A Friend's Funeral

Over the weekend, I attended a friend's funeral.  Jean's death was sudden and tragic - after a long battle with cancer, she appeared to be in remission.  The last time I saw her for dinner over the Christmas holidays, she was laughing and quaffing wine and showing off her new shawl.  She told me about her most recent trip to Argentina where she'd bought five pairs of boots (she had extremely long, narrow feet and usually had to get boots custom made, she said, but Argentinian women had her kind of feet).

A woman who fears being on the cusp of death doesn't buy five pairs of boots, I thought at the time, with a sigh of relief. 

At her funeral, I found myself thinking about those unworn boots and how naive my assumption had been.  Her show of living life to the fullest and carrying on in her delightfully showy manner was a means of trying to put others at ease, as she always did.

Before the eulogy, her best friend - also named Jean - read Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman."

I came home from the funeral and stared at my bookshelf for a long time.  I pulled out a book that Jean had given me a couple years ago, My Maasai Life.  Tears filled my eyes as I realized I'd never even bothered to read it and now I never would be able to read it and discuss it with her.  It was a memoir written by her friend whom she'd met while doing volunteer work for Free The Children.

Jean, see you back in Kenya one day??! read the handwritten note above the author's signature.  (Had she  meant to give me her own copy?  Perhaps she'd only been lending it to me and I'd misunderstood?)

Last year, when I'd told her I was writing my own memoir I recalled how excited she'd been, and a couple years before that, I recalled how supportive she'd been when I told her I was leaving academia to do my own writing.  "So creative writing's your passion," she'd said somewhat quizzically (an Iowa farm girl by birth, and an entre preneur at heart, she was amazed by how little pay writers will work for). 

I could write more about Jean, for she certainly continues on in my imagination - her candid advice on men, her funny stories about travelling home and running into her old high school boyfriends, her incredible ability to draw others out and make an impression.  Maybe one day I will write more about her.  But right now writing more would be too sad.  

Book #11: Fathers and (Wine) Lovers

Yesterday evening, as I was waiting for Daddy to come over for Fathers Day dinner, I was lying on the sofa reading a lush, full-bodied, all-round delicious book. It's delicious not only if you want to immerse yourself in the world of wine, but also if you're looking to dissect the cryptic, turbulent nature of father-daughter relationships (which I certainly did, especially on this auspicious day). The book is called Corked, by Kathryn Borel. It's a memoir about this young woman's trip through the wine regions of France with her dad - wine aficionado extraordinaire. An eccentric Frenchman whose emotions run the gamut from Tourette's-like outbursts to lyrical reflections, his mind teems with weird, unexpected facts about wine, like the fact that Languedoc is a "big up-and-comer" despite its longstanding reputation for spewing "wine for stoneworkers, who'd sit there breathing in dust and crap all day."

While this memoir yields scads of insight about the history and romance of wine, this isn't its true kernel. At the core of the story is the author's fraught quest to become closer to her dad and the other men in her life, too. (Not to get overly Freudian ... but I couldn't help but think of the adage that a father is a girl's first love object and as such, he sets the tone for subsequent lovers). All too aware of her complex dynamic with dad, Borel also puts under the microscope her conflicted feelings for Matthew, her most recent romance gone awry. Despite everything, she still feels that he is the only one really gets her:

"I described to him my allergy to the present. Matthew nodded patiently when I stomped around, detailing how I could not exist within or enjoy the present (even though he was in mine), and how it had pressurizing and irritating effects on the contents of my skull (which, at the time, included him). He abided this allergy, which was at once an itch and a fear, an itch that could be scratched only by getting on with it, moving onto the next thing, satisfying the curiosity that there is something beyond this place, this annoying purgatory that is holding up my trajectory to the other place - the other place, of course, being much better and more stimulating than this infernal place."

As I was reading, I found myself identifying with Borel's sense of being forever caught in a waiting zone, hovering on the fanciful brink of tomorrow, my life will begin. The small university town where I used to teach American Literature - Antigonish, or "Antigonowhere," as we outsiders liked to call it - left me awash in that horrible, anxious feeling so vividly, so unforgettably. Following my bad breakup with the town planner (more about this later) I was caught in a paralyzing cycle of reminiscing about my first love, Josh. If I were Clarissa Dalloway, then he was my Peter Walsh. The acrobatic sentences of Mrs. Dalloway ran through my head, as I power-walked past the dingy storefronts on Main Street, the wind burning my cheeks.

I'd missed my one chance at happiness. I wanted to press the fast forward button on my life.


Photo from: here

Book #3: Didion's Extreme Vulnerability

The streetcar this morning is almost empty. As it chugs along Spadina through the gritty mist, I’m reading The Year of Magical Thinking. With every lurch, my stomach turns to jello, and all the moments of loss in my own life come back with vivid force, lulled by the rhythm of Didion’s sentences:

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off.”

Not that I can claim to have suffered anything comparable to what she endured. Just days after her daughter fell into a coma for mysterious reasons, her husband John Gregory Dunne collapsed and died of a massive coronary. “Life changes in the instant,” she tells us throughout the book, folding us into the embrace of her grief.

But the beauty of Didion’s writing is the way it also triggers all the smaller gradations of personal loss and shock.

The slap of my surgeon’s words when, at age thirteen, I was told that I would need to have four vertebrae fused to prevent my spine from growing curved like a snake.

The death of my vain, beautiful grandmother, whose life only became interesting to me in the last six months of her life.

The feeling of heaviness that overtook my entire body after my first break-up. My father drove to McGill and I slouched down in the backseat of his SUV and the weight of my moondrop earrings pulled at my earlobes. Montreal vanished through the rear window, with all its shabby elegant brownstones, overflowing recycling bins, dépanneur wine.

“Life changes in the instant.” Wise words from a wise woman.

(A footnote on time: whereas my previous two entries explore my state of mind from two years ago, during the time I was still a professor in Nova Scotia, this entry shifts to the present, when I’m back in Toronto, taking the streetcar to work).

Photo from: here