Category: Deaths & Obits

RIP Christopher Lee and Ron Moody

I know he was knighted, but I no longer acknowledge the right of the so-called Queen of England to bestow honours.  Yes, I know she’s been a benevolent spirit during my life, but only for me.  Seeing what she represents in terms of the people whose land got stolen opened my eyes.

Here’s an obit.

Ron Moody has likewise made his last exit, stage left.

418 words yesterday, mostly infill.

No bead curtain.

MOTIVE HAS THREE SEASONS? Yes.  And we are watching them.  I adore how it twists one aspect of the police procedural so that the tension is evenly balanced throughout the show, and I adore even harder how instead of making three or four episodes a season arc-heavy, it spreads the arc out like breadcrumbs throughout the season. No GARBARCAGE here.

It’s kinda cool to be watching a show starring Canadian actors without constantly thinking how awful they are. (quite the reverse…) Kristen Lehman was born in New West, after all, and Louis Ferreira was born in the Azores and moved to Toronto when he was a tad.  The guest stars are usually pretty good as well, including Molly Parker and Charles Martin Smith, who also directed.  Actors from SG1 pop up with amusing regularity, sometimes causing Jeff and I to pause the show to try and figure it out, before we give up and go to imdb.

 

Visits and departures

A church elder died last evening.  The elder leaves an immense gap in our spiritual life, for the elder was a person with great institutional knowledge, practical wisdom and a steadying presence.

I’ll say who when all the family and everyone else knows.

BUT  Battery is coming today, and he always brings happiness with him, so that is good.

I will try to write today, and work on other projects if I can’t.

And we come upon a time of death

We are come upon a time of death, a time when Mortality scales up and lays out everything at once.  In your life, it is a news of a death of someone close, and then another, and then another, and then your facebook feed is full of deaths of friends of friends, people you’ve shared a meal with, people who are a voice and a way of seeing things and not merely a statistic.

People I love from church are already diagnosed and dying at home.  Now we have news of more, another elder, again, cancer. We have our protocols and our way of dealing with it.

In our church, we sometimes delegate another to take our calls when the first stinging news hits, how like grit in a high wind. We can’t take the deluge of calls.  Someone we love steps in.

There has been a lot of death in my life lately, but I’m not sorry for any of the dead.  I’m sorry for the grieving and the dying, and I’m very sorry for myself, for feeling these things more than I should.  When the feeling doesn’t turn to action, it’s sounding brass all the **** over again.  I can grieve in service or I can stay quiet.

So I will admit that I’m sad, and that I have reason to be so, but I will also say that having snerted my little snert into the hem of my thankfully washable dress, I will try to write a funny scene, hopefully full of delicious slapstick and horrified parents.  I can’t be of service, but I may at some point entertain.

Also, Mad Max is not all that great a movie.  I’d give it a solid B+, although there are some indelible images in it.

Woke up at 1:30

I have been passing wind continuously for 90 minutes.  My abdomen makes noises – “borborygmus” – so loud my whole bed frame shakes. A couple of minutes later, spectacular, long, windy choruses free themselves from my body. There is no pain, no high exhaust gas temperature, no stench.  Just LOTS OF GAS AND NOISE.

’bout one hundred words yesterday.  I’m feeling sessile.

Also, people keep dying. Somebody I was in an APA with 20 years ago (Morgan) has passed away.  She was close to people I really like and I haz a bit of a sad as a result. She told the most wonderful stories.

On the plus side…. It was lovely to talk to Chipper and Tammy on the phone yesterday.

 

Good bad ugly

brO and I are waiting for MR2 to come back from the krankenhaus so we can do a proper shop.  We went for a walk this morning and I picked up some milk and cream so that if the car doesn’t come back today I don’t have to leave the house again,

which is fine,

cause I’ve already written 500 words today and I think today will be furtherly productive.  Kima’s first pregnancy chapter “Someday it’ll keep you” is maybe a couple of pages from done, and I’ve got a good start on Brendan’s first chapter “Check unheard messages” which is all about what happens when you let the Sixer version of nepotism determine who your collaborators are.

And the great thing about writing English goodest is bragging rights.

