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.
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.
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.
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.
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