Doing it for Demeter - Part Two

There is a certain amount of power struggle in all family occasions, but particularly in the events and ceremonies surrounding a death.  Grief is a very personal thing, and people tend to assert ownership:  who has suffered the greatest loss, where one is in the hierarchy of mourning, all exacerbated by emotional intensity.

In my years as a hospice volunteer, I often had a front-row seat to this.  I remember puttering in the small open-plan kitchen at Victoria Hospice one late winter's afternoon, when two warring factions of a soon-to-be-bereaved family exploded into confrontation in the lobby.  I froze, and don't remember if I had the presence of mind to run to alert the staff, but they would have heard the shouting anyway.

I was determined to avoid similar scenes in the weeks leading up to my mother's memorial service, knowing how much it would have upset Demeter -- and knowing how easy it might be to trip the wire.

It didn't take my non-existent powers of prophecy to predict that Double Leo Sister would want to run the show.  I am, after all, a survivor of both her weddings, both ambitious pageants with items, displays, performances, and minute details being continually added, up until the last possible minute.

This means I was not particularly surprised when DLS didn't log in to the ZOOM meeting for planning the service with the minister.  She said she slept through it:  "I've been through a lot."

The minister forwarded transcripts of the meeting to her with handy-dandy ways to add comments and annotations; DLS said she'd been "denied access to the files".

To be fair, she's always had a deep distrust of (and impatience with) computers, ironic, given how important they are in the lives of the men in her life, two Zoomer sons and a husband in IT.  Even before the internet took over, she had a self-proclaimed phobia of paper.  This was her justification for never responding to letters, and must have made record-keeping for her work a nightmare.

As someone who's known her since her birth, I'd say she simply doesn't want to be pinned down, but I'm hardly an objective witness.

Her computer-literate husband and younger son eventually ironed out the "denied access", after I'd copied and pasted notes to send through email.  I tried to explain that the church group for Demeter's neighbourhood would, by tradition, being organising the food.  She told me she would provide the food -- just as she had done for her best friend's memorial service, which she had put together during the pandemic.  

By this time, seventy people were expected, so I quietly made arrangements with the volunteers anyway, most of whom I knew from my own days with the church, which DLS had left as a teenager.

My mantra became I'm doing this for Demeter.  I said it under my breath and repetitively.

DLS was now heavily involved in designing display tables for the reception, which she hoped to use as a conversation "activity", to "get people involved".  

I decided not to say that, at late afternoon on Valentine's Day, those people kind enough to show up would probably want to go home, and set about my most pressing duty -- writing the eulogy.

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 worked, for all concerned.

That meant I had to compose an obituary.  Obituaries are eye-wateringly expensive.  I figure the reason 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 better afford to fork out hundreds of dollars.  (Come to think of it, "no service by request of the deceased" is kinda like an elopement, isn't it?  That is, if we're sticking with the memorial service/wedding comparison.  We don't have to.)

We were having a service, so I went for economics and brevity, thinking about what I look for in an obit (particularly as a family researcher), i.e. confirmation that, yes, 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?

It is a far, far better thing

Over the past couple of decades, what passes for Christmas television programming has bemused me.  As far as I can tell, some underpaid minion, saddled with slapping some sort of viewing schedule together, had assumed that, since Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, anything connected with Dickens is Christmassy:  Great Expectations, Bleak House or even A Tale of Two Cities.

With that in mind, I can pompously intone:  "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times . . . . " when talking about this year's Christmas, can't I?

(Well I can.  You weren't there.  Lucky you.)

It was the worst in the sense that I knew it was going to be stressful, took steps to prepare and plan against that eventuality, and it was all exactly as stressful as I feared anyway.  

A house guest (delightful, courteous, and omnipresent).  

Extended family with temperaments diametrically opposed to the introverted temperaments in our household. 

An unusually deaf Demeter, plagued by a small and stubborn ball of wax in her so-called "good ear", and totally bamboozled by aforementioned temperaments. 

A daughter on the autistic spectrum, to whom Christmas is vital, abandoned for a few heart-wrenching minutes, by her panicky father on a holiday carousel.  (It's a long story, please don't make me repeat it.)

