by Laurie Gough
One day, when I had been in my second year at university, my dad, who was a professor there, had cancelled his class and gone to the hospital because he felt sick — he actually took a city bus to the hospital since he didn’t drive to work. That night he went into cardiac arrest and my mother had watched in alarm as six men had stormed into the hospital room to jump-start his heart back to life. Apparently, he had a virus around his heart, something the doctors hadn’t seen often and something that could happen even to someone in his fifties who was trim and fit like he was. A week later, my mother and I followed behind the ambulance that was taking my dad to Saint Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. We were told there was a good chance he wouldn’t make it there alive.
I remember feeling as if a blazing fire had suddenly been stomped out inside me, leaving a hollow, chilled shell. One moment my life had consisted of staying up until 3:00 a.m. with my friends at the university’s International House — a campus residence full of young eccentric idealists from around the world; dancing to The Clash, Talking Heads, and U2 at the campus bar; protesting the contras who were currently taking over Nicaragua; discussing apartheid and whether or not Nelson Mandela would ever be free; listening to Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Cockburn on country drives in my friend’s Chevette; planning the next dance party in the basement of our residence; and attending classes for a degree in International Development. Occasionally on campus I’d even see my dad — who was known as the Jimmy Stewart professor since he looked like the actor and had the same style of drawn-out speech and friendly delivery. Not that my dad recognized me. One day, in my first semester, I was in a crowded elevator at the library when my dad and a colleague of his walked in. “Hi!” I said enthusiastically, since this was the first time I’d seen my dad on campus. He looked at me quizzically and said, “Hi?”
I stared at him. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“Well.” He knitted his brows. “You look awfully familiar.”
“Are you kidding me?”
He smiled, looking vaguely embarrassed. “I know that I know you. I just can’t place the face.”
“Dad!”
“Oh … Laur!” (He always called me Laur.) He chuckled. “I guess it’s just out of context seeing you where I work. Or maybe your hair is different.”
At this point, his Chinese colleague shook his head and said to my dad, “I recognized her and I haven’t seen her in five years. And you all look the same to me!”
I laughed, which relieved all the confused people on the elevator. I wasn’t offended. I was used to it. When I was in high school my friend Jane used to come over after school and liked to stop by my dad’s den where he’d invariably be writing at his desk. “Hi, Dad!” she’d blurt out, imitating my voice. He’d glance up and say, “Hi, Laur, how was school today?” She’d answer that it had been okay and they’d carry on a brief conversation about homework or maybe even baseball. He never noticed that it wasn’t his own offspring he was conversing with. Years later, he would learn he had facial recognition disorder, now known as face blindness. He discovered this one day when the Globe and Mail featured the disorder with a two-page photo spread of twelve faces, including the Queen, Brad Pitt, Bill Clinton, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Hitler — but the newspaper only showed those people’s eyes. The celebrities were easy for the average person to recognize. My mother, myself, and my sister got them all immediately, without a second glance. But my dad didn’t recognize a single one. He was truly baffled that we could recognize these people just by their eyes. All his life he’d had this peculiar condition and hadn’t known it was actually a neurological affliction. It turns out that normal people use a very sophisticated part of the brain to recognize faces. But people with this disorder use a much less powerful part of the brain, the part that the rest of us use to recognize mere objects, not faces. The difference in the complexity of these two brain regions explains why we can immediately recognize people we haven’t seen in ten years, but might not recognize a friend’s car in our driveway, or our own suitcase at the airport. This means that for people with facial blindness, a face is just another object.
I always thought it was weird when I was a kid and my dad would say things like, “I was just out on the street and think I was talking to Leslie from next door because she was wearing glasses and Leslie wears glasses.” He’d known our next-door neighbour Leslie for over a decade. Or to my sister he’d say, “I think your friend Sandy was just here asking for you.” And my sister would say something like, “You mean Sandy who was here for dinner last night and who went camping with us last month?” He’d say he could tell it was Sandy because this girl talked with a lisp and Sandy has a lisp. I used to think, can’t you just tell it was Sandy because it is Sandy? Don’t you know what she looks like? But apparently he really didn’t.
