They Left Us Everything

by Plum Johnson

  I open the cutlery drawers, which used to be so neatly arranged by Dad. Now everything’s a jumbled mess, another of Mum’s “junk drawers.” In amongst the sterling flatware and engraved napkin rings are plastic bananas, green ceramic frogs, paperweights, candle stubs, rubber bands, pencils, and crocheted doilies. It’s all too much for me now. I need a break. Dumping the clothes was easy, but sorting through this miasma is a different thing altogether.

  Suddenly, I hear Jan shriek from the kitchen.

  She’s found a wicker basket of old spice bottles and holds it up to the light to show me. Despite the fact that the rusted lids are screwed on tight and the bottles should be half-empty, the ingredients seem to have multiplied. The rosemary and tarragon jars are alive, hopping like Mexican jumping beans. Who knows if these ever got shaken onto our food? Whenever Dad found a maggot, he’d tell us to eat it. “It’s protein! Consider yourselves lucky—in the Japanese POW camps, prisoners would fight each other for these!”

  The mould on bread was good for us, too, he told us, because penicillin was made from it. And the charcoal on our burnt toast from the wonky toaster was like free Kaopectate—a cure-all medicine Dad bought frequently. He often fed the pink chalky liquid to Sambo.

  By late afternoon I decide we’ve done enough for one day, and we take Sambo for a walk. Whenever I’m out in public with Sambo, I call him Simbo so as not to offend anyone. To Mum, his name was a logical Southern name—since he’s black and white—but I cringe when I have to use it in public. I’m sure my childhood Little Black Sambo book is now banned in most school systems.

  Mum and Dad always had dogs in our family, starting with Scrappy, the large, dignified Dalmatian who protected us as children. We all loved Scrappy, but after he died of old age, Mum and Dad progressed through various breeds: Buffy, the mutt; Jenny, the beagle; Tanzi, the long-haired dachshund; and Winnie, the Dandie Dinmont—breeds that got smaller and smaller as my parents got older and Dad grew gentler. Winnie died of old age, too—when Mum was eighty and no breeder would sell her a new one. They said she was too old. Insulted, she bought Sambo from an ad tacked up on a bulletin board at the entrance to her favourite grocery store and fell in love. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat!” said Mum.

  All of Mum’s dogs have lived a grand life, sprawled out on the verandah in the sunshine, chasing squirrels in the garden, going for long walks with Dad along the lakefront, barking at the geese, sniffing the fragrant rhododendrons, catching treats from the pocket of Mum’s red, fringed wool coat. At night, the smaller ones slept beside Mum’s bed. In the afternoons she arranged play dates for them, inviting other dogs to come visit in the garden. “Can Sally come play with Sambo today? He’s missing her!” Sometimes, Sambo even received postcards from his friend Pucci, who spent the winters in Florida.

  Today, Sambo seems listless. As we wander along the lakefront he walks slowly with his head down and seems uninterested in the other dogs we meet, or even in the ducks splashing and kicking. There’s steam rising off the lake, like wisps of smoke kiting along with the current. One little bird is cooing loudly in a high-pitched voice, oo-ee, oo-ee, oo-ee. We even see two white swans float by, which I’ve never seen this time of year, but when I call out “Look, Simbo! Swans!” he just keeps his nose to the ground and gives a slow shake of his head as if to say, “Don’t bother me with that stuff.”

  I wonder if he’s depressed, missing Mum? At home he lies around all day, and occasionally I find he’s gone upstairs to sleep at the foot of Mum’s bed. I’m not a dog person, but I have a special place in my heart for Sambo. He’s the only dog who’s been able to worm his way in there. He did this years ago, when he was only a puppy. I’d come out to look after him while Mum and Dad went on a two-week cruise, and on our first night a terrific thunderstorm shattered the skies. The wind howled, the roof rattled, and suddenly the bedroom lit up with lightning—bang! Sambo, who’d been curled on the floor beside my bed, shot into the air like an acrobat in a circus cannon and landed—thump—onto my pillow. We held each other tight all night, his little heart throbbing wildly against mine.