And the Resident Fan Boy, whose instinctive defence is shutting down his brain, whenever something emerges from left field, which happens a lot at Christmas.

It was the best of times in the sense that I didn't kill anybody.  I didn't yell at anybody -- except the Resident Fan Boy, and only a couple of times, at that.

The shopping was done on time, and the presents seemed to go over well.  There are still three Christmas cards to mail.  (For those of you not resident in Canada, we had a postal strike from mid-November to mid-December.). What food I managed to produce has been edible, even marginally festive.

So I really have nothing to grumble about.  My expectations weren't overly great, and my house is, in no way, bleak.

Besides, there has been very little Dickens on the telly - apart from A Christmas Carol.  The specialty channels are jammed with scores of Christmas-themed romantic movies, in the vein of Harlequin and Mills & Boon.  They play them year-round now.

Oh, joy.

Merry Eighth Day of Christmas, to you and yours.

The elephant in the room

 The best of results and the worst of fears, all in one day.

On a summer's morning, I was struggling to get Demeter's laundry done, and, tussle concluded, returned to our place to find the Resident Fan Boy and the Jolly Not-So-Green Giant setting up an enormous big screen television in our living room.

This was not a shock.  The Resident Fan Boy has been promising me for two years that we would join the ranks of those with flat screens - as my eye-sight steadily deteriorates.  I sent him examples and gently hinted, but he always said that he was too busy with his church volunteering and accompanying younger daughter to her singing lessons.  He decided that he needed the guidance of brother-in-law the Jolly Not-So-Green Giant, who works in IT for a provincial governmental department.  Every time my Double Leo Sister and her husband visited, the topic would be raised and deferred.

Finally, the appointment had been made, the device purchased, and now the technical argot was in full swing.

The Jolly Not-So-Green Giant is young enough to belong to a different cohort, and was, once again, earnestly trying to sell me on Netflix.  (Every time I investigate Netflix, I'm mostly impressed by how unimpressed I am.)

Having, after some fiddling, located our cable service (which provides us with HBO and Crave, thank you very much), it seemed they couldn't connect our DVD player. Now, this is something that clearly mystifies J N-S-G G, who streams everything, but I've been dreaming, for more than two years, of being able to watch my favourite things on a big screen. 

As the fellas sank into another discussion consisting of strings of letters and numbers, Double Leo Sister quizzed me about lunch.  I checked with younger daughter, who had retreated to her room, but she wasn't forthcoming, so DLS and I decided on the local Greek restaurant.  I was nervous about Demeter waiting for us, as the installation stretched on and on, so I set out for Demeter's apartment.  DLS followed with her dog, and I tried to clear my head of the jangle of the upheaval.

We should have taken younger daughter with us.

We were accompanying Demeter to the restaurant, in a slow descent down Cook Street, when my phone rang.  The Resident Fan Boy was calling to say he couldn't find younger daughter.  Or the cat.

I gave a quick update to DLS and doubled back to our place.  Apparently younger daughter had fled with her purse when she overheard her uncle telling her father that the DVD problem could be resolved, but, as he laughed dismissively, the VHS player was out of the question. (The J N-S-G G has always derived derisive pleasure out of our ancient televisions, DVD collections and residual video cassettes.) Not a problem for us, but younger daughter, being on the spectrum, abhors change, and there are a couple of VHS tapes she treasures, mainly for what she associates with them. Neither man noticed that she'd  slipped out, until they were getting ready to join us for lunch.  They soon realized that she hadn't taken her phone.  Younger daughter has fled before, but not since we returned to Victoria.  She does know the neighbourhood, having walked most of it.

But how could she have taken the cat? He weighs fourteen pounds, I wondered miserably, more resentful than ever that the RFB had involved his complex and complicating in-laws in what should have been a relatively simple purchase.

I arrived to find my husband uselessly pacing the apartment.  He had located the cat, who had taken his safety perch on the very top of younger daughter's armoire.  Shortly afterwards, the J N-S-G G phoned the RFB with the news that younger daughter had shown up at the restaurant.  Double Leo Sister came in the van to pick us up, but I chose the five-minute walk as a balm and therapy - and a play for time. I had a bit of stress and irritation to walk off, both of which I couldn't afford to show.

