Pop 89: Dear and Beloved
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
When will it end? And who can I blame it on? Those are the first thoughts that come to mind when disaster hits. We are still getting over two recent deaths in our tiny community when news of another looms in the clouds – in the menacing glow of an ambulance’s whirling light, headed north of town.
I was headed south to deliver a series of collages to Grand Coteau Cultural Centre in Shaunavon. I was not in the mood for it. A storm was brewing. And the night before, my sister called to say my father had taken a turn for the worse in the hospital. He was admitted the previous afternoon for sepsis.
Shades of my mother’s stroke crept into my memory. I was on the road with my ex and his band at the time. We were in Caspar, Wyoming, and the waitress at the IHOP was setting my pancakes in front of me when the cell went off, and my sister, the same sister now in charge of care of my dad in this crisis, delivered me the scary news.
We drove all night from Wyoming to Medicine Hat. At one point, we stopped at a gas station, and the women’s washroom had a hand-painted quote on the wall that read: “Women are like teabags; you never know how strong they are until they get into hot water.” I couldn’t eat anything, not even the Wisconsin cheese soup. My beau grabbed a handful of crackers for me, hoping he could get me to eat a couple on the drive. When we got to Alberta, I had to part with him as he drove on to a gig in Edmonton. After a couple of false starts in white-out blizzards, my sister and brother-in-law and I made it to Kelowna too late to say goodbye.
Yesterday as the wind grew fierce, while my dad was in a Kelowna trauma ward, a siren’s cry pierced Val Marie village. The post office was closed; the woman who works there is on the ambulance crew. Such is the way things work in villages. You are rushing to a scene, and you don’t know how bad it is, but you know you will be personally affected because there is no doubt you know the injured party. And when you return to work or home, everyone will look at you with pleading eyes, and you will have to keep the details to yourself.
It did not end well. We lost another deeply loved fellow, someone who always had a joke, a laugh, a smile, a wink, and a nod. Paul-Emile was always ready to smile. Even his complaints came out funny. He was ever ready to help people out. Once, I was trying to convince the housing committee that the garbage bins fenced in a pen directly in front of my window could maybe be moved to the alley. They deliberated, and I complained until Paul-Emile showed up at coffee row at the Senior’s Centre one day. Hop in, he said, I want to show you something. And he drove me to my place. The bins were gone, the pen was knocked over. What happened? I asked. I don’t know! he exclaimed. It just fell over!
Paul and Joy had a pew at the back of the church. They started going to mass as a way of expressing gratitude for him getting his health back from an illness. When it came to the sign of peace, when we reach over to shake our neighbour’s hand, Joy would smile and wave her little bottle of hand disinfectant at us, keeping us at bay and watch over her man. That was in a time way before disinfectant became a ubiquitous accessory.
It’s too soon to use terms like “I will miss,” but I will miss Paul’s wild drive down Railway after every heavy snowfall, dragging two tractor tires chained to his truck, flattening the road better than any snowplow. I will miss his spontaneous stops in the middle of the road to chat with a neighbour, truck window to truck window, with nothing but time and stories to share. He and Joy, never a better-named woman, a local once said, always seemed like they were entertained by each other, even when he drove her nuts. They made a decision to get the most out of life, to do whatever it took to stay on the sunny side.
My dad isn’t out of the woods yet. But he has his kids praying for him because he raised us in a tradition that believes in the power of prayer – that blend of awe and wonder at both the bright joys of life and the small stuff that ends up being the big stuff in the end: a phone call on Sunday, a perfect pancake, a game of bridge, a skate on a pond, a walk in the snow, a Christmas carol, a cup of coffee that goes straight to the cold bones, a silly joke, a memory.
I know we all gotta go sometime but sometime is never the right time. There’s always so much more to say to each other. Stories to tell. Family histories to write down. Songs to be re-sung. There are so many more soups to share together and soup recipes to jot down.
Last night I came across a copy of the 23rd psalm handwritten by my mother. (These are the ways souls get in touch with us from the other side, I thought.) I read it out loud, thinking of the story my brother told me of my mom’s last hours as one sister read it over and over to her on her hospital bed. As a choir director, she used to sing it, a dearly beloved form of solace for the rest of us to hear. And I think to thank both parents for instilling in me a conviction as true as flesh and bone, that green pastures and still waters await us, as sure as the stars and the prayerful poems that point the way home.