The James Clare Tribute Band

Greetings! For those of you who actually follow this blog in any kind of regular fashion, I apologize for my recent (total) lack of posting. Work and real life took over for awhile, precluding much of my internet activity. And then I got back into Twitter in a big way, especially during such exciting events as the Toronto mayoral race (don't get me started), so I've been paying a lot more attention to that form of expression lately. Sometimes Twitter is just a better medium when you have one specific thing to say, and feel that it's not expansive enough or intelligent enough for a full blog post.

The last few months have been intense for me. I've spent a lot of time pondering my decisions about where to live, how to spend my time outside of work, and what my priorities should be. As I said to a friend recently, in a lot of ways I am lucky that I have options to choose from and the freedom to make my own decisions about these things. But I tend to see the wide-open space as a scary abyss and a lack of direction, instead of as an opportunity.

I've also dealt with sadness recently, when we lost my grandfather. I was lucky enough to go through my entire childhood and adolescence with three grandparents, without ever losing a family member or close friend. Now I have lost two of those grandparents in the last year and a half. Both times, I had the surreal feeling that I was living out a role I'd only read about or seen in movies, and wasn't sure how I should actually be feeling. There were many moments when I showed grief on the outside and felt panicked on the inside, but most of the time I felt numb, or kept myself busy trying to be supportive and helpful to my relatives who had just lost a parent.

My papa had been dealing with dementia and alzheimer's-type symptoms for three or four years. It crept up on us; at 80, he was a remarkably healthy and ever-cheerful man who loved to participate in intelligent conversations and was active in community volunteering, hospital boards, et cetera. Within a few years, he was losing his short-term memory and had trouble finding the correct word while speaking or locating an object that was mentioned to him. At 84, he no longer recognized many of his family members and friends. Yet he remained an incredibly patient and kind person, never complaining about his situation though it must have been so frustrating, and still lighting up and giving us a welcoming smile when we came over.

For most of us, it took a long time to accept that he wasn't entirely himself anymore, and we tried as much as possible to treat him the same way we always did. But it hurt to see him that way, needing so much more care from my grandmother and not being able to participate in conversations or games the way he used to.

One Sunday in September, the whole family (about 20 of us) gathered to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday. We had planned a whole special evening: a limo to pick up my grandparents at their house, stops along the way to pick up various other aunts and uncles, a surprise stop for champagne and toasts at another house with all of the grandchildren (and great-grandson) waiting, then on to a dinner, complete with slide-shows. It was a wonderful night to celebrate my grandma and the family she created with her husband.

On the morning of the following Thursday, I got a message from my cousin saying that Papa had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Those of us who live out of town stopped what we were doing -- in my case, checking my morning emails; in my dad's case, driving to the office for an early meeting -- and did the only conceivable thing: get to the hospital. There was a Greyhound bus leaving from downtown in an hour and a half; I showered, packed a bag, and took a subway to the station in record time, my heart pounding and inner monologue yelling the entire time. After a bus ride that seemed to last forever, I arrived at the hospital to be with my family, many of whom were already there. Papa was not conscious at this point, and did not wake up fully while we were there. He was in the intensive care unit for about two days, all of us there with him, until he passed away.

Throughout the four days that followed, through the phone calls and writing the newspaper obituary and the wake and the funeral, the recurring sentiment among our family and from friends was that we were all incredibly lucky to have each other to lean on and to create a loving atmosphere for such a sad happening. I don't know that having all of us there made it any easier to say goodbye to our grandfather; I hope that it was in some way helpful to my grandmother to know that she wouldn't be alone. But the whole experience reminded me, once again, what family means and why it's so important to me. We've spent so many evenings together at parties, laughing and dancing and enjoying each other's company, not just because we're family but because we genuinely have a good time together. And when we're able to come together during the difficult times as well, it makes me feel even closer to those friends I happen to be related to. It also makes me miss my other cousins, aunts and uncles who live farther away, miss them more than I usually do, but still feel happiness that I share those bonds with them too and remember the times when we've been together through sadness.

One of the things I found difficult to grasp while going through my Papa's passing was the idea of heaven or afterlife. This side of my family is Catholic, many of them practising, and so it was comforting to all of us to be told by priests and friends that he would be with us after he passed, and would know that we were all expressing our love for him. But as someone who stepped away from regular churchgoing 10 years ago, I struggled to think about this in an intellectual way. And so it was even more emotionally meaningful to me when I heard about my dad's conversation with his uncle, the morning that Papa had passed.

My dad had called to tell my great-uncle that his brother, my grandfather, had passed away. His uncle said, "I knew he had passed when I saw a rainbow in the sky early this morning." After hearing this, my dad came into the kitchen to share the story, with tears in his eyes. He told us that on Thursday morning, while driving to make it to the hospital in time to see his father, he'd said a silent prayer, asking God to send us a rainbow if his dad passed away.

It's been a month and a half since my grandfather's passing, and this story still makes my heart pound and my fingers shake. My belief system is irrelevant in the context of what my dad experienced. To my family, the rainbow was just one of several signs that our grandfather is still with us and will remain a part of our daily lives.