How I Love

Cozmo-the-dog is showing signs of dementia. Yes, I know I see dementia everywhere, but also yes, I am sure. 

The look of confusion on his face when he’s rung the bell and I’ve taken him outside to his run but he’s forgotten what he’s there for. “Did you want to come outside to pee?” I ask him. “It’s okay if you just wanted to check for lions.” (Lions because he’s a Ridgeback, originally bread in Zimbabwe to help hunters capture lions.) The way he stands in the middle of the room, as if wondering what he’s supposed to be doing. (Nothing. He’s never supposed to be doing anything, except exactly what he wants to do, which is usually napping.) And the blank look in his eyes, sometimes, when I cuddle him good morning and he appears to be puzzled as to who I am. 

He’s almost ten human years, and that’s old in Ridgeback years. I’ve only been his stepmum for the past two and a half. I know this drill—I’m a short term memory, and so I’ll be one of the first to go. 

I’m aware he’s aging physically. He can’t always jump up in to the back of the car. After an hour-long walk he tires. He’s anxious when he can’t see David. He takes his time on stairs, avoiding them whenever possible. We’ve unrolled a floor runner to help him navigate the path from the door, to his water bowl, to his beds. (He was once one of four ridgebacks in the house—he has many beds from which to choose.)

I have watched other dogs grow old without losing their memories. Cozmo is different. Two years ago he didn’t ever look discombobulated, and he never hesitated. Now he’s uncertain, sometimes fearful. 

“He can’t tell you what he’s thinking or feeling,” the vet remind me. “He doesn’t have English, or words in any language.”

I know. I know. Doug can’t tell me what he’s thinking or feeling, either. He doesn’t have English or words. 

I have snuck Piper-the-cat into Doug’s care home; it would be more of a challenge to walk Cozmo (120 pounds, about the height of a dining room table) through the reception where I sign in. And who would benefit? Not Cozmo, being in a strange place, full of unfamiliar smells and sounds. Doug is an animal lover, and at one time he’d have enjoyed petting Cozmo’s head, caressing his velvet-smooth ears, but now he no longer strokes his dementia-friendly or soft stuffed animals. 

I hold Doug’s hand. I feed him treats. I take him outside whenever possible. I tell him that I love him.

I am doing the same for Cozmo. 

Because really, what is "caregiving" if not showing love the best way I know how to?

All the Lives I'm Not Living

“There are always points of collision - moments at which it is possible to say, yes, if I had done that differently or I had been standing slightly to the right or I had left the house two minutes earlier or if I hadn't crossed the road just then my life would have taken a completely different course.” Maggie O'Farrell, My Lover's Lover

I read that novel on the train to London a few weeks ago, and sat in a coffee shop in Victoria station to finish it. Then, my head full of the characters Lily, Sinead, and Aidan, I walked to the V&A along streets I’ve walked so many times before. My earliest memories of this part of the city are from the year I was five, holding tight to my grandmother’s hand. I spent my late teens and twenties in London, and my most of my forties only an hour away. I was a Cordon Bleu student, an apprentice, a Chef, a wife, a divorcée, a Masters and then PhD student, a new wife. I was a granddaughter, a niece, a cousin. 

In Life after Life, Kate Atkinson describes time as a palimpsest; I thought of this as each step sparked memories from a different period of my life. There’s the shop where Aunt Em and I bought completely impractical (but very beautiful!) wine glasses for the directors dining room I ran, there’s my doctor’s surgery, a Mews where I catered a dinner oblivious to the celebrity guests (whose names I didn’t recognise and have long since forgotten), Divertimenti, the cooking store which used to be just down the street from the Cordon Bleu, the club where a then-friend celebrated his 40th, the Food Hall I loved introducing to Doug . . . and all the empty spaces where landmarks from my life used to be. 

And this route (Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington) is just one tiny patch of London. . . I’ve lived in Clapham and Notting Hill, worked in The City and a dozen other places, partied in Soho and Covent Garden, walked mikes and miles across almost every other neighbourhood. This was my city, once.

My sister gave me Joy Sullivan’s Instructions For Traveling West for Christmas, and “First, you must realise you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living,” has become my new mantra. But I struggle. I can so easily picture a parallel world where Doug is well, and he and I are living happily ever after. Where he was joining me on this walk, meeting our friends, Tiff and Amy, exploring our favourite rooms of the V&A together.

