Where've I been this time?

I had planned to be back blogging again once we got back to Fredericton, probably Wednesday evening, but I'm quite a bit later than that now because frankly I was in a pretty bad mood over a fairly minor setback and I really wasn't interested in doing the sort of writing I do here. Maybe if it were a simple bit of recounting the day's events I might be able to do that, but it's never been about being a simple chronicle, so if I'm not in the right frame of mind I'm only going to end up frustrated and disappointed with the result. There weren't many of you around for my little writing project back about six or seven years ago but it was plagued by similar problems.

So where was I? The funeral and the wake, I guess. There were a lot of people who came through that I didn't recognize at all, another group that I recognized and couldn't put names to (some of those were because the people had changed a lot and some of those were just because my memory has never been good for connecting names and faces) and the usual group that I get to see most times I'm on the Island. I've only been to a few wakes like that before so maybe they're mostly like Mom's was, but I was really struck by how many people sat around after they'd come by to talk to us and just were chatting amongst themselves. It really was almost a party atmosphere, without the music and drinking, I guess, which is more than I'd hoped for. Around the end of the evening someone, I can't even remember who now, one of Mom's cousins, I think, came by to tell us that they were going to invite everyone over to their place after the wake to keep sitting around and chatting. We decided not to go -- by then I was feeling wiped out -- but that kind of confirmed my impression, that it was a social event and enough people were enjoying themselves that they decided to keep it going. I'm sure Mom would've liked that.

Thursday morning was beautiful. It was already around 15°C by the time we left the house and by mid-day it was into the low twenties. We drove over to the funeral home and had a few quiet moments with Mom before we had to head over to the church. There had been a social group Mom had been active in that was going to come over in the morning, they had planned to come as a group and since it involved people from all over the Island they had asked if we would mind if they came on Thursday morning, visited her briefly before the funeral and then went over to the church to save the members from coming to town twice. I said I didn't mind at all but it turns out that nearly all of the group had decided to come Wednesday night anyway and come back on Thursday morning, so there wasn't too many people there in the morning.

The two things that stand out best for me from that morning at the funeral home was the complete sense of loss I felt when I came in to the room and saw her lying there and said "Good morning, Mom," in the same way I had been every morning for the last three weeks. I know that by that point it was just a body, it wasn't her anymore, but that sense of it being the last time I'd get to say that with her in the room was harder than I expected.

The other thing was when we were leaving and I kissed her forehead. There was enough make-up and such that it didn't feel like her at all, I don't think I'll forget that sensation for a very long time, but in a weird way that was comforting. It really made the point to me that the casket didn't hold anything terribly important to me, the essential part of Mom is somewhere else now.

The actual funeral was conducted by Fr. Brad Sweet, a very young priest in the parish, though I'm also sure Mom would've liked him. He's actually an interesting character himself. He was ordained on August 19th (I think) and was appointed to the parish on September 1st, so he was very new, though he had been a deacon in Tignish for quite some time, I guess. He's something of an anomaly, though, since he converted to Roman Catholicism at 28 and then decided that he wanted to become a priest, eventually getting special permission to allow him to do so because he was already married. Speculation among the folks I talked to was pretty rampant about how old he actually is -- I think he looks younger than me -- but he's probably not much more than his mid-40s.

At the graveyard it was sunny and warm, a perfect early-September day, quite a bit warmer than it had been over the days when Trish and Jim had been in town with us and I found myself really wishing she could be there with me. Immediately after the service I sent her a text message letting her know how things had gone and that I was doing okay. At least as okay as could be expected, I suppose.

The CWL had a reception for everyone back at the church and by the time we made our way back there I realized just how critically we'd misjudged things in that respect. I think we'd said we expected about fifty people and that many of Mom's friends and relatives had offered to bring sweets so we only needed them to provided sandwiches and beverages. By the time we returned from the cemetery, though, there was standing room only and I'm sure there were a hundred people, probably more than that with the arrivals and departures. It was yet another one of those moments where I realized just how many people knew and loved my mother, whom I'd always kind of seen as having a reasonably quiet life. The fact is, yes, she had been quiet a lot of the time, but she had been involved and that had mattered greatly to many more people than I'd realized.