Ayuh.  All I know is that when I think of the ideas I want to introduce and the hearts I want to break  MUAH HAH HAHHHH! choke gargle.

Fuel oil spill at English Bay.  I’m sickened by it.  The province says “It’s a federal matter” and the feds have killed all the funds for boats for oil spills.  Harper won’t be visiting I’m sure and the boat responsible can’t even be pinned down and fined f’chrissakes.

The grown child of a friend of mine (and a facebook friend) was metres away (indoors thanks be) from the police incident at 5 last afternoon.  Perp got all stabby with two dudes rendered more topologically complex and one woman clinging to life as of this morning; and when bean bag shot didn’t slow him down they gave him summary justice, lead punctuation edition. Vancouver seems to be abloom with police shootings. IA is all over it.

1.3 hours.

ALRIGHTY THEN BREAK TIME IS OVER.

 

Stan Freberg

I could spend a lot of time talking about how Stan Freberg was an integral part of my childhood, but I won’t.  I mourn the man.  

You can call me the Queen of Denial…. Keith and Paul conveyed me up and down the Fraser Foreshore in a canoe yesterday afternoon. The tide was slack. We had a brief picnic on very soggy and clay-ey ‘beach’. Of particular note (beside the weather, which was glorious) was the immense sea lion carcass on the log boom. There was a live sea lion swimming by the railway bridge; he or she chose to surf the waves generated by a fishing boat. We had a few beers and sang and played on the deck afterward and Paul mowed our front lawn (I ran outside when I heard the mower fire up to get the parade of “I live close to a public school so my lawn has lots of junk food wrappers on it” policed up.)

Justice for Cindy Gladue

I am very sore today because merely standing triggers my pelvis pain to the point where I drag both my feet.  Also, Paul very efficiently tricked me into mowing the back lawn, so I was really, really sore by the time I was done. 2.0 hours on the cpap – keep forgetting to put the mask back on.

I wrote this in my notebook over a rather lavishly irrigated lunch yesterday.  I went to the rally, which was triggered by this.  As is my custom, I did a square search count of the crowd. It was never fewer than a hundred people and swelled to 150 around 11 am.  Knowing that we were gathered in 20 cities across Canada (including Saint John’s NFLD, where it was ass freezing cold and blowing snow) made me very proud.  And sore, as I mentioned.  I am going to pick up another one of those mini-chairs from Lee Valley, I simply cannot stand for an hour and a half without problems.

So I was angry when I wrote this.  I am still angry, but it’s the quiet, smoldering kind.

Edited for errors in usage and kindness Feb. 20 2021, the day I learned Bradley Barton is going to jail.

April 2, 2015 unceded Coastal Salish land. MST LAND

Canada is the kind of country where a sex trade worker deserves to die for being a sex trade worker.  If she’s Indigenous, and ‘somehow’ ends up with an 11 inch stab wound which is paraded through the courtroom in a specimen jar in a grotesque parody of a ceremonial object, she had it coming.  Somehow the fact that a misogynistic piece of sh*t named Bradley Barton murdered her in a drunken stupor gets dropped from the equation, and he left the trial a free man.

I’ve been angry at the Canada ‘justice’ system before. Lots.  But I don’t normally get off my ass to protest.

Cindy Gladue did not deserve to die.

She didn’t get justice.

Her children and her family and loved ones did not get justice.

I am enraged that Cindy Gladue and her 1200 and counting indigenous sisters are being treated by the justice ‘shitstem’ as entirely disposable human refuse.  The UN has asked Canada to investigate.  Harper says it isn’t even on his radar.

F*CK THIS RACIST SEXIST ENTIRELY HORSESH*T SYSTEM.

It’s gotta come down.

Let it come down.

With unity of purpose and steel in our veins, let us BRING IT DOWN.

There were 150 of us in front of the Courthouse yesterday. Indigenous and white and mixed and ‘other’.  We were men and women and non-binary and children. We wept and drummed and sang and screamed our disappointment and anger that Indigenous lives are forced to be so far from justice, or even its prospect or possibility.

Justice for Cindy Gladue.