Imagining is what I do best (there’s a reason I write fiction). So I also imagine (returning to O’Farrell) where I might be had I not met my first husband and lost my twenties and thirties to him. Impossible to know. 

And here I am now. Sullivan's poem continues: "Get lost. Keep going. Give grief her own lullaby. remind yourself - joy is not a trick."

Flashbacks & Foreshadowing

I am deeply grateful for the four years I spent immersed in Alice Munro’s Dear Life, and how much I learned about myself through a close reading of all her versions of each one of those stories. I am equally grateful that for most of those four years Doug and I could have long conversations about the differences, subtle and dramatic–a change in tense, or punctuation, or a completely revised ending–and their effect on a paragraph, an understanding, the whole piece, and/ or the collection. 

My desk in the PhD room, 2015

Doug’s dad was a journalist and editor, author of a Toronto Star column called “Words” and passed his expertise about and love of language to his son. I was lucky indeed to have Doug’s insight. Again and again we returned to her techniques around analepsis and prolepsis. Munro is well known for her complex and multi-layered writing of time and the way in which her stories are rarely told in a linear fashion.  Time in Munro’s fiction, argues Douglas Glover, “. . . never flows in a straight line; it loops and eddies and suddenly compresses in a spasm of action then stretches out again” and Gerald Lynch notes her writing’s “temporal gaps, slippages, and recurrences.”

So true to life. Verisimilitude - another of Munro’s literary strengths.

Multiple times I day I remind myself to Be Present! Live in the Moment! But I also look both behind and ahead. “I am a part of all that I have met;/ Yet all experience is an arch wherthro’/ Gleams that unravel’d world, whose margin fades/ for ever and for ever when I move.” (From Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”) As I move forward in this new chapter of my life with David, I think back with regret at all I didn’t do with or for Doug–all I could have done differently, better. On the positive side, this abundance of regret is helping me create a full life now. No hesitation, no holding back, no second guessing. David and I share a love of travel, and we both choose to spend money on experiences rather than stuff. (Well, with the exception, in my case, of books and scrapbooking supplies.) When one of us suggests an adventure, the other says yes. And off we go. On a hike, to dinner, to Disney, to the theatre. I do not dwell on the fact that David’s dad lived with dementia, but I am aware that each day we spend together is precious, in a way I wish I had been when Doug was well.

Sneaky weekend away, April 2024

A friend and colleague who has a one degree separation from Munro’s family assures me that although she was living with dementia, she was still able to enjoy life on a day-to-day level. I wonder. I hope so. But at best, I am skeptical. I will not ask for clarification with regards the definition of enjoyment.

I understand. Last week I sat, holding Doug’s hand. I fed him ice cream and read him some of our favourite poetry. I told him about my week. I reminisced about some of our holidays, long walks, and a few of the many, many moments I cherish. I described the view outside the window; I told him what wildflowers are already in bloom. 

Trilliums, May 2024

And had his friends asked me after I’d kissed him good night and left the home, I would have told them that he was content. And hoped they didn’t ask me to define content.

Doug, like Alice Munro, was a writer, a reader, and a lover of language. To live without books, and newspapers, and magazines, and pencil and paper in hand . . . It breaks my heart.

The summer school in Cambridge at which I’ve taught for many years has survived the pandemic and I’ll be teaching with them again this summer. I am going to take David back to the place where Doug and I made our life for those four years when I was reading Dear Life. I have no doubt that I will be looking back, even as I move forward. 

Teaching, summer 2016

Trigger Warning: Butterflies

Memory can be such a double-edged sword.

I have been thinking about content warnings, about the power of words to harm at times, heal at others. 

The powerful and supportive content warning Charlene Carr wrote for her most recent novel, 

We Rip The World Apart

I expect fiction to reflect real life, and I expect real life to be full of sorrows and horrors as well as joys. If I choose to read a novel set during a war, I am prepared for savagery and inhumanity, though I also hope for moments of grace. If I choose to read a novel exploring a marriage, I expect miscommunications, hurts, the possibility of infertility and/or infidelity, along with the many forms of love that can hold a marriage together. 

