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