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Published: March 25th 2005
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Living abroad, trips home occur on special occasions, births, wedding, funerals. In the winter of 2005, my Grandmother's condition had become serious and she was moved into a final care facility. I paid her a visit with my Uncle who lived nearby and was checking up one her each day. It was an awkward visit. She lay in her bed talking with us for a few minutes. The nurse and my Uncle agreed this was a good day. Kay was talkative and her mind relatively alert and cohesive considering the morphine. I knelt by the bed and for the first time ever brushed my hand across her head. She looked frail. She'd lost considerable weight. I had in my head several things I wanted to say, memories of her old house in Cedar, Papa, what a good grandmother she'd been. I couldn't say anything. A lump formed in my throat. Although my mother is an R.N. and deals with death every week, it was only spoken of as a clinical fact demonstrated by strangers, not as a certainty that would affect those close to me. My Uncle knelt on the other side of the bed. Kay spoke about a spider
Bowen Island
approaching Vancouver International Airport over Georgia Straight - go figure, cloudy she had watched for several days crwaling around the ceiling, in and out of the cracks and light fixtures. She cannot move and she lies facing the ceiling or the TV. Her eyes were the most terrifying. She looked so young and innocent, like all of life's stresses had been peeled away. The nurse and my Uncle helped her to eat some ice chips. Then our visit was over. I collapsed in the hallway, cried for a moment, and again most of that evening.
After a couple days in Vancouver catching up with my folks and my sister, and a couple friends. I headed for a few days road trip with an old friend. Marci and I stayed in Victoria one night, ate classy Chinese with her father and his wife. Dropped by my Uncle's in Nanaimo to visit with the new additions, my little cousins Kiara and Garret. Up Island, Qualicum Beach, we shared a home-cooked feast with Marci's mom and her household. The next day we crossed a low mountain range and through a couple minutes blizzard to reach the westcoast and Tofino. We hopped a whale watching boat and were blessed with a pod of 'friendlies',
Linda & Bob
my folks dressed in their new Laos shirts humpbacks who didn't appear to scared of our boat less than 25m away. The 7m waves had an unwelcome effect on my friend. The boat tour continued up the coast to Hot Springs Cove, where I had booked aboard a not too well known B&B, The Innchanter, run by a friend of a friend. His old boat was moored at the most serene and private dock, only a short walk from the spring. Once the tour group left, the B&B owner, his mate and I relaxed in the hot pools, drinking a beer, and watching the sun set over the sea. A definite BC moment. Marci & I spent the next day chilling on the boat's top deck. The sun was out and the air fresh but I had forgotten that such beauty was paid for with cold winds. We kept bundled. She read. I sketched. After a second night's stay, a couple delicious meals and a few more soaks in the spring, Marci and I, along with the B&B owner, caught a seaplane back to Tofino. To make up for a year and half outside beautiful BC, I had done well. Marci & I stopped for a picnic under
the tall fir trees of Cathedral Grove.
Katherine Dodd died two weeks later, April 15th, age eighty-seven. She had out-lived her husband, a Canadian soldier whom she'd met in London in 1944, by a quarter century. I was not present for the funeral. It was a grand ceremony. Kay had been a devout Irish Catholic and long standing member of her church. It seemed no coincidence that she passed on only days after the late Pope John-Paul III. What struck me most after hearing news of the service was how she was much more than a Grandmother. I had never really considered her in any other light. She had often told me stories of her and Papa's days as goldminers up country and their adventures with the camper truck. She'd recounted stories of the night before D-day, doing shift work at the hospital, when a long silence had been followed by the sound of what seemed an unbelievable number of fighter planes. She spoke endlessly of relations on three different continents but I could only see her as Grandma, reading her romance novels at the breakfast table.
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