Schematically, a piano seemed to be a much better match for musical scales, and better for learning music and music theory than a guitar.

Learning about reading and playing music might help me to connect to her…

Looking back on the past year, in the midst of such fear, uncertainty, and worry around pandemic disease, war, and political and social unrest, I can say that in spite of all those unsettling factors, I have almost ironically grown to feel like some of my old, personal internal baggage has become lighter, almost vapourous, and some very old shadows have almost faded away.

I’m talking, in colorful terms, about the baggage of my youth: my past family experiences and my strained relationships with my parents.

So far, in my True Life writing project, I’ve dredged up a lot of old memories and revisited many one-sided assumptions. I may still regret many of my parents’ life choices, but I’ve also learned to celebrate their successes and to appreciate them. My mother and father were not just tragic people with burdens and failures. They were each full but flawed, and each worthy of compassion and understanding.

Maybe at the age of 56, I’ve finally grown enough distance from them and gathered enough of an older person’s perspective in my life that I’ve released a lot of my lingering sorrow, hatred, and resentment for how their mistakes affected me and my sister. Maybe the mass and individual tragedies in the world in the past few years has finally convinced me of life’s finiteness, and made my problems seem smaller and more ordinary. Maybe I’ve finally reached a “life’s too short” resolution.

Deaths of family and friends has probably been another major factor contributing to my letting go of baggage:

In 2018, we lost our brother Victor to cancer. In 2019, we lost our beloved little cat Peaches to a mysterious cancer-like tumour. In 2021, we lost my wife’s father to complications from Covid.

Watching an old friend’s family suffer the devastating loss of their mother and their son, I saw how the grief and pain drew them all closer, and made them even more devoted to each other. Last month, one of my wife’s dearest friends passed away from cancer too, and we watched her family’s love coalesce and crystalize in the same way.

It’s felt like step after step of loss, from one person to another, all of them reminding me that living must come to an end for each of us some day. Often, a recent loss will evoke a memory of an earlier one, tangling and compounding the grief.

At some point back in my youth, I believed in life as a kind of infinite horizon that offered me as much room as I could take. I felt it was up to me to keep running towards that bright light. Now, it’s an end-point, not a magnetic goal to run towards. It’s more like a wall. I feel as if I can see the wall that I must one day breach, and it’s getting gradually closer. I wonder how long I’ll live, and how healthy or happy I’ll be while I’m doing it.

The challenge is in accepting this truth:

While my life’s horizon no longer feels infinite, once I get over that last wall, everything I am will be.

It’s okay to visit the past, but you’re not really supposed to live there.

For most of my life, I’ve had questions about my parents, especially my mother. There have always been things I wanted to know about her, but even when she was right in front of me, I either couldn’t ask them, or she would not be in a position to answer.

That feeling of unresolved curiosity and the dread of lost opportunities are nagging, bothersome, incomplete feelings, born of a thousand little toddler-era insecurities.

I started asking myself questions about my Mother when I was between the ages of twelve and eighteen, but I was raised to “accept things” and “move on” with the necessities of living. That was the tone of our family: don’t discuss painful subjects, and don’t question Dad.

I asked lots of little questions anyway, but if my questioning got into tender territory, Dad would lose patience. I learned to not ask him about my Mum very often. These tendencies were practical – they stopped one from being frozen with regret or guilt – but the downside is that they just left all my questions buried under a thin veneer. Until I really decided to dig a little deeper, I’d never know enough about who my mother Angela was on the inside. Our Dad had already known her and lost her, whereas me and my sister had lost her without ever really knowing her.

After our Mum passed on in 1995, I took on a challenge for myself to write my life story as much as I could, to try to capture and make sense of the actions and events of my parents, the arc of their lives, and what my life meant. Overall, that writing project was really just me trying to answer the question “Who am I?”

Revisiting the past can be a limiting experience, like climbing inside a box of memories and being trapped in with them, banging your head against the interior.

But, it can also be an expansive, creative experience, where you integrate new information and new insights, and describe your discoveries. The Past can be like a gallery, meant to be shared and celebrated.