So, at the age of nineteen, there I was following an ambulance in which my funny, sweet, quirky dad might not be alive when we got to Toronto. My heart was cracking in pieces, but my mother was worse. Never had she seemed so small and fragile to me. At only a hundred pounds, she’d always been a stormy force of nature, a former high school math teacher, and our household electrician, plumber, and gardener. She’d never been one to shy away from a political argument or be taken in by a vacuum cleaner salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness — if she answered the door the Jehovah Witnesses would always ask for her husband instead, the one who was “always so nice.” They’d never know he was a polite atheist.
At the hospital in Toronto my mother looked like the tiny person she really was. I was trying to stay strong for her, while inside I was reeling with desperation at the thought of losing my dad while still in my teens. At the administration desk, they couldn’t find any record of him and we thought this meant he’d been taken to the morgue. A hellish half-hour later they figured out he was in the cardiac wing. The cardiac wing felt like a morgue, its long grey empty halls echoing our footsteps. Finally, we found my dad hooked up to some machines and the prognosis wasn’t good. He’d had another cardiac arrest. I remember standing next to him, holding his hand, and crying while he told me, “Don’t change, Laur, don’t change. Just stay the way you are now.”
I couldn’t believe any of it was happening.
I remember as we drove through Toronto that evening to stay at my Uncle Bill’s house, I stared out the window in shock at the far-too-happy people who were strolling along, holding hands, and throwing their heads back to laugh along the leafy autumn streets. I’d never felt such a stark separation from humanity before. I felt I’d crossed over some invisible line and would never be like those people out the window again, that I’d never smile again. How could they be so carefree when death was so close? Didn’t they know?
Miraculously, my dad didn’t die. Instead, he was told he had a year to live. Not dying that week was the best thing that ever happened to him. Every day he was thrilled to be alive. Soon after, he took early retirement and started doing things he’d been putting off: travelling, reading, writing, bird-watching, always thinking up ways to solve various world problems, and going to more baseball games — he had an uncanny knowledge of baseball, having loved the game since childhood and knowing it intimately. Anyone could ask him a random baseball question, such as, “Who played third base for Boston in 1949?” or “What happened in the fifth inning of the World Series in 1962?” and he’d always know the answer. A year after the heart incident, he was still talking baseball and politics. Then another birthday passed. Then another. He went on to live another twenty-eight years, outliving the doctor who’d given him that damning prognosis.
I think this was why when he died for real, I found that I wasn’t grieving. I’d already faced his death twenty-eight years earlier. Ever since then, being with him had felt like a gift, like getting a secret glimpse into the rarely considered possibilities of what life can offer when we’ve almost lost it. He seemed to feel it, too. His brush with death had turned
him into the most laid-back person I knew, lighter and happier than he’d ever been, always seeing how funny things were in the big picture, never letting much of anything get him down. He often said that if he died the next day he’d be okay with that, although he hoped he wouldn’t. This wasn’t derived from some paranormal near-death experience that made him believe in an afterlife. He just knew that life, this life on Earth, had given him a second chance.
Quinn, however, knew none of this. And at least I had been able to say goodbye to my dad, even if he’d been in a coma. Quinn hadn’t. I thought of my friend’s little niece who’d been there with her dog when a veterinarian euthanized the pet on the living room floor. After the dog died, the little girl folded herself against its body and emitted the saddest howl my friend had ever heard. After several minutes of wailing, she got up, wiped her tears, left the room, and was fine after that. It seemed clear to me that being part of the intimate process of death helped people cope. But as far as Quinn was concerned, his mother went away on a bus one day and when she came back his grandpa was dead. His grandpa, whom he loved so much, had been ripped from him without warning, suddenly and forever. So when Quinn sobbed at night, it was often impossible to find words to make him feel better. Telling him that I still felt like Grandpa was always around, was still with us, was still a big part of who we were, did nothing to alleviate his misery. Grandpa wasn’t there physically. Quinn couldn’t call him on the phone. When we visited, Grandpa wouldn’t be at the door to hug us and tell us who was winning the baseball game. Quinn just couldn’t grasp the finality of it all. It was as if a tidal wave of grief was forever smashing him down and he couldn’t find his way to the surface. Worst were the nights when he’d cry into his pillow for forty-five minutes and suddenly become quiet. I’d think he was finally asleep. But then he’d turn to me with a tear-streaked face and red eyes and say, “Is he really dead? Really? He’s never coming back?”
