Balance, recycling, and the circles in life.

11

May 10, 2013 – Beginnings, middles, and ends.

Sometimes they are orderly, and sometimes they aren’t.

Sometimes we read stories in books.

Sometimes we listen to stories.

Sometimes we live stories.

Sometimes we make stories up.

I used to read stories much more than I do now. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I have become busier. Maybe it’s because I just don’t make time for leisure as much these days. Or maybe it’s just because I really need to go and get proper glasses.

My Mom loved to read. She sent me books, and when she visited she was always sent home on the bus with a new book to read. She loved to share good books, and if it was a really good book, she wanted it back. If it didn’t come back, she would go buy a new copy for her shelf so she could read it again, and lend it again.

I love people who can tell a good story. My Granny was a phenomenal story teller. She could keep me rapt for hours as a child. She could slip into a Scottish brogue at the drop of a hat and regale me with stories of her youth, of her mother, of anything really.

Lately I feel as if I’ve been living a tragedy. The story I’ve been living hasn’t been pleasant. A story of sadness punctuated with moments of laughter, moments of shared memories. A story with flashbacks and diverging plots.

But every story has an ending, of sorts.

Today we said our final goodbyes to Mom. It was a day earlier than we thought it would be. We thought things might take longer at the house and expected to be cleaning tomorrow. But five pairs of hands and a pathologically organized and somewhat minimalist mother meant that things went faster than expected.

I don’t know if that was good or bad. I had steeled myself for tomorrow, but when the final things happened today, it may have been a positive as I didn’t have the opportunity to really work myself up.

Today we sorted through the last things, called the Salvation Army to confirm the donation pickup, filtered through the donations to ensure as much as we could pass to the Hospice charity went there, and started cleaning.

When the truck came to make the final pickup I couldn’t be there. I simply could not watch the last of my Mother’s belongings be packed into a truck and taken away. It was too heartbreaking to see her remaining belongings, the things we hadn’t carefully packed up for ourselves, disappear.

I went and sat in her backyard and wept. Kirk came out from time to time to check on me, and just hugged me. As I sat there alone in the backyard I looked at the garden starting to sprout, I recognized lily-of-the-valley coming up. I remember Mom digging up the pips from Granny’s yard. A recycling of loved plants. I also have some in my garden. They are my birth flower.

I heard a chittering sound and looked up to see one of her loved squirrels jump down onto a bird feeder. It watched me closely for a while, nervously chattered at me, and then finally settled in comfortably for a snack of sunflower seeds. The feeder also came from my grandmother’s home. Mom loved birds and squirrels and his presence seemed comforting. More recycling.

Eventually I heard the truck leave and I ventured back into the now empty house.

We discussed the plans for the evening, tears slipping out, totally out of my control.

I locked the door for the last time and walked down the steps, away from her much loved home and garden. They are for someone else to begin their story here now. Mom’s chapter here is finished.

Waterproof mascara has its limits.

We had wanted to let Mom go on the lake in front of our old cabin. But the lake is still frozen.

We had driven down to the confluence of the Nechako and the Fraser last night and found a quiet spot, out of the main flow, peaceful and in a park she loved. It seemed a good alternative.

So tonight, after dinner, Kirk and I, my brother and sister-in-law, and my best friend, walked through the peace of the evening cottonwood forest toward the water. A small woodpecker clung to a tree and we stopped to admire it. It didn’t fly away quickly, but came closer, so close. As we walked on, a Douglas squirrel stopped on a branch at the edge of the path. We stopped and it just quietly sat there for a few moments, almost close enough to reach out and touch.

When we reached the river we first released Darbi’s ashes. Mom’s dog passed away three weeks ago and so we were able to send them off together. Mom’s remains were encased in a sandcast urn that I pushed into the river in a calm back eddy. The urn floated for a few moments and then gently slipped below the surface in the deep water. The urn is made of barely held together sand, the biodegradable compound is designed to dissolve quickly, as is the gelatine bag her ashes are held in inside it.  The contents would quickly be dispersed by the rivers currents, distributed along the mighty Fraser river, entering the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the river near Steveston, a place she loved to visit because fo the seagulls, the antique shops, and fresh salty air.