I've debated this next point quite a bit over the last few weeks, what I write about it because I don't want anyone reading this to read anything else into it, there are still some pretty tense subjects in my family, but ultimately this is for me and I don't want to forget it. After we had left the reception I came out to the car and parked beside us was my cousin, Kent. He and I used to be inseparable when we were kids. As far back as I can remember he and I would play together when my mom and his mother (my cousin Sheila) would get together. A combination of things sort of separated us a while back, silly family stuff to some degree but I think it was more just age and changing priorities, these things happen after all. He apologized for not having been in the reception and at the funeral but he'd had a couple of emergencies with his business he had to take care of -- I don't really think that had as much to do with it as some potential other awkwardness, but that's irrelevant now -- but he wanted to make sure he came by to express his sympathy and to try to offer a little comfort. That's about all I'll say on it, I guess. He was there and he wanted me to know he was there, which meant a lot to me.

So we had the remainder of Thursday and Friday planned to take care of whatever business we could do, then head back to Fredericton on Saturday and back to Ottawa on Sunday, with everything moving up a day early if we wrapped up everything on Thursday and Friday morning.

Now we're finally back to the part that led me to make the statement in part one of this update that I was assuming stuff not everyone knew. We knew there was going to be stuff that we needed to do with another trip to the Island. Mom's car, which I'd been the legal owner of since July, needed to be driven back. The headstone wouldn't be in place until mid-October and Jim Peters hadn't expected us to pay for it until it was placed. There was a lot of stuff that belonged to Mom that we were going to move back with us. This was all stuff that probably could have been dealt with while we were there at the time but after the previous three weeks I was utterly exhausted and I didn't feel up to anything. I just wanted to get back to work and try to get some kind of normal routine back into my life for a bit. So we decided that we would use the unused half of my plane ticket, the one that Christine had booked for me to return on September 21st, to fly back to the Island around Thanksgiving and we would rent a moving van, load it up with Mom's stuff and drive back after that. The matter of driving Mom's car back would probably remain un-addressed until Christmas.

The next week back at work was mercifully quiet and I spent the better part of a couple of evenings doing nothing but writing thank-you cards for people who had made donations in Mom's memory or who had sent us cards or helped out at the funeral or wake in some way. The week after I was travelling for work and the next week back at the office it was still reasonably quiet so I had evenings free to sort through some more of Mom's papers as well as our own.

During that time, though, we did some estimation and determined that it would be almost the same cost to us to have professional movers move most of Mom's stuff from Brenda and Steve's basement as it would for us to rent a truck, pay for gas and insurance and such, so we opted to pay professionals and instead fly home for Thanksgiving drive the car back this time. I kind of liked that option better because I didn't want to gamble on good weather at Christmas for Christine and I to each do solo drives back, particularly with two cars we'd never driven in snow before.

So that largely brings us up to date. We flew down on Saturday, a week ago yesterday, and had turkey and all the accouterments on Sunday and Steve and Brenda's and again on Monday at noon with my father. Monday evening we went to have dinner with my cousin Sheila (yep, Kent's mother) and her husband Kenny thanks mostly to running into Kenny by accident in the Sobey's on Saturday night, and then back to have leftovers with Dad on Tuesday night. Lots of big meals were had on a Thanksgiving were Christine and I had no solid plans and had to turn down at least two invitations from my family in Ontario.

By Tuesday morning we had a reasonably long list of things we had to do. Christine and I both agreed it looked like more than one day's worth of work but it probably wasn't more than two, so we'd still be able to stick to the current plan of driving back to Fredericton Wednesday evening, visit with her family on Thursday then back on Friday morning. It turns out, though, that we accomplished everything we needed to do on Tuesday and so Wednesday morning was just getting up, going to visit the grave where the new headstone had been placed the day before, and then back to Freddy.