If only the RFB had bought the television on his own, I grizzled.  He told me later that he actually prayed they wouldn't be able to fit it in their van, so he could have it delivered and installed later.

At the restaurant, younger daughter apologized and told us she was considering a walk in the park, but thought that would make her late for lunch.  I handed her the phone, gently explaining that she should always have it handy, and congratulated her on remembering to go to the Greek restaurant.

We brought Demeter back, and I was able to show her a Repair Shop she'd seen, but this time in all the glory and splendour of a 65-inch high definition screen.  DLS took the RFB to London Drugs to pick up an inexpensive compatible DVD player, and I showed Demeter a sampling of Wolf Hall, which we'd been showing her in parts on her Thursday night dinner visits. What had been dark, and difficult to follow for her, was now huge, clear, and comprehensible - just as I'd prayed it would be.

Finally, to my secret relief, they departed.

I feel grateful - and exasperated at the same time.  Over the past month, we've been learning how the new toy works and revelling in the clarity and detail - particularly such things as ballets and musicals.  Even old Fred Astaire movies have a three-dimensional look to them.  It's like being by a window and looking in on far-removed times and places.

However, there is a price, beyond the monetary one.  I can never express anything other than delight, acknowledgement, and appreciation for the service rendered, as traumatising as it was.

But you know, there was always that particular elephant in the room.  Now it can watch TV.

The empty seat

Cartoon by Morten Morland, a Norwegian cartoonist based in the UK

 This cartoon is being shared a lot; it appeared in today's Times. 

 I think it strikes a chord on many levels (which is actually what a chord is, isn't it?).

Those of us who watched the State Funeral today (and we couldn't resist) had an opportunity: to see beyond the pageantry, symbolism, and sentiment.

We feel a loss, but it's more than a seemingly omnipresent and immortal Queen.  It's a way of life, and a way of seeing things, which, however myopic, was something taken for granted.

Many of us looked over to a chair, and realised, probably not for the first time, that a flawed, maddening, but beloved person no longer was sitting there.  Perhaps we thought:  Oh s/he would have loved/hated this.

I was lucky today.  I escorted Demeter from her apartment to watch bits and pieces of the ceremonies.  We drank tea, of course. Afterwards, we discussed which members of the Royal Family we'd seen over the years.  (They come to Canada quite a bit.)

And I realised that my very British mother actually only lived in England for about a decade, if you include her first year of life, and home furloughs from Kenya.

Then I escorted her home, and went for a walk in the sunset.

It seemed appropriate.

Yes, we've heard of him

Elder daughter, who has been resident in England since last October, is discovering the delights of bank holiday weekends.

For this last one, COVID restrictions have loosened enough to allow a visit to my cousins in Lincolnshire.

Let's be clear.  These are delightful cousins.  They are gracious, well-educated, kind, and hospitable.  Elder daughter has visited before on previous trips to the UK.

They moved to Lincolnshire recently, and live in what elder daughter describes as a "gated community" just outside Lincoln.  They met elder daughter at the train, and gave her a tour of Lincoln.  They didn't let her pay for anything.  Elder daughter figures she ended up 60 pounds on this trip, because they also insisted on paying her train fare.  "I can't ever repay them," she moans to us on Skype.  "They'd never accept it!"

There is a small price to pay, however.  My cousins have told elder daughter how astounded they are that she's managed to get a job in London.  After years of working for a major cultural organisation in Hades, elder daughter has taken a full-time job with a heritage organisation in Greater London (after securing interviews with such organisations as the Old Vic, the Royal Academy of Music, The Rose Theatre, and after a job offer from the British Library).  She's done this during a pandemic.  

My cousins are astonished at her grasp of British politics; she has a First Class Honours degree in Journalism and History.  They are amazed that she can navigate England by train by herself.  She is twenty-nine. 

Bless their hearts.

After a wonderful weekend visiting other cousins, sightseeing, catching up, even doing some baking, my cousin asks elder daughter:  "Tell me, is Christopher Plummer a big deal in Canada?"  

Elder daughter assures him that this is so.  She doesn't mention that Christopher Plummer was born in Toronto, raised in Montreal, and was the descendant of a Canadian Prime Minister, because my daughter surpasses me in diplomacy, as in most other things.