Years ago, when we were relatively newly-weds, I took him to see The Seventh Seal, one of my very favourite movies. He fell asleep. I was appalled.
This gift is a Criterion DVD. There's a commentary, which I have yet to access (and an essay by Woody Allen, which I plan to ignore), but I decided to watch it a couple of nights ago, marvelling in the crispness of the re-mastered black and white print.
Like all good art, I see something different every time I revisit it. I think the last time I watched it was in 2020. Being set at the time of the Black Death, it made harrowing pandemic viewing. Now, of course, the ever-looming presence of the black robed and hooded Death (Bengt Ekerot), who stalks the Knight (a very youthful Max von Sydow) and his companions between chess moves, is particularly piercing, following my own recent loss.
However, I saw other details that escaped me, even after repeated viewings. This time, I noted that Jös (Gunnar Björnstrand), the knight's sardonic squire, carefully and protectively shifts his body over his dagger, as he sleeps, awkwardly outstretched on a stony beach in the opening moments of the film. I notice his cat-like defiant hissings behind the Knight's back, after being given an order.
I think of the actors, all dead now.
And the Resident Fan Boy? He nodded off. Again.
So this is the kind of day I had.
I rose, with every intention of heading down to the coffee shop, but halfway through my preparations, I felt a familiar pain in the lower right half of my back. I had a kidney infection last summer that sidelined me for three weeks, and this was pretty well how it got started.
The Resident Fan Boy phoned our nurse-practitioner clinic when it opened at 8:30, and was told that we couldn't book in an appointment for three weeks, and all emergency appointments for the day were already taken.
We had been rather expecting this, so the RFB called the Urgent Care Clinic and was put on hold, the automated voice telling him that we were 19th in the queue.
We had been rather expecting this. He handed the phone to me, so I could listen to the muzak, while he went up to the laundry room.
About five or ten minutes later, *my* phone rang. It was the nurse-practitioner clinic, double-checking my problem, and telling me that I could have an appointment at 11:30. I rather suspect someone had checked my chart.
Saw the locum, accompanied by a fresh-faced student nurse, and she sent me across the street to LifeLab with a requisition for bloodwork. The technician told me, that since I didn't have an appointment, it would be a 50-minute wait. They saw me in 80 minutes. I'd been rather expecting this and had brought a book. Got through three chapters.
Walked home and nearly got run down in a lit crosswalk by an older gentleman driving an SUV. He, of course, had been watching left for traffic, while making a right turn, somehow failing to notice me, or the four other pedestrians crossing from the other side. Fortunately, I had been watching for him, because I rather expected this.
In case you missed it, the playwright Alan Bennett had an elderly unhoused lady living in his driveway in Camden (northeast of Regent's Park in London) for fifteen years between the mid-1970s and late 1980s. He wrote a play about it after her death, which starred Maggie Smith, and she took the same role in the film.
Younger daughter seemed quite taken with it, but sad. She said it reminded her of her grandmother, who, I hasten to add, was never unhoused, delusional, or hygienically challenged. Every now and then, younger daughter took the DVD out of the library, as she did this month.
Yesterday, I watched it for the first time since my mother died. (I'm sorry to keep bringing this up, but this is probably going to be a steady part of my life for a while, as I work through things.)
I sat through it, and despite the lack of parallels with my own mother's final years, I felt bludgeoned by the isolation, the vulnerability, and the piano-playing. I'm told that both my grandmother and mother were proficient pianists, but never heard them play, because both flatly refused to play for an audience.
Bennett was in the process of losing his own mother at the same time he was the unwilling host to the lady in the van. In the film, he's consulting with a doctor in Yorkshire, after his mother breaks her hip in her nursing home. The advice the doctor gives him is almost word-for-word what the emergency doctor told me when Demeter fractured her pelvis one week before she died.
I went out for an early evening walk to recover. When I came home, we watched the season finale of Call the Midwife, where Sister Monica Joan, in her nineties, is dying of kidney failure.
There's just no escaping it. The reminders are everywhere, like a milder form of PTSD.
Now Hear This is a PBS programme that I've been following for a couple of years with mild interest. It's a sort of musical travelogue in which conductor and violinist Scott Yoo, often accompanied by his wife, flutist Alice Dade, pursues a given musical theme - a composer, a genre, a geographical setting - and engages in less-than-spontaneous interactions with various experts. It's good fun and reasonably informative.
