Pop 89: Communing in Time and Space
By Madonna Hamel
My brother is treating his stroke as a gift. Granted, he doesn’t always see it that way, but he is trying to mine it. His intention to use its lessons to enrich his life is admirable, and is motivated by his hope to pass his insights and stories on to others. Over the last three weeks, there have been many, many long conversations while he and we three sisters sit around his bed, or at the kitchen table, or near the fire in his cozy home surrounded by sentinel firs and nodding ferns. Some nights we stay up late because to go to sleep means to wake to the fact of a stroke. Other nights, we stay up late because we are graced by laughter and memory and tales of wonder and imagination.
With every conversation, Doug takes pains to find the right word for his every thought and sentiment. Words to situate him - and us- in time and space when time and space have been drastically altered. In a profoundly confusing time, it’s imperative he gets the words right. And by “right,” he means etymologically precise and accurate, not politically or ideologically correct.
Besides “Grace,” another word that comes up often is: “Community.” Nobody knows the meaning of “community” better than people who live on islands or in villages in remote places. Nowadays, social media flings the word about liberally - applying it to everything from chat groups to YouTube fan clubs. But an actual community is much more than it. A community is a group of human beings who interact with each other - physically, personally and in shared physical space and time.
Community involves good old-fashioned “communion”: baking, breaking and sharing daily bread with each other, not a group of strangers we erroneously call “friends” clicking on pictures of last night’s supper “shared” online. It is flesh and blood people who bake bread, cook soups and then pack them into their trucks and deliver them to neighbours who are doing poorly.
My brother belongs to an actual community. He has been there for others, and now he is learning to let others be there for him. His older neighbour Georgie has that rural woman’s way of being both tender and tough at the same time. He values and honours her combination of deep wisdom and dark humour. She’s been lending her car to us to take the ferries to Campbell River, Comox and Nanaimo for doctor appointments. When we return after a long day of docs and travel, there is always a fresh gift of a meal on the counter and a fire in the grate.
Two days ago, Gina brought a bag of garden carrots and a cake. Brian brought sourdough and did a run to Costco for us. The neighbours on the other side passed chowder over the fence and jars of salmon canned last year. Deb, a sea captain and long-distance trucker in her seventies, came by the other afternoon with beers for her “buddy Dougie.” In her gentle, quiet voice, she waxed on about her new boat. She returned the next day with a warm loaf of bread and a handful of fresh-baked peanut butter cookies because she noticed: “He wasn’t drinking my booze.”
In the village, after a doctor’s appointment at the island clinic, people swarmed him, wanting to give him hugs or a pat on the back or just a big beaming smile. We tried to ward them off, like handlers or bouncers. The whirling behind his left eye gets intense, and we make our way back to the car.
Community: “A treasured feeling that comes from shared experiences.” “A sense of shared history.” “Members of a collective that have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other.” Given those definitions, I’ve seen some pretty bizarre words coupled with “community,” words that contradict the very idea of caring about the fates of others. I ask myself, how does “S&M community” or the “billionaire community” care about the fates of others? Community requires engagement, attention, listening, and tenderness, even when we’d rather not make the effort - in fact, especially when we’d rather not.
If you don’t know each other’s names or homes or voices, you’re not a community. You’re an idea, a concept of community; once you’ve experienced the generosity, vulnerability and late-night calls for assistance, that reality hits home.
I can tell you what community is not: it is not a group of people who bond over a shared enemy. It would absurd to call the Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan, a community. A real community is the group of people you’re stuck with, come hell or deep snow. You make the community with the knuckleheads you’ve been graced with. You try to see the similarities in each other, not the differences.
Yesterday we drove Georgie’s car to Nanaimo to see my brother’s new occupational therapist. We were all excited about the new exercises, tricks and games to allow Doug to achieve eye-hand coordination. The young OT invited the sisters into her office along with Doug, and we sat around a table while she pulled out a deck of cards and asked him to shuffle, then sort them into suits. The look on my brother’s face as he faced the chore in front of him was of sheer delight. Finally, the carpenter was given something to do with his hands. Finally, somebody was going to watch him and give him some kind of actual physical assessment within time and space. We sat, holding our breath, watching, fully engaged, trying not to cheer or gasp as he shuffled and sorted into piles, singing Bob Dylan to maintain a rhythm. The sheer determination and openness he brought to the task was thrilling in its immediacy. For that moment, all that mattered in the world was that he could sort these cards. Our tiny community was filled with Grace.