  Mum always said Sambo had special powers. The breed originated in Tibet, she told us, and because of their keen hearing, they were used to guard the Royal Courts—they could hear enemies coming twenty miles away. Sambo looks like a fierce Chinese lion in miniature, with his thick, woolly facial hair splayed back from his nose like petals on a chrysanthemum. He smells like a wet wool sweater. Mum said Sambo was once royal himself—reincarnated. She claimed he was extra intelligent and understood English perfectly—proven, she said, the day Dad lost his eyeglasses and couldn’t find them anywhere.

  “Sambo?” Mum called. “Where are Bapa’s glasses?” According to Mum, Sambo raced out the screen door down to the bottom of the garden, nosed around in the compost heap where Dad had been gardening, and brought back Dad’s glasses in his teeth.

  In Mum and Dad’s downstairs hall there’s a tall, framed portrait scroll of an ancient Chinese nobleman with a white goatee, dressed in a blue jacket embroidered with gold dragons. Mum often carried Sambo over to it. “See, Sambo? That’s your ancestor!”

  But like everything else in this house, Sambo is way past his due date. I always thought he lived extra long just to keep Mum company after Dad died. He’s arthritic and deaf and almost blind now, and spends most of every day curled into a ball with his back to us in his warm basket by the kitchen radiator. He seems forlorn. Jan and I try to perk him up, but as the days go by he gets more and more listless. He fights Jan and me at night now when we try to put the prescribed ointment in his eyes.

  On Jan’s last day, we decide to take him to the vet. Jan cuddles him in the back seat while I drive. Sambo recognizes the vet in her white lab coat and wags his tail, but when she gently feels his hind legs, he winces.

  “Let me take Sambo to the back for a more thorough examination,” she says kindly.

  I stare at the slick tiled floor and wait with Jan, absently twirling Sambo’s red leash in my hands. When the vet calls me in ten minutes later, the news is not good. She tells me Sambo has an infection in his jaw that extends up into his eyes. This must be why his eyes have been weeping.

  “Here,” she says, stroking Sambo, “let me show you.” She lifts up the corner of Sambo’s mouth and I almost pass out. The jawbone is exposed in an oozing yellow mass—all the way up inside. She lays out the options: there are antibiotics, there are painkillers, and there’s an expensive operation with no guarantees. But when I ask her which one to pick, she hesitates and looks briefly at the ceiling.

  “Sambo is very old,” she says softly, “and we know he’s suffering. If we operate, I’m not sure he’ll survive it.”

  “What do you advise?” I ask her.

  “It’s really whatever you feel most comfortable with.”

  I press her. “If Sambo were yours, what would you be doing?”

  “I’d probably be doing the kindest thing,” she says, and she has tears in her eyes. We both know what the kindest thing is. The awful truth of it drops with finality down a black hole in my heart. I thank her and tell her I’ll have to think about this. She nods sadly and I take Sambo out in my arms to the waiting room.

  “What did she say?” asks Jan as she takes Sambo from me and we head to the car.

  “Sambo has to be put down.” I find myself wanting to turn on the windshield wipers as I pull out of the parking lot, but it’s my tears that are blinding my vision.

  “Omigod … is it that bad?” Jan is stroking Sambo in the back seat, and I’m looking at them both through the rearview mirror.

  “His infection has been there a long time.”

  “Didn’t your mother take him for regular checkups?”

  “Yes! And the vet showed me the notes. For the past five years she’d been recommending an operation and Mum always refused!”

  “What?”

  “I know … but it was going to cost thousands and Mum said it was too expensiv
e.”

  I can see Jan kissing the top of Sambo’s head. “You poor, poor baby.”

  I find myself suddenly defending Mum. “I know most people treat pets like people these days, but as much as Mum loved Sambo, she knew he was just a dog.” I reach for a Kleenex and wipe my eyes. “I wish we treated people the way we treat dogs.”

  “You mean, like, the ‘kind thing’?” asks Jan.

