Shattered Family Ties

Daughter is home today after 22 days with Mother. September 1st is move in day at her university.  I have exactly one month left of her at home.

I continue to sift, sort, trash, recycle and gift the possessions in my house.

Yesterday I opened a package that Mother has yet to bring back with her to Newfoundland.  It was the below picture, in a frame.

I held the picture for a good few minutes.  This woman has been dead for nearly twenty years.  She is my aunt by marriage.  She married Mother's 3rd brother and they were the only extended family that we had in Canada and we spent a little bit of time with them throughout my childhood.  Sister and I were flower girls in their wedding.  They came to the big life events of good catholic households:  first communion, confirmation, wedding, etc.  This particular uncle was legendary in the family since he started smoking by eight years of age and started charging interest to his older siblings for loans at about the same time.  He is now a senior banker and has resided mostly in South and Latin American countries since shortly after his wife passed on, suddenly.  He quit smoking years ago and used to run marathons with XHusband.  I believe he still runs.

I thought about how I'd love to have known this woman, my aunt, throughout my adult life.  She passed away before I was comfortably esconced in adulthood - I was merely 25 years of age and living in a town about 2 hours from where she lived.  My memories of her are of a woman that had a fabulous sense of humour and a wry take on life.  I believe I would have enjoyed her immensely if I had been given the chance to live closer to her as I raised Daughter.

And then it hit me.  The loss of this woman was preceded by the loss of another woman that I was not given a chance to get to know, even in childhood.  The loss of my maternal grandmother.  I was shattered.  I was gripping the frame and choking back tears.  The loss of these two women left an enormous gap in my family structure and the subsequent decades of dysfunction - which show no sign of abatement - seemed to mirror their deaths.

My aunt, just before she died, suddenly, in 1992.

It struck me how the glue that holds families together seems to exist in the maternal bonds.

Mother was a young adult in a different country when her mother passed away.  A country that was extremely expensive to get to or from relative to the inexpensive costs of travel today.  My maternal grandfather did his best to keep the family relationships alive and together (with a healthy dose of solid dysfunction added) but after his death in 1996 the shreds of familial connections started to fray. At this point in my life I feel very little connection to the sixteen younger (living) maternal cousins and various and sundry second cousins that are still springing forth due to the fact that I am the eldest and the youngest cousins are still toddlers (I have two uncles that reproduced as seniors).  There are a couple of exceptions to this but living in a far away country makes it difficult to maintain any sort of intimacy.

Daughter, at seventeen, willingly chose to spend 22 days with Mother.  Would I have done the same at her age?  I was not given the choice since both grandmothers were dead at that point in my life. I do know though, that most of my entire life I have felt like a buoy that is not anchored.  Yesterday was the first inkling I had that the anchor I missed having was real and not just a product of years of reading self help books that described dysfunction in detail but rarely beyond the immediate family.  My maternal grandmother was an anchor that kept my maternal family afloat and her tragic loss before her family had grown left a gap that still reverbrates. And the loss of my aunt did the same - shattering the one meager extended family relationship I had on the new turf her, my uncle, and my parents chose as home.

And today, having found and named the lost anchor I feel I have actually sealed the cracks in my foundation. Mother is writing a memoir about her mother.  I eagerly await getting to know my lost anchor and feel enormous gratitude that Mother's anchoring presence is still in my life.

No longer just passing by.

I am one of the fortunate people that has managed to arrive to middle age and I have personally witnessed very little death.

In the natural order of things I know this will change but other than giving my heart a little squeeze when thinking of my parents passing on I don't put too much time or energy into thinking about it.  One never knows what can happen or when and worrying about it will do nothing to prevent it.

So when I found out last night that one of my neighbours passed away I was shocked.  This is not someone I know beyond passing an occasional fresh cut peony too and exchanging weather pleasantries but he was a fixture during my time in this house which is now almost eight and a half years.   I don't even know his name but since his daughter lived in their basement I always thought of him as C's dad.  His daughter is of my age and we have chatted a lot over the time I've lived here.  Her mother, the new widow, has limited english and my chats with her are also limited to pleasantries.

I first became aware of this man when the ambulance and fire trucks showed up in the middle of the night within the first couple of years of me living here.  When I asked the daughter what had happened in the days following I found out that this man had had a heart attack.  I found out about his expected convalescence period and his intent to return to work as soon as possible.

Sure enough, in the proceeding months, I saw him shuffling off to work each morning and returning at night.  The man worked long hours and the only thing that seemed to have changed was that he had acquired a cane and he had lost a fair bit of weight on his already slight frame.

Within a short period of this heart attack, he had another.  Ambulances and firetrucks again.  Discussions with C. told me that there was a longer hospital convalescence this time yet he was again planning on returning to work even though this time she didn't seem so eager about this plan.  At that time I was shocked he had survived another one since he no longer looked as strong as he had when I first moved to this house.

As far as I was aware, this was his last heart attack and until last Friday night I saw him shuffle back and forth to work and we would exchange the usual pleasantries.  A few months ago I saw him on his way home near the main intersection from our street and he was smoking.  I was shocked, since I know he had quit years earlier, but immediately my ex-smoker empathy kicked in.  I've joked with friends that I just might pick up the smokes again in my senior years.

I admired this man and his strength.  It turns out that his fatal heart attack this past Saturday night was his fourth.  He was 75 years of age and worked until the day before he died.

I will miss seeing him shuffling up and down the road and sitting out on his front porch with his wife and daughter.  I hope that as I age I might manifest some of the strength and courage he portrayed.  I also selfishly hope that my own death and the death of my loved ones goes as quickly as this man.