Pop 89: Something’s Lost, Something’s Gained
By Madonna Hamel
I am looking at a picture of my brother the first day he walked among his garden beds after leaving the hospital. He has a white beard, deep smile lines radiate from his bright, shining blue eyes. The smile on his face is so open, so fresh from a return to the edge of life and death, that I can barely look at it; it is so vulnerable. And yet, I make myself look. I do not like feeling vulnerable, but I know the alternative is to become hard, brittle, and closed off from life.
It’s been a vulnerable, miraculous, heart-breaking, exhausting two months. Tuesday morning, driving Dougie to the Comox airport to meet and hand-off the car key to his friend Jackie, he keeps forgetting I’m leaving. “Tomorrow we can start the garden”, he says. Or, “Let’s go for sushi on the way back.”
“I’m leaving, Doug. I’m going home,” I say, crushed at having to say it. “Oh, right,” he laughs, a brief flicker of lostness passes over his expression.
He finds a way to joke us out of the moment. We both know there will be more cognitive blips like these. But we also know there is no limit to his curiosity about his own situation, nor to his desire to try new exercises, learn new strategies for living, for adapting creatively to the situation, for owning his words that this new state of things can, indeed, be “a gift.”
In the Vancouver airport bar I email family about the night on Cortes Celeste, Jody, Doug and I walked along the wet beach looking out to sea, the last light of day shining on the soft shore. On the dark and windy drive back to the north side of the island we sisters broke out into Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, from her album “Clouds”, recorded when she was twenty-three. The words, “Something’s lost and Something’s gained, in living every day,” hit hard. Especially because she suffered from a near-fatal brain aneurysm in 2015, but returned to the stage to sing the song at the age of seventy-eight last year.
Drinking a beer, exhausted, but feeling like a nurse on her night off, I gaze around the airport, welcoming the wait before boarding. At one point I catch my reflection in the bar mirror. Mitchel recorded a reprise of “Both Sides Now” in 2000. The artist is also a painter, and both albums covers are self-portraits. The first is a fresh-faced freckled Joni holding a wild lily, Saskatchewan’s provincial flower. The 2000 album features a self-assured woman smoking a cigarette, sitting at a bar in front of a glass of wine. I can relate to that older woman, sitting inside a wisp of smoke that could just as easily be a shape-shifting “feather canyon” cloud.
After two days travel I am still not home. Through ferry rides, flights, shuttles and many long waits I’ve “unpacked” and sorted the events around and following my brother’s stroke. I’ve come up with some stark, sad, sweet and sobering realizations about myself. Anybody who enters into a caretaking situation knows: you will be changed by the big change your loved one has gone through. You cannot underestimate the lessons available to you. No matter the wound, damage, injury, event - there is power in facing it with an open heart and mind.
I find myself recalling stories of head and brain injuries, and new ones seem to show up everywhere. I did an interview with Rosanne Cash about her own self-diagnosis of a rare congenital brain malformation which resulted in brain surgery. She quoted one of my favourite poets, Adrienne Rich, who, in her poem “Power”, about Marie Curie writes: “She died a famous woman/ denying her wounds/ denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.”
My brother-in-law reminds me that Walt Whitman had a stroke at the age of fifty-four. In “Specimen Days” Whitman writes: “The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains… the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
Before leaving Cortes my brother shaved his white beard. It was another marker in his return to the land of the living. Over another long meal of reflection, laughter, a few tears and always the saying of grace, he comes to the realization, strange as it may seem, that he might even look back on these days and feel a kind of nostalgia for them. In the airport my little sister texts me to ask how I am doing. “Odd,” I say. “I have this heightened sense of reality. I know these two months gave me that. And part of me wants to get on the next plane back. That clever bastard predicted we’d be nostalgic for this time out of time.” “That clever bastard was right,” she replied.
I’ve made it as far as Medicine Hat where I left my car in haste and my sister and I boarded a plane headed to my brother’s side. None of us wanted to mention then that we were flying out on the same day our mother died of a stroke fourteen years ago. It was Lent then too, and I just wanted to make it through Easter.
Sitting on my sister’s couch I hold a picture of Walt Whitman against the picture of my brother with his beard and see the same bright eyes pouring out, unhampered, vivid, bright, daring me to live full-bore, unearth the gains amid losses, embrace the danger of vulnerability, because it is our power.