Doing it for Demeter - Part One

Memorial services have more in common with weddings than you might think.  

There's food and flowers, speeches, the complexity of dealing with family politics, and the minefield of other people's feelings - with the added complication of planning all this while in a state of grief.  (In our case, because of the size of the sanctuary, there were also RSVPs, which took some delicate explaining.)

Four months after my mother's departure, I'd like to write about Demeter's memorial service - probably in a few parts - mainly because it's far less painful than writing about her death, especially the week leading up to it.  This is a shame, because I know from experience that the details of anything in life, even events you think you'll never forget, get lost to time (and everyone will remember it differently anyway) - which makes me want to make notes in self-defense.  

But I can't face it. Images ambush me upon waking in the middle of the night, or moving through my day. Maybe I can write about my mother's death in a year or two.

But Demeter's memorial service went well, considering. 

We got pretty good reviews.  And I didn't kill anyone.

I knew Demeter wanted a memorial.  She'd left detailed notes.  Not out of self-aggrandisement, which wasn't Demeter's style at all, but out of the belief that funerals and memorial services are a great help in grieving and healing.  She left a great deal of leeway in what we could do, because she understood that death rituals are for the living, but left suggestions to ease our decisions.

Because she'd been a long-time contributing member of her church, we had the benefit of having the church and minister, with little in the way of fees.  

The date was settled quickly, because our American cousin was anxious to attend in person, and of the dates made available by the church, Valentine's Day.

That meant I had to compose an obituary.  Obituaries are eye-wateringly expensive.  I figure the reason that that grieving families go for the term essays is that if you're skipping a service - usually at the deceased person's request, I hasten to add - you can afford to fork out hundreds of dollars.  

We were having a service, so I thought about what I look for in an obit (particularly as a family researcher), i.e. confirmation that this is indeed the person you thought it might be.

I composed a briefish three paragraphs (still damned expensive) saying where Demeter had been born, where she had grown up, where she had worked, and the names of her immediate family.  This information also supplied the three surnames she'd used over the course of nearly ten decades: her maiden name, her married name, and the name she chose for herself for the final third of her life. The all-important date and place of the service.  Demeter was convinced, in her final years, that no one would come, probably because so many of her friends had predeceased her.  (She was wrong.)

I should have splurged, and added "No flowers, please".  I didn't think we'd get any.  (I was wrong.)

The challenging bits came next.

I'll have a think, marshal what compassion and diplomacy I possess - don't laugh - and get back to you, okay?

Suggestive sidewalk

I was shaking off the grogginess of the afternoon by strolling over to Demeter's building to pick up the mail.

When I noticed the instructions on the sidewalk.

I'm very suggestible.

So I jumped, tiptoed, swerved, popped, and balanced. 

 Within reason. 

 For no reason.

A child flew past me riding in a star

This turned up on my "Liked Songs" on Spotify this morning, while I working on something else. 

 I must have "liked" it ages ago. 

 I don't recognise it. 

 But I like it.

There once was a note pure and easy/ Playing so free like a breath rippling by/ The note is eternal I hear it, it sees me/ Forever we blend as forever we die  

I listened and I heard music in a word/ And words when you played your guitar/ The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering/ And a child flew past me riding in a star

As people assemble/ Civilization is trying to find a new way to die/ But killing is really merely scene-changing/ All men are bored with other men's lives

We all know success when we all find our own dream/ And our love is enough to knock down any wall/ And the future's been seen as men try to realize/ The simple secret of the note in us all

"I shall be silent, but under protest."

I got a rather odd gift for Mother's Day from the Resident Fan Boy, although not quite as odd as the Holocaust Encyclopedia he got me for my birthday, some years back.

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.

Owl through the morning

It was younger daughter who spotted the owl, clinging to the edge of a gable roof of one of the older, more gingerbready houses on Vancouver Street.

It took the Resident Fan Boy a bit of searching to realise that she wasn't referring to a carved owl, but a very real one, grasping a baby squirrel, which, I hope, was dead.  (I wasn't there.)

The owl was being loudly harassed by a quartet of crows, intent on seizing its prized bit of protein, one or two getting close enough to get in a vicious peck.

"Oh, is that still going on?" inquired a passing couple.  "This has been going on since four this morning!"

As younger daughter and the RFB gazed, the owl finally had enough and vanished in a flurry of feathers.

It was way past its bedtime.

Coming down is the hardest thing

It was déjà-vu all over again.  The pavement hurtling up to meet me.

See, I'd received word that my prescription for my latest kidney infection was ready at our favourite pharmacy, where they know us by name and even let us slip ahead in the queue for vaccinations.  (Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone.)

The trouble is, they close on weekends, and this is the Victoria Day long weekend, and I had excellent reasons for needing the prescription, which I won't go into, thank you very much.