I guess it was a bad sign that Wednesday morning, while we were loading the car with our luggage and a few things that were too delicate to send with the movers, we saw the first of the season's snow, but it was light and didn't last long so I didn't sweat it too much. A bit of a warning that not all would go as planned, though, I guess. Wednesday evening we visited Bill and Jackie, Christine's sister and brother-in-law, and both on the way there and the way back I noticed an increased frequency of a problem that I'd seen once on the Island on Tuesday. The car was struggling to shift from second to third gear. Thursday morning we had a leisurely breakfast with Christine's parents and then planned to go make a few critical stops (visiting the comic shop I used to frequent when I was in university, long since moved from the original location but still overseen by the same friend was chief among them) but we were hardly halfway to town before the problem with the automatic transmission (it's a shame it's financially impractical to convert this vehicle to a manual, I'd do it in a second if I could) became impossible to ignore. The only good side to that was that the idiot-light came on then, too, which is normally the sign that a code has been logged to the computer, so it's not just me explaining in vague terms what's wrong.

It turns out that the computer controlling the transmission was reporting its own failure. I suppose a good thing but basically just confirming what I already knew. The good news is that the component in question is still under warranty despite Mom's car having been a 2002 model. The bad news is they couldn't get a replacement in until Monday so our plans of returning and me being back to work next week are shot. The current plan (keep in mind this is Sunday afternoon and a lot can change tomorrow morning as they start replacing the computer) is for us to drive back on Tuesday and return to work on Wednesday. On the up-side, I don't have an intermittent shifting problem in the black magic (as far as I know) that is an automatic transmission to have looked at as soon as we get there.

Where've I been? (Part 2)

Okay, this was originally the rest of the previous post, but it seemed almost cheap to keep going with it after I spent so much time talking about Mom's last moments. So I cut it out and put it here.

Anyway, the rest of that day was a mess. I kept busy as long as I could. We were at the funeral home, we were talking to Janet and Gregory and Zita a lot, we went back to Brenda and Steve's for a while and I logged in to work from my laptop to try to answer a few questions and keep my mind occupied. Unfortunately this is where my memory gets a bit soft around the edges, too. What I do know is this. It was Tuesday. The funeral was Thursday. I'm pretty sure we left the Island on Saturday, we took Friday to try to accomplish the last of the business we could, and we returned to Ontario on Sunday.

I know Gregory and I started making the rounds right after that. There was, obviously, the business of the funeral home to attend to, but there was also a number of other things that needed to be done. We needed to cancel Mom's old age security cheques, we needed to cancel her health care card and her driver's license, I needed to get into the safe deposit boxes to get a look at her will, stuff like that. Gregory knew he had been named as her executor and I was the next of kin -- it's funny the things we knew then and the things we knew a few days later, as much as I dislike the random associations my mind makes much of the time, it can be somewhat embarrassing when I'm standing in the washroom and my subconscious burps up some particularly funny tidbit, I couldn't help hearing Lawrence Fishburne talking about what we know in The Matrix -- but we didn't know if there was anything in there that we would maybe need a lawyer to interpret for us. We were hoping the answer would be no, that we could just read the will and carry out everything the way she'd already told us it would go. Whatever money she had left should go to paying off her bills and covering her expenses, pretty much anything else would go to me, her jewelry would go to my sister (and Trish and I had already made a slight amendment to that when her and Mom had talked about the paintings and Mom said she wanted Trish to have the ones she'd had up in her place on Campbell; no big deal that, since we had been told by Mom that's what she wanted and it's also what I wanted, honestly I would have been happier if Trish had taken more of the paintings, we already had some and I want to share and I do feel like I've had a leg up all along since I knew Mom had been painting for years, but I think we agreed on something we can both live with).