The horror of death was burying my son alive.
I started reading books on grieving children and found I could relate to something that Barbara Coloroso wrote in Parenting Through Crisis. She wrote that confronting the reality of death directly and honestly with children is painful at the best of times but especially today in our death-defying, cure-everything-now, fix-it-fast society and with so many of our ancestor’s rituals abandoned.
I realized we’d probably made a huge mistake in not having some kind of funeral or ceremony after my dad’s death. All we did was hold a memorial at my mother’s house one afternoon, in which friends, family, and neighbours gathered among the seventies décor to drink white wine, eat catered sandwiches, and talk about my dad. Quinn was outside riding his unicycle most of the time, not the least interested in interacting with people he didn’t know.
I thought back to places I’d visited and remembered ways people around the world dealt with death. Two years earlier, I’d travelled to Bhutan to write a story on happiness for a magazine — Bhutan is the remote Himalayan kingdom that measures its citizens’ Gross National Happiness. After several days hiking on a centuries-old track through alpine wilderness, we reached a peak at close to 13,000 feet. Our guide pointed to a rocky hill beside us and explained its significance. “If a baby dies, the family brings the dead infant to the top of these rocks so vultures can take the body away. It’s called sky burial.” To me, a sky burial sounded appalling, but also heartbreakingly fitting. I remember gazing out at the mountain ranges all around us, and noticing that as the fast-moving clouds appeared and reappeared by the second, they revealed secret craggy peaks and shimmering green valleys for an instant before allowing them to disappear again in the fog. And then it didn’t seem like such a bad place to leave a dead person after all.
I thought of Fiji where I had lived for a time in my twenties. The South Pacific islanders there, I learned, knew how to handle death and mourning. They did it communally, something Quinn hadn’t experienced at all. I’d been staying with an extended Fijian family on the tiny tropical island of Taveuni, teaching school and living among the Fijians. One night, a group of us — Fijians and various backpackers who’d become friends — was circled around a beach campfire, singing, playing guitars, and drinking the traditional kava. Suddenly, we heard heart-shuddering howling coming from up the hill where the family lived. We soon learned that the patriarch of the extended family, my Fijian boyfriend’s grandfather, had just died. The howling wails were coming from the women — the dead man’s wife, sisters, nieces, and female cousins. These women continued to wail all night long, painful moans of deep sadness that echoed throughout the island. In the morning, a vast collection of relatives began arriving from other islands. A ten-day funeral was about to begin, a funeral that would entail two enormous feasts a day, which, incidentally, would mean a lot of women chopping vegetables on mats outside, pounding coconuts into cream, killing pigs, and a lot of people getting fat. As the boats and planes arrived, I would see women running at each other on the dirt road: sisters, cousins, and aunts who’d left Taveuni to live with their husbands’ families. They’d hurl themselves into each other’s arms, laughing, crying, and shrieking. The men would shake hands. The women’s wailing over the dead man continued non-stop in those first several days, their passionate sobbing helping to draw the grief out of everyone. Perhaps that wailing, intense, all-consuming, unshackled, full-throated sobbing — so like Quinn’s — is a natural human response to death and loss, a natural response that we North Americans have buried deep inside us. I remember thinking as I lay in my tent at night listening to the women, that although their wailing was sad it was also hauntingly beautiful, like the soul of the world revealing itself.
Oi lei! Oi lei! Ai valu! Oi lei! I can still recall it now years later.
