By Catherine Ford
There are serious political issues that need addressing, but today nothing is as important as loss.
The turmoil in the United States, the bumbling of the Alberta government, even the seemingly appalling lack of organization and vaccine supply issues facing the Canadian government will have to wait. Reality is more pressing.
Within the past year, two of my oldest friends, women I lived with while at the University of Alberta, have been widowed after marriages that lasted more than 50 years. Such reality smacks me in the face; makes one realize how close and how real death becomes as we grow older. Both Mike Hancock and Ernie Walter were too young to die. And if you are older than 60, you know 80 is too young.
Both men were professionals, both were fathers and grandfathers. But before Ernie became a lawyer and eventually retired as the chief judge of the Alberta provincial court; before Mike earned a PhD and moved back to his home in England, they were young men in their prime, falling in love and marrying young women from southern Alberta. That’s how I choose to remember both of them.
Nobody actually wants to think about death. We have a tendency to soft-pedal reality. We talk about “losing” someone, as if he or she was a set of car keys. We talk about someone “passing” as if we were all pedestrians on the same sidewalk. Such talk does no one any favours. We all die. It is inevitable. No bunches of flowers or plush toys left on sidewalks or lawns ease the grief for those left behind.
Sandra Martin argues in her excellent 2017 book, A Good Death, that dying is the final human right, and all of us should have the choice, if possible, to plan our final scene.
But planning takes more than a personal directive; it takes time. Very few of the older generation (that would be me) bother to talk to children about death, with the possible exception of the “nursery” bedtime prayer that starts out positively, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and ends with the prophetic, “If I should die before I wake/ I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That should be enough to scare even the most optimistic child. I imagine that scores of children have been scared in the past year as deaths from COVID-19 have dominated the news.
Instead, we are lulled into believing that children remain unaffected or, if worried, that they will “grow” out of it.
But the demise of friends and acquaintances is a reminder, as if one needed it, that death, taxes and the increased price of decent scotch are always with us.
The most agonizing aspect of my mother’s final years was not her increasing senility, but the fact that over those few years, her life slowly shrank around her. It was hard to watch, harder still to help with the distribution of her belongings and heart-breaking to see her reduced to a single room in an auxiliary hospital, containing a few pictures, a television set, her favourite chair and a side table.
With each move, she carried with her less and less. Her life shrank from the world to one room. Such is a warning to those who have not yet qualified for an old-age pension: Beware the little life.
Still, if one believes in an afterlife, if one has a faith, then the 16th-century words of John Donne in Holy Sonnet 10 offer ease and hope for those facing the inevitable: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so … One short sleep past, we wake eternally,/ And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
For the rest of us, this is all we have.
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