Category: Deaths & Obits

Slow and fast, warm and cold

Right now life is a slurry of goodbyes and re-introductions; changes in temperature, ambiance, the furnace breaks, the filk convention looms, the tooth is snaggled, Granny’s dead, I’m finally back on the ERP at work, I am up again and spinning at a great rate of knots.  The distance between life and the blog is bigger than normal, and I have few venues (not none, fortunately) for venting about it.  Some things are burning brightly, some are swallowed by silence and distrust of the future.  The major thing is allowing myself to be happy by how genuinely pleased people are to see me.  I feel like I’m home, and I’m happy.

My back hurts.  Commuting subjects me to lots of interesting loading on my lower back. This is making me crabbier than normal.

One of my coworkers dreamed I was coming back to work.  I don’t know whether to believe it and I’m not really worried about it either way.  I’ve had one precognitive dream that I remembered, so although my sample size is small my willingness to believe is large.

Pocky.  It’s what’s for dinner. I bought Robbie B lunch.

Long hours of sleep, punchuated in the morning with traffic noise. Lest my mother be upset, that typo was deliberate….. now let me wander off my rails again and think about how we can set up an Aspie friendly place for the boys to do their mourning.  Because as sure as Darwin’s winnowing fan claims us all, I can think of four of my blood kin who need to go off and have their own corner to grieve in.  Of such are the ways of the accommodationist, the ever blooming woman of the boundary layer, who would be, of course, me.

Memorial service will be later

Probably during the week – the staff at the Cedars want to go.

Work is awesome, and will be even more awesome when I have email, ERP and a proper phone for the call center work.

I am thinking of my dad and it’s hard not to cry.  It doesn’t matter how much you expect it, it is still shattering.  And while shattered, you must get up, and eat, and deal with lawyers and doctors and arrange things and make lists.

Memorial Service did him justice

It went long, and it was emotional.  Tre and Battery and Tanya had to leave because Tre got fussy, but Lindsay (strangely enough! my former boss and grandboss at work) came and sat next to me, and while I didn’t speak much to him, I’d like to thank him for being with me.  Tanya came back in to greet Owen with me and then we went home.

Ryan was a very special young man, in a lot of ways, and sure I was crying for myself (thinking about what it would be like to lose one of the kids) and for his parents (whose mental state is easy enough to guess), but I ended up doing most of my crying for his friends, who really loved him and who will have to work very hard to live up to his standards.

I have a packet of seeds of Ryan’s favorite flower in my coat pocket now, and I’ll plant them when it’s a bit more like spring.

It is with sadness and relief that I relate my woeful tidings

Uncle Dave died this morning.  I will always hold him in my heart as a vibrant, somewhat ornery, disciplined, fun, rational person, whom it was an honour to know and a deeper honour to be family with.  I see him sitting on the back deck at the Augur Inn, back on 2nd St, laughing and talking and eating and smoking his pipe after a hard day arguing with the walls, or the flooring, or mudding, mudding, mudding.  Remember the time he and Paul tried to set fire to the house? … yeah, it’s funny now.   I’d be in the kitchen, listening to him and Paul laughing uproariously, and thinking how very happy I was.  That’s the image I will hold. So many anecdotes, about his travels, his time with the Princess Pats, his time on the boat in Australia.

I light a candle for Alyssa and D. and the girls, Paige and Chloe.  I am thankful beyond words that he died at home with his loved ones around him and I so feel for Alyssa, who took herself to the end of her strength to perform this last office of love.  I didn’t cry on the phone with mOm this morning, but I’m sure as hell crying now.

I had breakfast over at Paul and Keith’s so I was there when Jeff called me, and now Paul and Keith know too.  I just called Katie.  It’s not like the world is so full of good human beings that we can suffer the loss of one without impact……

Busy day

Today I am going to go and see a music teacher who lives close by to see if I can take lessons; then I’m going up to my old workplace for lunch; then I’m going to Surrey for a while, and then I should be home for supper.  This is the most I’ve been on transit since the fireworks last summer.

Last night Tom and Peggy and Paul and Keith came over for broiled pork chop, cauliflower and home made cheese sauce, salad, cole slaw, corn and garlic bread.  Dessert was fresh fruit and pecan torte. It was all nommers.  Then we sang and played for a while.

I light a candle for everybody killed and injured at Fort Hood yesterday.   I am sure there will be an uptick in attacks on furrin brown people as a consequence.  I light a candle for the man who thought he could made a contribution to world peace by slaughtering his fellow soldiers.  It’s just so grisly, and so wrong.

Beautiful day

It’s difficult, when you’re not an art historian or otherwise an art geek, to assess the value of seeing a real Vermeer or a real Rembrandt.  But it is supposed to be good for one, so I accompanied daughter Katie to the current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and was happy to be thrust 350 years into the past, when the current ideas about what constitutes the middle class were putting down sturdy roots. I looked into portraits whose faces bore the stamp of This is my Relation; I was struck, over and over again, by the beauty of details, clouds, ships, insects, trees; by the shine of the silver, the connections to the Dunnett books, and the pushing of art into places where it had never gone.  Why draw a dead and a dying horse side by side?  Why depict the interior of a synagogue (showing the mothers attempting to ride herd on their kids at the back of the shul)? Why elaborate on a new fashion of depicting happily married couples in a fantastic amalgam of backgrounds – he set amid his globe and his expensively bound volumes, she sweetly tugging at him to go into the garden for a moment?

It was the Art of Middle and Upper Class White Folks, writ large and small and in brilliant detail.  As a result, it is comfortable art.  Not challenging, not disturbing, not heartbreaking.  English contemporaries commented on the Dutch mania for everybody, from the greatest to the meanest, having pictures on their walls.  It’s pretty standard now, that your house isn’t a home until the pictures go up, and now I have a solid sense of where that notion came from.

Katie really enjoyed it.  She particularly enjoyed the paintings with trees, the detail and substance of them. We also agreed that the paintings on copper were the most beautiful, texturally.

I only played Art Troll once, forcing her to stand in front of the Vermeer, telling her that it was the first time in 50 years that a Vermeer had come to Canada and that she bloody well better look at it.

Then we wandered up and down Granville looking at the trendy shoes and clothes, I stepped into Tom Lee for a couple of packs of strings, we had a beer and cocktail (Sex on Wreck Beach, fancy that) respectively at Speakeasy, and headed out for Metrotown where she bought hair gunk and I heard the siren song of new smallclothes.  We parted at Edmonds Station.

Then I went to Planet Bachelor to hang out with Keith and Paul (Keith bailed on karate) and sing and play for a while.  Watched the 1929 documentary about the Peking (4 masted barque) again; I never get tired of watching that. I was very out of kilter and didn’t do anything very well; couldn’t remember lyrics etc.

Katie and I had a very good day, and I get some more Katie, greedy me, when she comes back today and I get my hairs cut.

Then she’s off to the PNE and I’m going to cut grass and tidy the kitchen and put away my laundry (finally) and start figuring out how to transfer the John tape onto another tape so that Phyllis can hear her son singing, and get ready for the small dinner party tomorrow night, which will consist of me, Jeff, Keith, Suzanne, Mike and Paul.

John’s interment in London is tomorrow.  Ruth and John and the kids will be going; I don’t know if any other relatives will be there.