  “Well … even the vet called it that. I can’t help thinking about Dad … and Sandy. How come Sambo can get a painless release from the end of life with a simple catheter in his hind leg for three minutes, but we have to suffer?”

  “Nobody wants to play God,” says Jan.

  “But we already play God all the time! We play God when we use a defibrillator to restart a heart … when we hook a comatose patient up to a ventilator … when we perform a Caesarian to rescue a strangling baby … when we give blood transfusions.”

  “Watch what you’re doing!” says Jan as she grabs the seat in front. “You just went through a yellow light.”

  “You wait,” I continue. “By the time we all get Alzheimer’s, there’ll be so many of us they’ll legalize euthanasia.”

  “Okay by me.”

  “Me too,” I say. “I used to wish one of my children was an electrician or a plumber … but now I wish one of them was a vet.”

  I discover that I can’t easily make this decision about Sambo. Two weeks of debate takes place between my brothers and me. When we finally reach a verdict, we decide we’ll do it together. I wish I could let Pelmo know, but she’s in Tibet, out of contact. I tell my children, “Sambo will die next Friday … we’ve booked the appointment.”

  Chris and Victor drive out to Oakville and meet me at the house. At the vet’s I’m distraught, so after kissing Sambo and thanking him for all he’s brought to our family, I place him in Chris’s arms and go to sit in the waiting room. I look at all the other families there with their pets. There’s an elderly woman in a pale blue parka holding a black Persian cat, a middle-aged couple with a collie, and a mother and her young son cradling a beige plastic cage. The cage is empty.

  When Chris and Victor finally emerge empty-handed from the back corridor, Chris is holding Sambo’s small red leather collar with its tinkling tags—a sound I know so well. He tells me he cradled and patted Sambo as the needle went in and that Sambo simply shut his eyes and went to sleep; he didn’t even twitch. I can’t stop crying. Chris and Victor both put their arms around me and we walk to the car together. We’re told to return in a few weeks for the ashes, and we decide we’ll sprinkle them with Mum’s. Later, when I find tufts of Sambo’s hair in his steel-wired brush, I take it out to the frosted garden and put it in the wiry branches of the leafless forsythia bush for the birds. I hope they can use it in the spring to warm their nests. Maybe the squirrels will use it before then.

  When I get home from the vet, I desperately want a bath. But Mum and Dad’s bathtub doesn’t hold water, the drain mechanism failing like so much else. Even though the lever still works, there’s an imperceptible and steady leak. I take the flat rubber stopper from the kitchen sink and for the first time in memory have a bath lasting longer than five minutes.

  I stand in my towel in Mum’s bedroom and look out her window at the lake. It appears calm on the surface, but underneath I know it’s doing some very strange things. There’s a phenomenon on the lake called a seiche—a standing wave that sloshes back and forth in a vertical motion, getting slowly and suspensefully bigger, kind of like a mini tsunami. It doesn’t usually cause any damage, unless it gets really big—like the ten-foot one that hit Chicago in 1954 and swept eight fishermen to their deaths. But it’s made me remember the recurring nightmare I used to have as a child.

  In my dream, I’m standing with Mum and Dad and all the people of the town, silently facing the lake. Our line snakes along the shore, as far as the eye can see, in both directions. We’re all holding hands, staring up in horror at a wall of water—a monster wave—that hovers over us at the shore. The whitecap on its lip foams and curls hundreds of feet in the air, threatening to crash down at any moment and drown us … but it never does. And nobody says a thing. I used to wake in a cold sweat and run to the window to check that the lake was still flat.

  Mum and Dad’s wedding in England, 1944

  En route to the Far East by ship after the war to meet Dad for the first time, and with my amah, Ali Kan

  Reunited with Dad in Hong Kong, 1947

  In 1952, Mum and Dad found a barn of a place overlooking the lake

  Dad began shoring up the exterior

  Mum named it “Point O’ View”

  On Saturday evenings, Dad rolled up the carpets and sprinkled wax so dinner guests could dance more gracefully across the hardwood floors

  Mum got all dressed up and Dad often wore his tux—even for my thirteenth birthday party in the dining room (below)

  We frequently lined up after church for photos. In winter, when the ice shelf formed on the lake and icicles hung from the windows, Dad taught us how to make newspaper fire logs as he carefully stoked his fire.

