Pop 89: One Contingency Plan After Another

By Madonna Hamel

Imagine waking Thursday morning and not quite knowing what “morning” means, let alone Thursday. Imagine this happens on Friday, too. And yet, while it’s a shock to not know where you are in time and space, you are relieved just to be here. The intimate truth of your fragility is inescapable, so you get up and walk around your home, reaching for the familiar.

For my brother, the familiar is family. Mornings we gather around the kitchen table and talk about whatever comes up. We call this: Coffee & Confession. It involves tears and sighs, laughter and wonder, while the sun rises over garden beds eager to be filled.

Then we watch Doug make breakfast. The breaking of eggs, the moving them around the pan, the transfer from pan to plate is “dinner and a show.”

Somewhere between the frying pan and the kitchen table, old stories rise from the far reaches of his brain. Up come reminiscences of days on the road with his rugby team and his old friend from high school, Duke, who actually talks like that other Duke, John Wayne. “Come to think of it,” Dougie recalls, “I suffered a concussion in one of those games. My stroke is like that - only ten times more! That time, I came out of it speaking in an Irish accent!”

The garden beds, steaming in the morning heat, are also family. It may be sleep deprivation, or maybe it’s the gift of a heightened sensory awareness of the life “force that drives every tender reed”- as Dylan Thomas calls it - but I swear the tiny new shoots surrounding us are listening to our voices as they drift out the kitchen window into the enclosure of the garden wrapped in the embrace of the trees leaning in. Looking at them reminds me of a radio broadcast that saved my sanity the year I moved to Quebec, and my car broke down somewhere along Lake Superior.

My Cavalier was over-heating again, and I had to pull over to the side of the road. The documentary I was listening to was called “The Geography of Hope.” Coming through the radio was the calm voice of an Indigenous woman saying: “Just ask the trees for help. They are there, and they will protect you.” I have never forgotten her advice, and I have never ceased to feel the guardian-like presence of the one-legged relations in the form of fir, spruce, birch and aspen.

I have also found myself using that title in a variety of situations over the years: The Geography of Hope becomes the Geography of Wonder and Memory, of Wisdom and of Charity. Tonight, as I gaze in wonder at my brother dozing on the couch before the fire, I consider the brain’s own mysterious geography, what one neuroscientist refers to as “the magic shop.”

Doug has found himself in a new terrain requiring courage, humour, and a willingness to, as he says: “accept everything that happens to me.” But what does that look like? A life’s dedication to keeping connected to the Unconscious and whatever images it renders up to him, helped along by family, friends, vocational medical professionals and grace.

Doug is staying open, learning more and more about life, love, body, soul, fear, and joy. He’s grown wiser in this short time. And his humour is intact, despite the losses. Frankly, I doubt my own ability to be that open that many hours a day. I watch intently, knowing I am learning something here, something about my own soul’s terrain.

This time has aged us all in ways both sobering and sweet, and I am thankful that our priorities stand boldly in place, that they have, for the most part, held their place. Any pressing petty cultural and personal obsessions come across as fantastically ridiculous, supremely inane, and insulting to the spirit and purpose of life and all our relations.

This whole project called “aging” needs mining, not hiding. Instead of diminishing and denigrating what it means to be old, we, as individuals, need to appraise our own innate wisdom. Because we are going to need it for times like these. It is tragic how bereft we are, as a culture, of this understanding.

I am hit with the awareness that the deepest and richest vein of gold we will ever strike is the hard-earned, long-in-coming, cumulative gift of wisdom that comes with age. Finally, all our ideas, theories, concepts, and beliefs about life and death land in the body where the real work happens.  We are not born to stay young; to do so is to die before we are old. And then what would be the point of this life, full of hurts and hopes, agonizing losses and sobering reappraisals? Our darkest times are our greatest assets, insights meant to be passed on to the young coming up behind us who need us to show them how to navigate through life, not how to apply make-up to look thirty years younger or how to make a million before the age of thirty. They need us to show them how to bear witness to our own lives, especially when we reach our final third.

Winston Churchill once described history as “one dam thing after another.” I am starting to see life as one contingency plan after another. But I’ll take it any way I can. This past month has taught me to reap the rewards of the previous past two-thirds. It’s time to harvest the fruit of our endeavours. We are not meant to do this alone; it is not possible. Gathered around the table, we take turns saying grace. We break cornbread, slather it with butter and toast each other. Right here, right now, we are the best of what it means to be human. In our greasy hair and weary smiles, sleep deprived and moody, then floating in a state of grace, we rejoice in being together.