Saying Goodbye To Old Times

Tags

Alzheimer's, Christmas, family, home, Nova Scotia, time, traditions

Our Christmas home in Nova Scotia felt sort of… final, to me, this year.

We plan to spend next Christmas here in BC because it is expensive to travel during the holidays, and it makes a stressful time just that much more stressful. Our next trip to Nova Scotia will probably be during the summer when more people will be free to get together with us, and travel is safer and cheaper.

Although the snow was certainly a thrilling novelty to Owl.

My father’s Alzheimer’s is slowly progressing. He still knows who everyone is, and what is going on, but he is frail, and quiet, and easily confused. My mother has to help him shower, get dressed, and she puts him down to bed for naps and at bed time like a child.

But he’s still Dad.

If and when we spend another Christmas in Nova Scotia, the person that I know as my father may have faded away entirely.

Christmas was always a big deal in our house. Both my parents love Christmas, and we used to have all sorts of traditions built up around it. The annual tree decorating was so idyllic that my high school friends used to attend it too, because it was just such a Christmassy THING.

But many of the traditions have fallen by the wayside one by one what with my commitments to Perfect Husband’s family, and my father’s illness, and the fact simply that time is moving on and things change.

We did still decorate the tree this year. Mum needed PH to help bring the tree in and get it set up. The last time we were home, Dad could still do that. He still sat and watched us decorate while he sipped egg nog, but once upon a time he would have been the one pouring the drinks and sloshing too much rum into everyone’s nog.

The decorators this year were mostly Mum and Owl, with me alternately helping, taking photos, and watching the baby. It was the same, but not the same, at the same time.

If that makes sense.

Meanwhile, the Christmas Eve traditions on PH’s side of the family are going to be changing soon, too. Their Christmas Eve family gathering had the same food, the same schedule, but less exuberance. My nieces and nephews are older now. The next youngest to Owl is already ten years old, and most of them are young adults in university and beyond.

Our kids were definitely the hit of the show.

We got a family photo of all of the “kids”, including Fritter, on the front steps. We don’t know when another group photo will be able to be taken as the grown “kids” start moving away and living their own lives.

I’m really glad we made it home this Christmas, because I felt like I was getting a chance to say goodbye to these old traditions and accept that things are changing.

Owl got to experience and explore these “old times”, and I got to make my peace with their passing.

And these changes don’t have to feel bad. But they will be different.

Maybe that is okay. Maybe it is time for us to build our own traditions, here, at home.

30 Years in 30 Seconds

Tags

age, ageing, getting older, life, life story, time, timeline

1 day old

0. Born, squall, learn to move my own body parts.

1. Learn to walk and talk and swim. Realize that the reflection in the sliding glass door is actually how other people see me.

2. Get toilet trained by a visiting aunt. Now, whenever I use the potty I say, “Auntie Helen happy?”

3. Learn to read, which means that I no longer have to pretend to read magazines which fooled no one anyway because I often held them upside down.

4. Attend pre-school. Learn that when someone asks you “how are you, today?” you aren’t actually supposed to respond honestly – just say “fine, thank you”. Learn through teacher’s example that guinea pigs should be fed foods fresh in vitamin C and not left out in the sun for prolonged periods of time.

5. Start kindergarten. When a family friend picks me up at school because my mother was in a car accident, I worry about the safety of my Popple who was in the back seat (said Popple turned up yesterday during a purge of Owl’s closet and I vetoed throwing it away). Come down with chicken pox that same night, because my mother’s day was clearly not difficult enough. Accidentally kill my goldfish, Fred and Frieda, when I fail to alert my mother that their cage is due to be cleaned.

6. Start as a “full day” instead of a “half day” student at my Montessori school. Develop a crush on a boy called Michael who has red hair and spits when he talks. Get a puppy.

In Which If By Yes The Blog has a birthday, and Carol thankfully does NOT

Tags

blogs, time, writing

This blog is officially two years old today.

Is it just me or does it feel like a lot longer? And yet, the time has flown by between then an now. It’s very strange.

When If By Yes began I was renting, working, depressed, and whining about how I wanted a baby.

Now I’m a home owner (albeit of a musty, small, falling-down townhouse), looking for a job, anxious but happy, and whining about how I don’t want to leave my baby.

I’ve fancied up my blog theme a bit. Feel free to complain. If you all hate it I can always change it back. I”m still tweaking the background and such. How is it loading, for you?

As another part of my celebration of Two Years of Blogging On My Ass, I’m introducing a new segment to If By Yes:

The Early Writings of Carol The Genius

While I was home, I dug out some of “books” that I wrote as a child.