In the days leading up to the burial in Taveuni, the body of the dead man, decorated elaborately with frangipani blossoms, was laid out in a casket in his living room. People would hover around him, kiss his cheek, and murmur their goodbyes. In the beginning, no music was allowed. Singing, dancing, even loud laughing were frowned upon by the elders for fear it would insult the ghost. Supposedly, the dead grandfather’s spirit was still hovering around. It was all very sombre. On the fifth day of the funeral, however, I noticed something changing. The atmosphere seemed to be getting lighter, the wailing ebbing. People were guffawing more and they started strumming their guitars again, singing sensual Fijian harmonies deep into the night. By day seven, kids were tearing around playing hide-and-seek and racing up coconut trees. On day nine, everyone went wild. Craziness and joy seemed to unleash itself from people’s hearts by the hour. Adults and kids alike started throwing buckets of water at each other, even sneaking up behind their seated-on-the-grass grandmothers for a full-body drenching, everyone screaming with hysterics. They also plastered their arms, legs, and faces with white flour. One of the regally large aunts snuck up behind me that day, put her finger to her lips and winked, then began an elaborate jiggling of her rolling-fleshed curvaceous body, all her skin white with flour like a gigantic dancing powder puff. “I’m shimmering! I’m shimmering!” she suddenly began singing out as she danced and twirled around the yard. People roared and cheered her on. The feast that night was the most enormous of all: mountains of food piled up along the woven mats outside for the hundreds of relatives gathered — fried cassava, taro, and breadfruit; fresh parrot fish in coconut cream; roasted pig cooked underground in rug-sized banana leaves. After the volumes of food that had been consumed over so many days, nobody’s clothes fit any more. I remember hoping nobody would die any time soon. The island would sink from the weight. But no matter how fat we got, I realized that by the end of the ten days, the mourning had lifted. The ghost had fled.
Clearly, Fijians knew how to deal with death.
“That’s it,” said Rob. “We need some kind of ritual for your dad, maybe not ten days of gorging ourselves on roasted pig, but something.”
He wasn’t the first to suggest a r
itual. Someone in Wakefield had suggested we hire a local “shaman” to perform incantations while we sat around a bonfire drumming all night. This was so far removed from anything relating to my dad that it was hard to keep a straight face. As for Quinn, I knew there was no way he could take that seriously, either. Someone else suggested that in the spring, Quinn could write a letter to his grandpa, place it in a little wooden boat, then set it off down the river, symbolically releasing him as we waved the little boat goodbye. I liked that idea better but somehow felt we needed more.
“I know,” said Rob. “We could go to Toronto in June when Quinn gets out of school. We could take your dad’s ashes and throw them in places around Toronto where your dad grew up, places he always talked about, like his high school track, his old neighbourhood, the woods where he went bird-watching. We could go to a Blue Jays game.”
I leapt off the couch. “Rob, you’re amazing! We’ll call it the Grandpa Tour! And we’ll throw some of his ashes on the Blue Jays field! And we’ll go to the Toronto docks with the ashes, too. We’ll yell fuck off at Lake Ontario!”
Rob gave me a quizzical look. “Swear at one of the Great Lakes?”
I reminded him of the story. My dad — who never told a lie in his life — believed he invented the English-speaking world’s most widely used expletive, or at least was responsible for uniting its four-letter verb with “off.” (The word fuck on its own likely came into existence in the fifteenth century.) In 1942, at age sixteen, my dad had a summer job as a deckhand on Lake Ontario ships alongside tough older guys who’d tease my shy young dad for never swearing. He decided to do something about it. One night lying in bed, he turned all the swear words he knew over in his head, trying out different combinations and even thinking up entirely new words that might sound dirty. Finally, after a couple of hours, the perfect phrase struck him. When he tried the expression out on the other deckhands the next morning, their jaws slacked open. They never teased him again. A year later, a strange thing happened. My dad began hearing the expression around Toronto. And it wasn’t long before he began hearing the expression a lot. Decades later, when I was in my thirties, I had a friend who’d studied theatre in New York City. A group of us was discussing the origins of swear words and I mentioned this story about my dad. “Get out! You’re joking!” said my friend. He told me a playwright he’d worked with in New York had written a play set during the early years of World War II. The playwright wanted a character in the play to say fuck off, but wanted to make sure the expression actually existed at the time his play was set. The playwright did extensive research and discovered that the term fuck off didn’t come into common usage until 1943, and it was believed to have come from Toronto. I was flabbergasted. My dad’s story held up. Sure, someone else in Toronto might have come up with the same phrase at the same time, but this seems unlikely. Ironically, I never heard my dad use the phrase himself except in telling the story. He was too nice a guy.