  After Mum sacrificed Dad’s vegetable patch for her pool, guests were invited to use bathing suits from the big wicker basket

  If we needed Mum, we could usually find her playing tennis

  In the summers, we often drove south to Mum’s family in Virginia

  Mum wearing her favourite red sunglasses, which were shaped like a pair of laughing lips

  Pelmo in her Tibetan ceremonial robes

  Mum always said she thought her purpose in life was to make people laugh ... and her she surprises Dad with her Rudolf nose

  We held two weddings at the house after Mum died, and she ordered perfect weather for both

  In 1971, I wore Granny’s wedding dress, which had been worn by many brides before me

  By 2010, the dress had disintegrated, so my daughter Virginia (above with her father) started a new tradition

  A Fate Worse Than Death

  Dad developed forgetfulness fourteen years before he died. His short-term memory wasn’t good at the best of times (he could never get our names straight), but the first hint that it might be more serious was when he began insisting on driving on the “British” side of the road and mistaking red lights for stop signs. He kept passing the driver’s test, but it was a written test; they never took him out on the road. We children went to great lengths to have his driving licence revoked, and it infuriated him. When we sold his car and asked for his powers of attorney, he went ballistic.

  Victor said to him, “But Dad—what if you go completely gaga?”

  “Then that, sir,” roared Dad in his clipped British accent, “is a pleasure we shall have to enjoy when the time comes!”

  Those “pleasures” came soon enough. At our next Sibling Supper, we put Dad’s banking on our agenda. Dad—who had always run a tight ship and kept meticulous financial records—was going on spending sprees with his debit card. He was walking two blocks to the bank every day just to have twenty dollars on hand when one of his favourite charities came knocking on the door. They were knocking with alarming frequency, as if his door had become their new ATM. It was also noted that Dad was going to the town hall and paying his annual land taxes—in full—every month. Unusual packages from the Publishers Clearing House started avalanching through the mail slot. Along with magazines, Dad was receiving clock radios and gold lockets—prizes proving he could still paste the right sticker on the right square when ordered to. Eventually his bank account ran dry.

  Victor and I went to Dad’s bank and asked them to create an “Alzheimer’s debit card,” something the bank—we found out—had never considered.

  “We want an Alzheimer’s account,” said Victor to the teller. “You know … like a fake account … with only a little in it … maybe two hundred dollars.”

  “A fake account?” repeated the teller, blanching. “I’m sorry, sir, but the bank doesn’t offer such a thing.”


  “Look,” said Victor, “our father can’t manage his finances … I have his power of attorney.”

  “Oh, well then,” she smiled, “we’ll just give him a joint account with you … but he can’t have a debit card. He’ll need your signature whenever he withdraws funds.”

  “No, no, we don’t want that!” I said. “We don’t want Dad to feel like he has to come to us for permission every time he wants spending money. A debit card is his favourite thing! We just want to safeguard his money—don’t you understand?”

  But the teller’s eyes had glazed over. “You’ll have to speak to head office,” she said.

  And so it went—for weeks—until we finally found a friendly bank manager who was willing to bend the rules. Victor and I filled out reams of paperwork. We got Dad a lovely new debit card that he put in his wallet. We had all the household bills redirected to Victor’s address and told charities that we’d send them Dad’s annual contribution, but to please stop knocking on a weekly basis. So then Dad began redirecting his charitable giving to me.

  I reported at our next Sibling Supper that Dad had gotten it into his head—about fifty years too late, in my opinion— that I could use some extra cash. Every time he saw me he’d put his arms around me and whisper in my ear, “You look like you could use some extra money, First Daughter—am I right?”

  Initially I demurred, but he looked so hurt when I turned him down that I realized he still needed to feel like a provider, so I began accepting his generosity.