I'd deferred on the last episode of this season, "The Iceland Sound", because I didn't think it would be to my taste.
Oh gawd. It was ethereal. Much of the music reminded me of the majestic, soul-filling composition by Kjartan Sveinsson that closes out the credits of the film Echo (Bermál), the Icelandic film that made such a deep impression on me during the pandemic.
Two highlights of this episode: 1) an "impromptu" (nothing is impromptu in this series) jam on Icelandic dulcimers called langspil.
The music starts at about the 2:20 mark.For the first couple of decades of our respective lives, Double Leo Sister and I were so unalike, and so seldom seen together, that many people mildly acquainted with us were unaware that we were related.
This has changed steadily as we have aged and we're pretty similar now - at least in appearance and mannerisms, if nothing else.
About five weeks ago, in the wake of our mother's death, I handed an Ancestry DNA kit to my sister.
Shortly afterwards, she managed to break her humerus and tear her rotator cuff. (This was just what happened, not cause-and-effect.)
At any rate, I was pretty sure she had forgotten all about the test, and was preparing to remind her when she was down-Island, that if she really wasn't interested, she should give the kit back, because it's pretty damn expensive.
No, she said, she'd tested and furthermore, had heard back weeks ago.
No sign of her in my DNA matches, nor in those of my mother, whom I tested five years ago.
You're thinking of all those stories, aren't you? Those news items about people getting a DNA kit for Christmas and discovering, with a shock, that they're not related by blood to those they grew up with?
We should be so lucky. (I'm joking, but I think it crossed both our minds.)
Apparently, Ancestry now requires you to turn on match-sharing before it becomes visible to your matches, which, I guess, is a good idea, but it makes me wonder how many other matches I'm not seeing, because it's clear that most people take the tests to get the nebulous ethnicity estimate --"estimate" essentially means "guess", people -- and don't bother with the matches at all.
Anyway, my brother-in-law, the Jolly Not-So-Green Giant, figured out what icon to switch, and there she was: "Full Sister" - a slightly lower number on the centiMorgans she shares with Demeter, with nearly twice the segments that I have in the DNA match with Demeter. Also, her ethnicity estimate is quite different than mine, which happens to be way more similar to my mother's - interesting, but in the long-run, not that significant. Double Leo Sister has clearly inherited a different set of DNA from our shared ancestors; that's how DNA works -- it's more random that you might think.
Have I lost you yet?
I tried to talk about all this with my sister and brother-in-law, but like most people, they're really not into family history research, and they soon changed the subject. My sister is into Creative Anachronism and stained glass. My brother-in-law is into computers and fantasy novels. I'm not crazy about any of that.
I let them chat about these things with the Resident Fan Boy, while I started using my sister's shared matches to identify even more of our mother's and my shared matches.
They went home early.
There's one of those just ahead of me in the line-up, a young mum with a tiny tow-headed ankle-biter of indiscriminate sex. She's sat him/her (them?) on the counter while she places her order, and while the barista has turned to plate a pastry and the mum prepares to pay, I spot, with a flash of horror and panic, the TTHAB hoisting the mother's coffee mug, full of fresh hot coffee.
"NO!" I gasp, just restraining myself from lunging. (There's another customer standing between us.)
Alerted, the young mum calmly takes the mug from her offspring, and places it on the far side of the cash register. I'm semi-collapsed against the display case. There will be little need of caffeine this morning after that adrenaline rush.
"Happy Mother's Day," I breathe.
Tomorrow, birthday season drifts to a close at our house, with younger daughter's birthday.
As I carefully put final preparations into place, it occurs to me that, among the cards I received for my own birthday this year, not a single one was humorous.
Everyone seems to have donned kid gloves for me. I suppose I should enjoy it while it lasts, though I can hardly take joy in the reason.
And that's saying something. Both the Resident Fan Boy and I have weird family histories. (I've long suspected that there are no other kind, not if you're doing your research properly.)
This latest family foray began innocently enough.
John Reid, in his blog Anglo-Celtic Connections, regularly reports when newspapers become available at FindMyPast, and some months back, one of these periodicals was from Norwood, in Surrey (now Greater London, I think), where the Resident Fan Boy's paternal ancestors dwelt in the 19th century.
So I started a search, but couldn't find entries for the surname of those particular ancestors. Instead, I found a item in the Herne Bay Press, about the 1930 funeral of one of the RFB's great-aunts, under her married surname, of course. She'd lived and died in Herne Bay, Kent, but was being buried, like many of her family members, in West Norwood Cemetery. It was one of those goldmine genealogical finds: supplying a long list of mourners, saying who sent flowers, and giving a hint of which family members may have been speaking to each other, in the aftermath of a family scandal.