It turns out that we couldn't cancel Mom's CPP without the executor present to sign the papers, so we had to call Gregory. Then it turns out we couldn't cancel her driver's license without him present too, so we called him again. Then it turns out we couldn't cancel it anyway without him present and a copy of the will saying he was the executor. That leads me to a mystery that still confuses me a bit. There was no will in Mom's safe deposit box. That meant we had to wait until at least Friday when we could get an appointment with Mom's lawyer.

The safe deposit box, though. That was just full of unexpected traps and treasures. She had a stash of cash in there labelled for her final expenses. A large stash. There was a mouth organ (read: harmonica) there as well that a week before I wouldn't have known at all but after having met some of the relatives I now realized was the one Greg (my Grandfather) had played at dances when he was a teenager. I guess according to the strictest interpretation of the will that should have been mine now but I was sure it would mean more to Gregory than me, so I took it from the box for him. The worst was a birthday card I had sent Mom two years ago. I'd written a note in it and she had kept it and put it in the box. As if that wasn't bad enough, she had written her own note in it for me, "Dear Hon, You'll be reading this after I'm gone...". I'm serious, that's my mom. I tried reading it right then but I couldn't get more than a few sentences in, I hope there was nothing time-critical in there because I put it back and I don't plan to read it before Christmas.

So we did what we could on Tuesday and we were at the funeral home on Wednesday from about quarter to one until almost five and again from about six-thirty until a little after nine. We slipped out for dinner at The Heritage (again, I've eaten there quite a few times now) and on the way out I was sure I heard my name. I turned around and there, sitting at one of the tables with his brothers, was George, my cousin Evelyn's husband. I wasn't even sure he was on the Island and I had pretty much concluded that he hadn't heard, that we hadn't been able to reach him in time, but it turns out that he had been planning to come by to see us during the evening sitting.

The sittings. That was something. I mean, I guess I kind of knew how many people loved Mom and were likely to come by to see us from the number of visitors she had while she was in the hospital, but it was still overwhelming. In a good way, of course, I'm just lacking another word to describe the feeling I got when at one point I looked up from the person I was talking to and literally saw a line out the door of the salon of people waiting to see Mom.

Anyway, I'd met a lot of people in the hospital, but there were a lot more people I met at the funeral home who had only known through the notices we put in the news paper or had on the radio. (Oh, for anyone not from that kind of community, we still have death announcements on the radio stations. And they have the occasional traffic report, too, which always makes me smile for some reason.) Most of those people came up to me, generally introduced themselves (most names of which I've forgotten) or reminded me who they were (like Mr. Greenan, one of my two favorite catechism teachers) and then offered their sympathies. They'd inevitably ask how she died and then offer up the logical conclusion, "was it diabetes?" My mom had been Type-2 for years now, everyone knew it, and who would have thought that she'd have died from a frighteningly rapidly progressing cancer? Most folks who had seen her recently (as in back in June and July, this was only the first of September, after all) had known she wasn't looking well but there had never been a breath of a word of cancer, so everyone I told was shocked.

Unfortunately I'm again running short of time, it's Saturday morning now and our ride to the airport is coming soon, so I guess I'll finish this up later with a part 3, though I'm not quite sure when that'll happen. It may not be until Wednesday, I think we're going to spend the next few days with Dad so my internet access will be somewhat limited. I'll be back as soon as I can, though.

Where've I been?

Depending on what metric you use, either tomorrow or yesterday was the one month anniversary since Mom died. It's also the same length of time, I now realize, since I posted any updates here. Something I've kind of forgotten about until just the last two or three days when, as I'm running into people again and we're talking about my plans for next week, I realize I'm assuming facts not currently in evidence, so to speak.

So I'll get to the current situation first, then skip back to a month ago and try to fill you all in.