My childhood was perfect; I grew up in a beautiful location, in a safe country, with loving parents. I was beyond spoiled as a child: in the summer I played on the beach and in the river in the front yard, went camping, visited my grandparents in Nova Scotia and England. In the winter I cross country skied through the woods, skated on the river, downhill skied in Quebec every March break. Thanksgiving and Christmas were magical holidays. My younger sister was - and is - my best friend. When I was older I was lucky enough to travel (across all seven continents), live in many other countries, earn three university degrees, meet Doug, a wonderful man, and make an extraordinarily happy life.

A photo Dad took of Margie, me, Ginger the cat, Mum, Em. Of those six, only two remain.

As a child, I only knew what I knew. As an adult, I can look back and see cracks and imperfections. My eldest sister died when I was three, my older sister lived with undiagnosed mental illnesses, my mother suffered from serious and persistent depression for years. I struggled through high school, only barely graduating. Later, I survived an unhealthy, unhappy marriage. A category five hurricane. Three months in a psychiatric hospital. A vicious divorce. Whilst still newlyweds, we discovered Doug was living with early onset dementia. And my biggest regret - I am not a mother.

When Doug and I were living in Cambridge we wrote restaurant reviews for several publications. After one review in the local newspaper, a reader commented that “Gloin and Ells must have been wearing rose-colored glasses . . .” because that reader’s experience of the same restaurant had not been as pleasant as ours. We laughed at the criticism but knew it was true. We both saw a glass as half-full, always. Irritatingly cherry? Overly optimistic? Perhaps. 

pub grub in Huntingdon

same shirt, different day! dessert in Brighton 

(we ordered a knickerbocker glory because that's what my grandmother and I always shared 

at Fortnum & Mason . . . more of my happy childhood memories)

But the good, the positive, the beauty in our lives - in our opinion - far outweighed the shadows. We could have focused on the negative, considered ourselves victims, and defined our lives by the hardships we’d endured. Neither of us chose that option. My sister  and her family nicknamed Doug “Mr. Cheerful” soon after their first meeting, and he was - and still is, as much as I can discern. His childhood stories were like mine–full of sunshine and love and happy memories–and although I'm sure there must have been sorrows too, I have no idea what they might have been.

Life is difficult, and navigating it is difficult. I believe in triggers, though I can’t always predict what might affect me. Despite the hurricane, I’m not scared of wind storms. The other day, however, a cookbook fell open at one of Doug’s favourite recipes and I blinked away tears. His handwriting. A shoe store window displaying the red running shoes he yearned for (he asked for so little) that we couldn’t find when we were shopping for sneakers. And this weekend, a tent full of butterflies.

Because I am supposed to be “establishing my brand as an author on social media” and I’ve been reading murder mysteries & romance novels (i.e. not literary or bookclub fiction) last Thursday I thought I might post a #throwbackthursday photo on Insta (if that’s still a thing, rather than a trend that's been and long gone) - so I looked though photographs I taken on that same day in previous years. Close to that date in 2015 Doug and I visited a butterfly garden outside the National History Museum in London. That was such a good day - I remember so many details I didn’t capture in the photographs I took. But it held bittersweet echoes for Doug; he’d taken his dad for a day out from his long term care home to a butterfly conservatory in Niagara, just a few months before his dad died. 

Doug, 2015

On Saturday, completely unplanned, I visited a butterfly exhibit for the first time since 2015 and experienced such a surge of emotion I could barely see the gorgeous creatures through my tears. Coupled with the sharp pain of missing Doug was the guilt of knowing that I am continuing to live my life without him.

Again and again I’m thankful that in our last few good years Doug and I made memories. At the same time I regret all we didn’t do; I wish I’d done so much more.

Were I to include a content warning for my novel, I could mention infertility, infidelity, 9/11, stillbirth, death, dementia, alcoholism . . . but how can I guess what else might stir up a painful memory for one of my readers at that very moment? Raspberry pie, a fire tower, the hard plastic chairs in a hospital’s waiting room, the sound of a child’s laughter, a three-way mirror, silence, loneliness, loss. And what about a butterfly?

photo by Mum

“The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; 

it simply flies on.”

-Guillermo del Toro

"Butterflies are nature's angel. They remind us what a gift it is to be alive." 

-Robyn Nola

“Till a' the seas gang dry . . .”