As usual, this led to a happy couple of hours finding new records, and updating profiles.
To my astonishment, I found the said great-aunt's death certificate, posted by a new and unfamiliar account.
I flatter myself as being a family researcher of some experience, so I did searches of birth registrations and British business profiles, and finally identified the account as being connected to a first cousin once removed of the Resident Fan Boy. It turned out her husband's business was a sixteen-minute stroll from where elder daughter had been living in South Wimbledon a couple of years ago. (I'd had this cousin's father married to the wrong woman, so she was utterly new to me.)
Delighted by the discovery and the closeness of the connection, I told the Resident Fan Boy all about it that evening, and he was politely interested -- after I'd hauled out a couple of graphs to show him how he was related.
I had no immediate plans to contact this relative, but it was taken out of my hands the very next morning, with a text from elder daughter: "Should I respond to this?"
"This" was a message via FaceBook Messenger. It was the very cousin I had just identified!
I was startled, to say the least, and puzzled. Why was this cousin reaching out to my daughter, and, how on earth had she identified and found her? My tree is private, and my daughters' information doesn't appear on it, anyway.
However, I had carefully tracked this person's lineage, and she was exactly who she said she was, so I reassured elder daughter, told her how she was related, and gave her permission to pass on my email address.
Elder Daughter's Rare Paternal Cousin (or EDRPC, until I can think of something catchier) got in touch very quickly, and revealed the remarkable (and frankly terrifying ) ricochet of logic that had led her discovery of her second cousin.
Not seeing any descendants for my late father-in-law nor his brother - Ancestry doesn't show living people, thank goodness - she did a google search and found an independent site -- with all our names...
There's a reason for this. Years ago, when still a newby genealogist, I encountered a Texan online, who was researching one of the distaff branches of the Resident Fan Boy's family. She was something like an eighth cousin.
Being a novice, I didn't recognise the tell-tale signs of a rabid and ruthless researcher, and we exchanged details. I didn't quite grasp at the time that one never shares details of living people without careful vetting. Too late, I asked her politely to not publish or share the information I'd given in a family report I'd forwarded to her. She got quite huffy, saying that, in all her years of researching, she'd never received such a request.
It was only some years later that I stumbled across her "freepage" - with the FULL NAMES (sorry, am I screaming?) of my husband, children, and, worst of all, my living in-laws. the Texan lady had appended an utterly pointless "information reheld" in brackets after each name. I was livid and wildly embarrassed, but there was little I could do, but learn from the experience.
The EDRPC also found the page I had created for my late-father-in-law's dad at the Imperial War Museum's web site, recognising my name, then she stumbled across the Resident Fan Boy's uncle's obituary from several years ago, where both the RFB and I had left our condolences, which further confirmed our names and relationship.
So she entered the RFB's name into the search engine with the keyword "Canada", and up came the pièce-de-resistance-is-useless: a news item from his church, featuring not only our names, our neighbourhood, and the location of our daughters, but the name and breed of our cat!
All this, the EDRPC told me, made me think it was very likely to be all of you.
(No kidding, cuz.)
Social platforms led her to a likely variation on elder daughter's name, including being about the right age, and a Canadian living in London. So she sent out feelers to elder daughter.
"Isn't it amazing/terrifying the details you can track on the internet!" the EDRPC messaged me brightly.
Of course, she's lovely. Nearly all our relatives are.
We exchanged all sorts of family photos and greetings on holidays. She's delighted to finally have some cousins, a rare commodity on her side of the family. Furthermore, while tidying up my research to share with her - which she has firmly pledged not to publicise - I discovered a possible key to yet another longtime family mystery.
But I'm not posting that here. I'm still clinging to some of my illusions and delusions of online privacy.
I did an odd thing the other day. It had strange repercussions.
Having navigated the treacherous waters of adolescence before the advent of social media, most of my misdeeds, failed experiments, and plain awkwardness went blessedly unrecorded, except for those things that I foolishly put in my journals at the time. This is probably the reason I don't go back to read those entries, so I don't recall if I wrote much about Dale.
Dale was my first kiss.
