Thank You Dear Kith and Kin
I am beyond
being overwhelmed by all the birthday greetings that have arrived via
FaceBook, Jackie Lawson and a few tradition bearers using Canada
Post. Thank you all. I feel a verbal effusion coming on. I seem to have had so many lives in so many places
on solid ground and on-line.
When
I was working for the Newfoundland public
libraries, the library in Stephenville was presided over by the
wonderfully, lovably eccentric Gilbert Higgins, rather a black sheep of a
prominent legal family in St. John’s. He held his birthday party in his
library every year. It was a movable feast. His birthday orations
were worth the drive out to Stephenville. I tried to record one on
primitive equipment. Alas, this failed. They were worthy of the
Newfoundland Archives.
I don’t
usually make a big deal about birthdays, although people in Corner
Brook may remember my 60th when I held a large
fund-raising-and-thank-you-world party several years after events
described below. Upon reflection, this birthday, too, is worthy of
celebration.
Twenty years ago I spent my birthday in
the ICU unit in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, with lines and tubes coming
out of or into almost every orifice. Several weeks earlier I found
myself in pain so bad I couldn’t move. We had to call an ambulance. I
foolishly told them it was probably arthritis. No fever? “Mummy” says
you have to go to school, eh? They sent me home with Darvon. Lesson:
Never Self Diagnose! Five nights later we went back. This time they did
bloodwork. The locum doctor I had never met phoned me at home in the
morning. “Who ordered this bloodwork? Your white blood cell count is
through the roof. I’m having you admitted to the hospital immediately.”
Five doctors appeared around the gurney and asked me if I had had sex
in Africa in the last 30 years. I might have said, “I’m not that
interesting,” or “I might’ve had sex with an African but it was in
Denmark” but it’s all a rather merciful blur. It wasn’t tropical. It
wasn’t highly contagious. It wasn’t contagious at all. No flesh-eating spectres appeared. Twenty four hours
later the blood culture results came back: plain old Staphylococcus aureus sepsis. We
never did figure out how I got it. It is everywhere. You can develop
it after a paper cut if your immune system happens to be off duty. I
was in the hospital for seven weeks, survived on popsicles and lost 25
pounds.
As soon as I left the hospital I said to Ron, “Take me
to the mall. I want to buy a pair of white jeans.” Ron, dearest
pragmatist, said “You’ll spill red wine on them, and next year they
won’t fit.” He took me to the Mall. I spilled red wine. I gained back
weight. I had to use a walker for weeks and when I had gained a bit of
strength worked with a trainer at the gym for almost a year. But I
gloried in those white jeans for the summer. I was monitored regularly
for pleural effusions and was lucky that the only permanent damage
was to one ankle and one shoulder. I was also lucky that I had found a
new passion a decade earlier in storytelling. It was not quite so difficult to
bid adieu to belly dancing and trying to play the fiddle.
For
awhile I wandered in a lovely bubble amazed by everything upon which I
gazed, filled with the greatest love for everything around me. I wanted
to stay in that place forever but couldn’t quite manage it without
mind-altering drugs. I once read an article about one of my favourite
actors, Timothy Spall, who after surviving acute leukemia, described
something similar; then one day he realized he was being petty and
realized he was back in the world as we know it. I can’t find that article now, but I
found a similar one online in The Express
“When you’re in a state
of not knowing whether you’re going to live or die or not, you’re in a
state of profundity,” Timothy continued. “So I remember going out to the
park in between treatments and looking at a tree and for the first time
really thinking what an amazing thing it was. “And for about 10
minutes, I thought, 'That is a really nice tree.' And then after a while
I did it again, and after a while I thought, 'You know, this profundity
thing is a bit overrated.”
Septic shock killed almost as many
soldiers in World War I trenches as enemy fire. It still kills 15 - 30%
of the people who develop it today. Just before Christmas, Martin, a
member of our church choir and a truly fine human being, was stricken
after testing positive for COVID. He did not survive. It was a terrible
shock to us all.
How I managed to draw a long straw on this one
I’ll never know, but the last 20 years have been a gift. Amazing people
were on my team working in a hospital in conditions that were not
always “world class.” Great gratitude is due to Dr. Barry May, who died
of a heart attack the year after my experience, and seemed determined I
would survive. I hope I have done enough worthwhile things over these
two decades to justify the tax dollars spent on me at Western Region
Memorial Hospital.
These 20 years have been filled: remarkable people I would have never met, places I would not
have seen, stories I would not have heard, books I would not have read,
ankle-biting letters to the editor I would not have written. I would
never have been diagnosed as a soprano and sung “The Celtic Mass” with a Canadian choir at Carnegie Hall, where I hit the high B flat while my feet were asleep.
Psst: We did have to practice.
I would not have been spared waking on
my birthday in 1982 to the dreadful news of the Ocean Ranger disaster,
which devastated people I know and love. I would not have seen the destruction of our only planet unfolding
faster than my worst pessimism at the time, nor been locked down in a global
pandemic, during which I saw many random acts of community.
I try, but cannot always rise above the weltschmerz. I’m not good at pretending it isn’t there, and that there are no monsters under the bed. Sometimes I think our bodies can feel the axe stroke of every tree that is cut, every resource torn from Mother Earth's belly or the sound of the last words spoken in a dying language, to allow us to live our lives of privilege, far enough up the food chain - for now - to be warm and comfortable. Everything IS connected. We cannot really tell our cells that everything is OK.
We can breath and listen to beautiful music - as we did on the weekend at two wonderful chamber music concerts. We can enjoy Ron's creation of a "Retro" meal of French Onion Soup, Boeuf Stroganoff on fresh noodles and a bottle of Beaujolais Villages and watch another episode "Masters of the Air," as we reflect on our parents' earlier lives - my mother, a Sargeant in the Womens' Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force keeping maintenance records for the planes in which airmen trained in Eastern Canada before heading overseas; my father in the Signal Corps of the Canadian Army, sleeping in slit trenches under the heavy artillery and slopping through the Dutch fields in the The Battle of the Scheldt. He told a story of a time when most of the soldiers on both sides was suffering from dysentery and the marshy air was beyond fetid.
I tell fairy tales in which monsters are punished and kind children survive. Would that it were so. And, if you love people enough, you can turn them into real princes, princesses or rabbits. A few nights ago Prince Ron and I took an absurdist break and watched “The Death of Stalin” It was on Obama's list of favourites from 2018.
Frequently, Ron and I reflect upon a cartoon, that was posted years ago on a colleague's wall at Grenfell College, which was recently the victim of bad ransomware attack. It has taken a long time to track it down but I finally traced it via JStor. Somehow ...