We scattered yellow roses and raised a glass to her and wished her well on her final journey to the Coast.

We relived some happy memories, times that made us laugh.

Mom loved to take the slow route, the scenic route, and one could never rush her.

And we cried.

And we said goodbye.

As we stood there, a loon swam near. She loved loons, I remember her listening to them on the lake at the cabin.

A fish jumped, and an eagle flew low overhead.

Marne said “your Mom liked seagulls, didn’t she?” We said yes and she indicated that one had just flown over.

Someone said that the animals had come to pay their respects. Mom loved animals, it seemed as if they knew.

When we left the park we said a tentative family goodbye; my brother and sister-in-law may leave before we see them in the morning; and we drove my best friend back up to her Mom’s place and made some preliminary plans for the next day.

So an end of sorts. Mom’s and Darbi’s remains are recycled into the environment.

But what about those made up stories?

Sometimes we can worry about things that we don’t need to worry about. Sometimes silence can be deafening. Sometimes we feel guilt about things we don’t need to and we can blow things up in our minds and convince ourselves of things that are fiction.

Sometimes unexpected things can happen that can change the course of a day, divert it in a timely way.

I have a wonderful friend in this town, but a friend I haven’t contacted in some time. Years. I felt I had let her down, that I had probably been a lousy friend. And what kind of a friend was I to finally call her when I was in town when Mom had her stroke. She was out of town at the time, but she called me from Florida to make sure I was OK. And then I didn’t hear from her again. I thought that silence was telling me that I had violated a friendship and that added to my personal devastation. What kind of friend calls only when they need comfort? Some friendships can weather lapses, some can’t. I love that I have a number of very strong friendships that withstand long lapses in communication, but suddenly I thought this one had failed and that it was very much my fault. I deserved to lose this wonderful person. Every relationship needs a little tending, I thought I hadn’t tended it enough during a transition in her life.

We dropped my best friend off at her mother’s home and were on our way back to the hotel for the night. Two blocks up and we passed three people walking a black dog. The lead person was a tall woman with shoulder length blonde hair.

Something was familiar.

As we passed both of our heads swivelled back, and inside of the closed truck, we both yelled “CLAUDIA!”

Kirk quickly pulled to the curb and I had the door open and had a leg reaching for the sidewalk as the truck slowed. I may have actually been on the sidewalk before Kirk had the truck fully stopped. The trio walked towards us and suddenly my friend realized who was in front of her and we hugged long and hard. She asked what I was doing there and I dissolved into tears.

Again.

We ended up back at her home and shared a glass of wine and caught up, too briefly, it was already fairly late, we couldn’t impose too long, particularly since she had family visiting.

But this terrible story I had generated in my heart was fiction. I had convinced myself of something that wasn’t true.

I realized that real friends are just that, real.

Who flies across a country to help you clear out a house?

Who doesn’t mind that you don’t contact them for two years?

Real friends, that is who.

It’s not always evident, but sometimes if you look for it, you can find that everything circles back on itself somehow.

If my best friend hadn’t flown to Prince George to help, she wouldn’t have been there at the side of the river to be with us, and we wouldn’t have driven her back to her Mom’s house. If we hadn’t driven up that road, we wouldn’t have back tracked and passed that trio with the black dog, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to apologize and reconnect, and learn that things weren’t how I had imagined them.

And if all of that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have discovered that another of my childhood friends had recently lost her father and I know that I simply have to go and find her to offer her some measure of friendship and any comfort I can provide.

It will be a long time before I feel that I am OK.

I don’t believe in heaven or hell. But I do believe in balance. I think the world somehow finds balance if you are willing to see it.

Today I said goodbye to someone and something that I lost several months ago.

But today I realized that someone and something I thought I had lost, was still very much intact.

Sometimes what seems like fiction is horribly real.

And sometimes what seems horribly real, is actually fiction.

Balance.