Oh, there was little that was romantic about it, apart from the thrill of its being my first kiss. I barely knew Dale, who was a grade ahead of me. We were both in band; he was in the brass section, and I was in the woodwinds. I have no idea why he singled me out on a school bus returning from a band performance at a civic function on a distant New Year's Eve. It was a French kiss, and wildly un-erotic, but I was thrilled at the concept, which seemed to bode well for the new year.
This proved to be the case -- kind of. I was the girl Dale necked with at parties, although he barely spoke to me at school. On rare occasions, he'd hold my hand or put his arm around my shoulder while walking home. He'd point out the make and year of every car that passed, something that didn't interest me in the slightest, but I was thrilled at the attention. He changed schools at the end of the term, and I never saw him again.
Years later, at the annual pre-Christmas Holiday presentation at younger daughter's school, a young man did a rather peculiar presentation on biblical themes. (It was not a religious institution.) I didn't recognise him, because he was a few grades ahead of younger daughter, but I recognised his unusual surname, and asked him afterwards if he had a relative named Dale. He said vaguely that there might be someone in the family named Dale, but he had died "a long time ago".
I went home, did a search, but could only find the obituary for Dale's father. It said that Dale had predeceased him. The list of living relatives revealed that the vague young man was, in fact, Dale's nephew, so I guessed that Dale had died before he was born.
Family history research has taught me to return to searches after time has passed. For some reason, it occurred to me to search for Dale this week. Once again, I ran up against his father's obituary, but tried a few more times, using different keywords.
And there Dale was, in an obit published in The Ottawa Citizen. He died there in an unnamed hospital, some years before we moved to Hades. One of the few things I knew about him, when we were teenagers, was that he had some sort of heart condition, which would turn his lips blue. I remember a parent staying with him, when he became faint during a bikeathon to raise money for a band trip, so although I felt sadness, it was hardly a shock.
I did have a shock earlier this year, but the greater trauma of Demeter's death pushed it from my mind. I have just remembered it while thinking of Dale.
About a week before my mother's final fall, the Resident Fan Boy and I had a couple of friends to dinner, one of whom had attended last year's high school reunion, which I had been delighted to skip.
"Don't blame you," laughed my friend, easily. "It was great being able to chat with some people, of course, but it was a bit rough seeing that big memorial poster with the names of everyone who's died, particularly Dylan. He committed suicide, you know."
Thunk.
I knew Dylan way better than Dale. We were in the same grade, and often the same classes, between Grades Six and Twelve. I've written about him in this blog before. We were not friends. Nevertheless, I was shocked, and found myself wrestling with unpleasant memories, and imagining the impact on his children, his wife, and his siblings -- until my mother died less than a fortnight later, and I had a whole new raft of unpleasant memories with which to wrestle.
Four months on, after examining what little I knew of Dale's death, I looked into that of Dylan, wondering if by "suicide", the high school alumni meant "MAID".
I somehow doubt it. There are three or four obituaries online for Dylan, who was reasonably prominent. They are circumspect about the cause of death: "sudden". Generally, when MAID has been used, as it increasingly is, the wording is usually something like "on his own terms" or "at the time of her choosing". The pictures accompanying Dylan's notice show a man with pale skin laced with fine lines, and eyes rather large for his face, little resemblance to the preteen and the adolescent I remember. The obituaries are, of course, glowing testaments to his work. Again, no traces of the calculated cruelty I, and others, experienced in school.
Some years ago, at a gathering of university pals who had also attended our high school, a good friend mentioned Dylan, because he briefly lived in her community. I couldn't help myself, and blurted: "Is he a nice person yet?" One of the women bellowed in laughter, but my friend knew the question was genuine, and paused thoughtfully before musing: "I'm not sure..."
Dale and Dylan are both gone, and, for the time being, I'm still here, and I'm not sure I'm a nice person yet. Letting them both go is probably the kinder thing.
Spring has nearly finished arriving. The lilacs are blooming on the corner of our street. The plane trees, always a bit behind, are finally leafing out. Outside our window, an ancient tree, that looks for all the world like a profile of a lady's head with upswept hair, has attracted the local urban deer. I watched a doe, black nose upturned in anticipation, balance on her hind legs to nip off the blossoms. This week, the fallen flowers carpet the ground, where the fawns can feast on four legs.
In so many ways, I almost missed spring this year. A small part of me believed it might not come. How can spring come, now that Demeter is no more?
But I don't, despite all appearances, exist within a Greek myth.
Not even a Greek tragedy.
More like a human comedy.
Make that a tragicomedy.
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