So, I fed the cat, put away the laundry, changed, and fled out into the afternoon, clutching my umbrella, walking at a brisk pace, aided by my downloaded self-assembled Spotify playlist, which speeds me along.

Maybe that's why I suddenly found myself airborne, as my toe caught one of the uneven edges of sidewalk square, almost exactly as it did on a November evening a little over three years ago.  Fighting back the disbelief, I flipped on to my back, and saw two women running towards me from opposite directions. With John Mellencamp's "Authority Song" in my earbuds, I rolled on to the grassy verge, which provided a cushion, so I could push up on to my knees, back on to my heels, straightening my legs, and walk back with my hands to an upright position.  I beamed triumphantly at my would-be helpers, who had reached out to steady me if needed.  But I didn't.

"Man, these old sidewalks are a menace!" I said cheerily, before soldiering on.  (I hope I thanked them.)

At stoplights, I did an inventory:  road rash on the heels of my hands, and a definite sensation of a scraped knee under my (thankfully) old trousers.

I told my sad story to the pharmacist, who urged me to ice my hands and knee when I got home, which I did, of course.  I did the last time too, but was clearly not nearly as badly injured as I was three years ago.  There were two pink patches on the damp washcloth I'd wrapped around a baggie of frozen mashed pumpkin, and placed under my left elbow as an afterthought, when I realized it was a bit sore.  It had been scraped despite the fact I was wearing a fleece top under a fleece jacket, so it must have taken the brunt of my fall.  

I marvelled at lack of severity in my injuries, though.  Was I cushioned by the anti-left bag slung across my left side?  Did I bounce?  I certainly didn't hit my head or face this time.  By bedtime, two light burgundy bruises had appeared at the base of my big toes.

Oh, and the antibiotic started working almost immediately, thank goodness, or this really would have been a long weekend.

Here's the late great Tom Petty, singing "Learning to Fly", assisted by the Heartbreakers, Stevie Nicks, and the crowd at the 2006 edition of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee.

Well, I started out down a dirty road/Started out all alone/And the sun went down as I crossed the hill/And the town lit up/The world got still.

I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings/Coming down is the hardest thing.

Well, the good old days may not return/And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn.

Well, some say life may beat you down/Break your heart; steal your crown.

So I started out for God knows where/Guess I'll know when I get there.

Cat carton

While walking to the coffee shop (I do that a lot, so sorry for keeping mentioning this), I spotted a nice medium empty cardboard box on a corner.

I spent a chunk of last month searching for, re-assembling, and generally coveting medium cardboard boxes because I was donating Demeter's books to the annual Times-Colonist book drive, and my mother was a voracious reader.

I ended up with 19 boxes of books:  my Friend of the Right Hand transported 16 of them, and one of Demeter's merciful neighbours kindly fitted the other three into her car, alongside another neighbour's 3-box donation.

At the coffee shop, I mulled over whether I should take the abandoned box, seeing as the book drive is long over, and reasoned my recent experience indicates that containers are hard to come by -- and there are at least a boxful of books left in Demeter's apartment.  I figured that if the box was still there, I was meant to take it home.

It was.  I did.  I shook out the grass and leaves and insects first.

At home, I put it out where I would see it and remember it.

Now I don't have the heart to move it.

Not so great expectations

 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.

Surrounded

 

Ten years ago, on a miserable grey afternoon, I took younger daughter to the Mayfair cinema, which was opened in 1932 in Old Ottawa South, and we watched The Lady in the Van, based on Alan Bennett's play of the same name.

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.

One promise away

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. 

The female musician in this clip is Jófríður Ákadóttir, who is kind enough to her international fans to record and perform under "JFDR".  Later in the programme, she sings one of her songs, accompanied by high school students in a "clarinet choir", a clip that isn't online, although you can live-stream the series if you contribute money to PBS, something I resumed when the Creature stopped federal funding.

However, the video for the JFDR song is available:

 

Once an orchid sat/ in a silver night and/ solemnly waited/ Slightly breathing/ Touched its glistening/ tear, only one dream away from/ a perfect birth/ One promise away from birth/ One secret away from/ One dream a--/ One kiss away from life/ from a life/ from another life/ from another life, you know

Then when the sun rose/ in a newer lighting/ Lay his wings on her/ warm with his kisses/ and touched her light feather/ just so they could breathe again/ Just so they could feel the pain/ Just to be reborn again/ 

Then when I said/ Sat his wings down/ Yearning for our love/ Yearning for our love/ one dream away

I really loved the version with the clarinet choir. Icelandic students apparently get their musical education one-on-one on their chosen instrument, because music is so highly valued.  I can't help but wonder what life is like for those who lack musical aptitude in Iceland, because I was certainly never that good.  Is it like life for un-athletic kids in North American schools?