Doug’s care home is located on a road we’d driven many times as it’s a short cut between our house and my childhood home, when Mum still lives, just over 100 miles away. The building is well known - originally the site of a dark episode in Canadian history, but the morning he moved in was the first time we’d stopped there. As I parked, I knew that when I left at the end of the evening I’d be alone in the car. Leaving him behind. And I did, though I had to sit in the car for a long time before I felt safe to drive. 

The first two weeks were absolutely the worst (until Covid struck and I realised how much worse “the worst” could be). I arrived at the home after breakfast and stayed until he was tucked into bed in the evening. We had lunch and supper together every day, joined in all the activities, and both of us endeavoured to navigate this new routine. I tried to hold my tears while we were together, because my crying upset him. I was often unsuccessful, but I managed (I think) to suppress the worst of them until I was once again alone in the car, driving home to Piper-the-Cat. 

About four minutes from the home there is a house which, then, had an elf on a bicycle at the end of the driveway. The elf was dressed in seasonal outfits, and his bicycle was decorated to match. Over time that became my cue to pull off the road, blow my nose, wipe my eyes, and find a big smile. 

Sometime during Covid the elf disappeared. (I liked to think he was on a round-the-world trip.) Then the house was sold. (I hoped the elf had relocated with his family, and was given a new bicycle.) The new owners posted signs making it clear they supported the freedom convoy and were not in favour of vaccinations - views diametrically opposed to mine. 

Pavlov knew what he was doing. Even now, when I am far less likely to arrive at Doug’s home in tears, the empty bicycle where the elf used to live reminds me to find a smile in preparation for our visit. 

Recently a late season snowfall coated the bicycle so it resembled a ghost bike. I remember reading about the white roadside bicycles when I first started noticing them. They are part protest, part memorial, a way to make visible the invisible, and bear witness (Reverend Laura Everett, author of Holy Spokes: The Search for Urban Spirituality on Two Wheels).

Doug is NOT dead. 

But. 

But.

It has been such a long time since we were able to make new memories together. Every (one-sided) conversation we have is a distressing reminder of how far apart we are. Of what we used to do together, and how very much we’ve lost.

The day of Burns Night we listened to Burns’ poetry and songs; I was okay until “A Red, Red Rose” - the song to which I walked up the aisle on your wedding day. I had brought Doug’s wedding sporran for him to hold, but he wasn’t interested in it, so I was the one who clung to it, stroking the tassels and tracing the pattern engraved into he cantle. 

Holding on and letting go; I struggle with both.

So then to my blog: a way to make visible the invisible and to bear witness.

Again, December

 

I am not a stamper, but I’ve used this stamp multiple times this year. It reads: sometimes this time of year is just hard.

In amongst the Christmas cards on my mantle is a condolence card which arrived this morning. My Uncle Richard died last week leaving my mother, the eldest of four, the only surviving sibling. I tried to write a poem about the incongruity of sympathy cards arriving in the same post as Christmas cards the year my dad died. 

My mum and her brother, a few years ago; 

I have far more snapshots of them foraging for mushrooms, hiking, and sitting by campfires

My best friend’s mother has been diagnosed with cancer, and within days of being admitted to hospital has been moved to the palliative wing. This woman has been a second mother to me for my entire life; a world without her is impossible to imagine. My friend is somehow managing to balance caregiving and grieving whilst also creating Christmas for her children.

Many other friends are struggling with other challenges.

And everything set against the utterly horrific news from other parts of the world. 

Yesterday Doug and I had lunch together. “Had” lunch - his care home is currently in outbreak, so I was masked. Our lunch date comprised my feeding him and making a one-sided conversation. But then we held hands and listened to Fireside Al Maitland reading Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd, and for just a moment my eyes were dry and my heart was full.

 Our Christmas Eve tradition.

Early this year, but just as meaningful.

My wish for everyone is that the coming weeks hold many of those precious moments, when, if only for a brief time, all’s right with the world. 

Physics of A Car Crash

November was your epitaph, Dad --

That awkward month when maples, stripped

of their impulsive sobright leaves, scrape

the pre-snow pale sky

filled with leaving shadows.

The world was rushing toward holidays;

but inertia overcame me; I stopped

slitting thick, ivory envelopes.  

Christmas cards addressed to you 

and sympathy cards for us

lay in a random pile on the edge

of your oak desk.

But nothing is random, I heard you say,

explaining Newton’s laws of motion

energy and force and the ordered

behaviour of the universe,

saw rows of formulae in your neat script

like skidmarks etched into black ice.