An annoying day

Cleaning shit off the cat.  Other jangly annoyances.  Then Sue appeared out of nowhere and performed marvellousy in assisting in logistics for returning the rental car.  Honestly, it was like she dropped out of the sky. All she was doing was returning the cloak I loaned her (came back as I lent it, I’ll add.)

I got some lovely foodstuffs at the Costco and there was a beef stew in the crockpot as of 5:30 this am so there should be food in about an hour. It really hurts my hands to peel vegetables.  I am feeling a bit weird about that.  Dishes are washed and put away, the laundry is on, life proceeds.

Mike called the other night.  He has a rather bleak three weeks in front of him, travelling on business.  I don’t know how good a job I did of cheering him up, describing Alex’ tremendous gas (I am not exaggerating by much to say that he rattled the windows in the fOlks’ sunroom) and otherwise burbling; he described Rhonda’s memorial service in such a fashion that I had many reasons to have wanted to go and one really big showstopper reason not to.  Apparently Konrad was there too; I haven’t seen him since that MEGA AWESOME EPIC miniature camping trip some 7 or 8 years ago.

I should go move the laundry; the wretched clothes don’t wash themselves.  Although if I take the long view, someday they will.

 

 

Margot sad

She isn’t wandering around the house crying, but she’s obviously sad.  She doesn’t even try to resist when I pick her up. Jeff’s on the island.

Church was great yesterday.  Sue gave me a lift to and fro so I helped her set up tables.  Rev Debra’s sermon about Our House (our rental house, but she mentioned that..) was very inspiring, and apart from silent meditation being too short it was a good service.  I cried during Sue’s testimonial.  I never met her equal for being funny and pulling my heartstrings in the same sentence.  I got to talk to Karen, Renée, Glenn, Jean about Jenise’s passing (I bailed or more accurately, quailed, at going to the service but Jean very kindly emailed me to let me know how it was; it was well done and to Jenise’s taste, although I still would have been toast for going), sang my new call to worship for Tom, put tablecloths down (and took them up again) for the coffee hour downstairs.

And watched Dennis make his way to the men’s room.  I didn’t need to help him. He’s 92 and pretty much blind, but one of the great things about Beacon is that it isn’t too badly set up for people with various physical challenges, and he’s just so…. Dennis.  Me Loves Him.  I watched him go along the wall, his white cane tucked into his back pants pocket, because he didn’t need it.  Because it’s His House.  A more beautiful and mundane example of just what the preacher person had been talking about would be hard to conjure.

I know, it’s silly and small, but it just made me feel like the universe was a really good place for about 30 seconds, before I got distracted again.

After I got home I called Rob W to find out how he’s recovering from his knee surgery last week; he’s laid up at his auntie’s place downtown.

Spent most of the afternoon working on Come and Worship on the keyboard, to the point where my SHOULDER started to hurt.  Now I must reset the height of the keyboard so I am in a more relaxed pose at the keys.  I can actually play it in chord mode (there’s only three chords, haw haw) and I am almost to the point where I’m totally keeping the rhythm too.  This will make it much easier to score, too, since there’s a tiny little display on the keyboard which tells you which note on the clef you’re pressing.

Jeff reminded me that it’s garbage day, so I’m off to collect some trash.

I went on an’ on about dead people in my life

And somebody in my life was dying and I didn’t do anything about it but exchange emails with her less than a month ago.

Farewell Jenise.  I am very sorry for the pain and suffering you felt in your life, and if there’s one good thing about your death it’s that you’re no longer in physical pain.

I should have gone to visit her.  I wonder if I’ll ever get the lesson.  The last time I saw her was in 2009, and I fed her.  I thought it was a couple of years ago and then I searched for her name on my blog and feel crushed all over again.

 

 

John Caspell would have been 63 today

He was taken from us too soon, but it was still a privilege to know him.

And Elizabeth.

And Sue.

And Derry.

And Michael.

And Glenda.

And David.

And Bareld.

I don’t mourn for the aged dead, who went when they were ready.

Today is a day for fasting from social media and contemplation of mortality.  But only for a bit; I still haven’t completely mucked out the kitchen from Thanksgiving and I’ve got a piano lesson today at one. I’ve other chores as well.