The first, written when I was in grade 4, is called Follow The Animals Home and chronicles the adventures of two Mary Sue characters who own a ridiculous number of pets and end up wandering around the wilderness around the Niagra Escarpment. The second, All That Glitters is a slightly better effort about a motley assortment of kittens, puppies, and a horse who go tramping all over the countryside looking for the “perfect owner”, only to be continually disappointed.

Both are hysterically funny, although I don’t think I was trying to be at the time.

I also found a book of my early poems.

Now you, too, can enjoy selected segments from these early efforts! Marvel in the genius!

Or laugh uncontrollably.

Whichever seems appropriate.

Shall I start you off with a poem? 

Canadians

there isn’t a Canadian that doesn’t feel for creatures,

not even one, I’m not kidding it’s really quite a feature.

Even people that start out shooting as a child,

soon realise there doing and become gentle  and mild,

with animals,

why?

– Me, age 11

1915-2010

Tags

death, grandmothers, life, old age, time

It was the nineteen thirties, in rural Nova Scotia. A young woman, just 18, was starting married life with her new husband, and her newborn baby daughter. They had some property, and a house which her husband was still in the process of building. Every weekend he’d add a little more to it. In the meantime, though, the wall studs stood bare as ribs, and the sound of hammering often echoed through the tiny home.

The young bride lived close to her parents. Her mother, still young herself, also had a baby daughter. The bride’s daughter, and her sister, were very close in age and growing up together – more like cousins than niece and aunt. But there was a difference between them. The new mother’s daughter was a first born baby, to parents just starting out. Her clothes were sparse – what could be knitted in the months of pregnancy. Their resources were slim. But the baby sister – ah, well, she was the youngest of many, to parents with piles of hand-me-downs, to parents well settled.

The baby sister had clothes and luxuries that simply were not available to an 18 year old girl and her new husband. The girl would look at her own baby in her skimpy clothing, and feel inadequate next to her mother’s experience and resources.

But what really got to her were the black leather booties.

Her baby sister had tiny leather booties, very fashionable at the time, while her own daughter’s feet went bare.

Those booties ate at the poor young mother, as she looked at her barren house, the exposed wall boards, and her little daughter. It ate at her that she couldn’t even afford leather booties, the way that her own mother could for her newest child.

And so, one day, her husband brought home a pair of booties. They were tiny, and soft, and fashionable, and expensive.

They were every bit as good as the baby sister’s down the road.

Fast forward seventy five years.

The 18 year old bride is now a tiny, 93 year old woman. She is a grandmother, and a great grandmother. One of her many granddaughters lives in the old house once built by her husband, who passed away more than 15 years ago. The house’s walls have long since been insulated and drywalled. In fact, they need some repairs. And so, they have been renovating.

In the walls, on a supporting board once used as a shelf, they found a pair of black leather baby booties.

They bring it to the tiny matriarch, and she holds them, and she smiles as she remembers.

…Fast forward another year. She is told that her oldest son is dying of cancer. She does not go to see him in hospital, can’t bear the thought of watching him struggle for his last breaths, but writes him a note, bidding goodbye to her child. Then she sits back and waits for death to claim her and take her back to him.

Her daughter, a grandmother herself now, comes by every day to care for her, but the visits are not always remembered. Mostly she sits alone in her room in the care facility, and looks out the window with big, puzzled eyes.

She reads and rereads letters from her baby sister, now an old woman too, and each time she reads the same letter, it is new to her.

She is told that she has now become a great, great grandmother, and she smiles vaguely at the picture of the tiny baby in a strange woman’s arms.

I am 27, and visiting my grandmother at Christmas time. My husband and I find her room and look in. She is sitting in her rocking chair, and clutching a blue teddy bear to her chest as she rocks back and forth, looking at nothing.

She recognizes me, and is delighted, but she never uses my name. She clutches the hand of the grandson-in-law whom she has no memory of meeting before, although she recognizes him from photographs on her wall.

She holds me tight in a gnarled old hand, with skin as fragile as tissue paper and soft as a baby’s. She shows us a picture of the great great granddaughter. She tells us that babies are such a blessing, that when I was born my hairline looked the same as my father’s. She asks me if we know what we will name our baby.

I won’t discover that I am pregnant for another week.

She rocks, and she holds us tight, and her eyes fill with tears when she realizes that we must leave soon. She shows us pictures, and she talks about when my uncle was small. She tells us that the nursing staff put snakes in her room at night. She has been terrified of snakes all her life.

“I don’t think they were real snakes, Nana,” we tell her gently.

She rocks, and she holds me close, and tells me how much she loves me, and she looks at us with big, sad eyes.

“I never meant to live this long…” she says miserably, “I keep hoping I won’t wake up…”

and our hearts break for her.

…I got a phone call today.

It would be wrong for me to be sad. I should be happy for her, relieved for her, and in a way I am.

But…

My Nana passed away today.