Morbid curiosity

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.

The truth of the matter

I'm working at the computer when I hear an unfamiliar familiar sound.

It's the strange dropping swoop of a Facebook Messenger notification.  Years ago, I read on a internet security blog that it's unwise to have a Facebook Messenger app, due to the fact that you have to allow it an alarming amount of access to your personal information.

This means I can only access Facebook Messenger from my computer or laptop.  It also means that if I'm being contacted this way, it's usually someone who doesn't know me well enough to have my email address or my phone number.

Glancing at the name, my heart sinks just a little.  It's someone from my high school, who only gets in touch when a) she's planning a high school reunion; or b) she's lost track of someone she really wants to talk to -- I have a reputation for knowing where people are. 

It's a bit of both.  I supply her with an address, and she politely expresses the hope I'll be able to come.  I am courteously noncommittal.

"I don't know if you know," she texts, "but Buck Rogan died."

I did, of course.  As I've mentioned, I know where people are.  Buck is, presumably, in heaven.  

I've cudgelled my brain, but I have no memories of him, although I remember him.  He was one of the jocks, and I don't recall his saying a word to me.  

That's okay.  His obituary has a reasonably long list on online tributes, as is usual with one who dies before his time.  Clearly those who mattered to him, and to whom he mattered, are grieving.

I've kept in touch with those who matter to me.  I trust I matter to them as well -- although I may be mistaken.

This is the reason I don't go to high school reunions anymore.  I don't tell my correspondent that, because it might sound as if I don't care.  I wish I didn't -- which is also why I won't be going.

Iron lady

It seems that every time I come out to Victoria for my summer visit to Demeter, I am confronted by another ghost in the obituaries.

They called Margaret Thatcher "The Iron Lady".  They never met Mrs Dupree.

She was our iron-willed, iron-tongued, and iron-lunged PE teacher. She also taught Social Studies (now there's irony), but I escaped getting her for "Soash", instead spending my English classes trying not to listen to her bellowing at the Grade Eights next door.  The other teachers, no doubt inured by years of this, ignored the enraged yells emanating through the wall.

Having Mrs Dupree for PE was terrifying enough, especially as I possessed no abilities in sports apart from, to her utter mystification, endurance running.  I rode my bike to school and played clarinet, resulting in increased lung capacity, I guess.

When I was in Grade Nine, she came up with the idea of rotating volley-ball skill exams.  The "spiking" test took place on the gymnasium stage.  Cowed, and with little hope of passing, I blindly spiked the volleyball straight up -- and it descended with the entire metal-encased florescent ceiling lamp, missing Mrs Dupree and me by inches.

As the glass tubes shattered and scattered, the stage was plunged into semi-darkness.

That wasn't the scary part.

Frozen in horror, I gazed as Mrs Dupree shook like a volcano about to explode.  She finally let forth a howl of laughter.

"You should see your face!"  she roared.

Whew.

Going out with a bang

As I've mentioned before, I do check obituaries at the Victoria Times-Colonist for various reasons.  Once in a very great while, I read one that is not made soppy by grief, or discreetly lacking detail.  Today, I ran into one that is so much more than an obituary.  This, my friends, has the making of a novel:

FERGUSON, George - What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. 

George eventually became one of Oak Bay's characters. In the 1970's, he was an owner of the Blethering Place, along with his second wife, Janet. They also started the Old Blighty on Oak Bay Ave. They owned an antique store on the corner of Oak Bay and Foul Bay and they even had an auction, at which George was notable for having a parrot on his shoulder. One of his best stories was about being in his car with his new friend Chris in the seat beside him when it was suddenly surrounded by heavily-armed police officers. This was the beginning of the famous Rocancourt arrest scene of 2001. Some of George's favourite watering holes were the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, the Oak Bay Golf Club, and the Marina. Of late, George had to travel to and from these places on his senior's scooter, which he drove as recklessly - and sometimes as drunkenly - as he had driven his cars in earlier years. 

George was always an optimist about his future. Right up until the aftermath of his last surgery, he hoped that he could get into sufficiently good shape to charm another woman into supporting him, or perhaps invent something that would make him a billionaire or maybe even win the lottery! He never complained about his later lot in life, living cheerfully in a small apartment that was just barely on the right side of the Tweed Curtain. 

While George did not live well by some people's lights, it should be universally accepted that he did die well. In hospital, two days beforehand, he said he'd finished with the medical procedures he had been avidly seeking for the past few years; he said he was 'checking out'. He was completely calm and committed to the decision. The next day, we brought in some beer, toasted his life with him, drank with him, and helped him to make several thoughtful good-bye phone calls. He reminisced a bit and gave us a few unhelpful instructions. He died without pain the next evening, from a slow gastric bleed, with his wits about him and a light heart.

Turns out, his timing was impeccable: the next day we found out that he had been racking up ominous bank and credit card debts. Clearly, those supplemental incomes were about to dry up. In earlier years, George would sometimes slip out of a town after he had accumulated local debts and after the relevant woman's purse had been snapped shut. But of late, he was in no condition to skip town. And women just don't see old men on scooters as the stuff of their dreams - they see them as impending burdens. Perhaps George felt cornered. Perhaps he thought that, under his present circumstances, dying was the only way out. Whatever the story, no one can deny that George made his final exit with style and grace.

You can view the original and see a picture of this rogue here. I don't know if he wrote it himself or sweet-talked an articulate friend into composing it, but hell, I'd rather like to have an obituary like this.  I think, however, I'm not quite colourful enough.  Maybe I could make something up.

Maybe he did. (Judging from some of the comments, I'd say not.)

Dance me to the end of life

At the risk of sounding morbid, I must confess that one of my daily cyber-stops (along with news sites, family history blogs, Facebook, and my habitual stalking of David Tennant) is the obituary page at the Victoria Times-Colonist. Why? Victoria is a relatively small town and I lived there a long time. It shields me with fore-knowledge, so that during my annual retreat to visit Demeter, I won't blunder into a friend's grief in my ignorance, and might, in fact, get an appropriate note into the mail.

It's not scintillating reading; obituaries are not a hot-bed of original thought nor good writing. They're mini-biographies written by grieving people, so we usually hear that the deceased "fought a courageous battle" with whatever disease carried them off, that they lived with "the love of his/her life", or adored their children. Often they were a friend to everyone. Well, it isn't the time to argue, is it?

Today, though, I was brought up short by an obituary. The first thing that caught me was the picture, a tiny black-and-white snap of a lady dancing on one foot, waving an open umbrella. (Not the photo below, obviously.) You can't really make out her features. She could be middle-aged, or a little older. However, the picture radiates joy and celebration. So does the text which begins with little in the way of punctuation: "Thank you Thank you Thank you . . . .", then launches into a litany of gratitude for her family, for being born when she was, for things like stars and trees, friends and music, for her caregivers who "were born kind".

As exits go, this one was classy. She was no one I knew, but frankly, I'm a bit sorry she wasn't.