It's Wednesday evening as I write this. Thursday evening will be my first curling game of the year (a curiously late start to my season considering how early it had officially started, but that's another story). Friday is a regular day and Saturday Christine and I get on a plane and fly back to the Island for an indeterminate amount of time more than the weekend and less than a full week. Brenda and Steve are going to pick us up and then we'll pick up Mom's car when we get back to Summerside. Gregory has been looking after it for us while we sort out everything else and now seems to be the right time to go pick it up. I expect we'll only be on the Island for a couple of days, we're already booking our time off at Christmas and I'm hoping this will be the time when I can really spend time with everyone back home.

Okay, so back to the first few days following Mom's death. What did I say already? Nothing, I guess.

I knew it was going to happen. Not specifically that Tuesday morning, but I did know it was going to happen soon. I had the feeling on Sunday night when I was getting ready to leave and the nurse, she didn't say it was close, but the words she used were different enough from everything else she'd been saying before that I knew I was right. So I stayed that night. Monday night Gregory and Zita stayed with her and Christine and I went back to Steve and Brenda's place to play some cards and try to get some sleep. My phone rang and I looked at the time on it before I answered it. Six-fifteen exactly, which seemed odd to me at the time. It still does, though I don't know why, except that as I sat in the car to drive over to the hospital I noticed that the clock in the car told me it was 5:20am, which was 6:20am local since we'd never set it to Atlantic time. Five minutes is what it took for both of us to go from complete sleep to in on the road. Not bad considering I also remember very clearly that I didn't feel panicked or anything, Gregory was very calm as he spoke to me -- I'd expect nothing else -- and that calm spread to me. We didn't exactly rush.

Anyway, we were in the room before 6:30am and by then Mom's breathing was very labored. I don't know if she knew we had come in or not, she wasn't really responding to us at all, but I went over all the same and told her Christine and I were there and that we loved her and I gave her a kiss and as much as a hug as I could manage. Basically nothing changed for an hour, then around 7:30am she started to experience apnea. I'd been expecting this too, the book Reverend Paul had given me had prepared me for this, so I didn't worry, I just started counting how long the episodes lasted. The book had said toward the end it might go on as long as a minute without any breathing and then start again and most of these were less than ten seconds.

By about ten to eight the four of us were talking quietly amongst ourselves and the sun was up, lighting the room up a fair bit. Mom had a somewhat westerly exposure with her room, but it was still getting bright enough that we could have had the overhead lights off. I thought about turning them off, I knew they had started to bother her over the last week or so, she liked it darker in the room, but at least the light over her bed was off and having the rest on seemed reasonable since the nurses were going to turn them on again anyway each time they came in. With the sun coming up on what was promising to be a pretty clear day, it seemed like a moot point anyway. So Gregory, Zita and Christine were chatting, I was making my usual distracted, polite noises while I started the mental stop-watch each time Mom stopped breathing and right around 8:02am the stop-watch rolled past the 45-count, which I'm sure was more than an actual minute, when I told Christine that I thought it was time to get a nurse and that I thought she was gone.

So things that stand out in my memory about those two hours is the time on the face of my phone (my pink phone, a funny for anyone in on the joke, not really worth explaining if you're not) telling me it was 6:15am, the clock in the car telling me I'd been awake five minutes, give or take, the clock on the wall in Mom's purple hospital room saying it was 8:02am when I concluded we were one less. There's one more thing. While I was counting that last time the sky clouded over. As I was sending Christine out into the hall it was getting quite dark. By the time the nurse came in it was raining outside. And by about 8:30am we had seen the last of the rain we would see for the next few days. So, yeah. Out of the blue morning sky it started raining when my mother died. That's the way it was supposed to be.

Y'know, I want to keep going, but I think I'll stop there. That's a good place. I'll turf the rest of this post for now and I'll put it in the next post, maybe for tomorrow night. I'm curling at 9:00pm, which means it'll be a surprise if I get home before midnight, realistically I'll be home around 12:30-12:45am (we never have just one round after a game, despite all being grown men with day jobs, but I also need to space them out a fair bit because I'm not completely irresponsible). So that means I'll either get the update done early tomorrow evening or not until Friday. Stay tuned, I'm back.