Bird-Bent Grass Venema, page 37
tionally but tacitly anti-homosexual into one that stops just
short of condoning the murder of LGBTTQ* people.
Like Julia, the Ugandan grandmother who appears in my
dreams, I keep going to church because I have no idea who
the universe might want me to meet there. Sunday 19 January
2015 marks thirteen years and two months since a handsome
stranger first didn’t and then did sing beside me. Gareth and
I have been married for eleven and a half years and, with his
grown-up children and their partners, form our own version
of a happily blended family. When our granddaughters are
born—Nora Autumn in October 2011 and Adeline Clover in
July 2013—I add “Nana KK” to my list of identities and step
into the blissful space of a grandparent’s fathomless love.
And then a young African woman slides into the pew
behind me. Over the next hours and days and weeks, Gareth
and I will learn that Yiga arrived in Winnipeg alone in mid-
November 2014, knowing no one, a gender refugee from
Uganda. Back in the early 1980s, half a decade before the
United Church made it official policy, our congregation was
the first in Canada to accept LGBTTQ* members. We have a
reputation in the city as a progressive Christian community,
so when Yiga asked at the Rainbow Resource Centre about a
church where she’d be welcome, we seemed a likely answer.
I can tell by her English that she’s not Canadian-born, and
the moment the service ends, I turn to greet her and ask where
she’s from. When she tells me Uganda, I almost fall over.
When I tell her I lived in Uganda for three years thirty years
ago, she’s just as surprised. Over coffee afterward, I ply her
with questions. “Do you have family in town? Friends? How
can they have put you here without anyone to help? Where
are you living? How much money do they give you? Who is
looking after you? Who is helping you find a job? Where will
you go to school? How old are you? How will I contact you?”
I finally stop my barrage. “Sorry,” I tell her, slowing down.
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“None of this is my business. You don’t have to answer any of
my questions. I’m not your mother!”
“It’s okay,” Yiga says with a shy smile. “Maybe you can
be my Canadian mother?” Gareth and I are about to begin
climbing two steep learning curves, one called “supporting a
refugee in Canada,” the other, “helping a transgender woman
of colour live safely.” But on 19 January 2015, it’s still sim-
ple delight that compresses my heart, the chance to return
the generosity friends in Uganda extended to me when I was
just a little older than Yiga is now. If my mother were well,
she’d be thrilled at our meeting, and I think Rose’s grand-
mother would be too, the generous, affectionate old woman
who imagined herself in the future, the honoured guest at my
wedding: “And everyone will ask, how did that muzungu bride
get an African grandmother!?” Three decades later, every-
one wonders quietly instead: how did that stylish, charismatic
young Ugandan woman get a muzungu mother?
We never recover from Harry’s death, we never get over it. At
our best, we make accommodations, improvising new selves
around the chasm left behind when Harry jumped from this
life to what comes next. Harry’s absence and Alzheimer’s rav-
ages exacerbate Mom’s anxiety about unattended children, and
on Christmas Day 2012, no amount of reassurance assures
her that her 33-month-old grandson is safe on his own. Late
afternoon, supper about to be served, I find little Sebastien’s
Beppe crouched in the front hall, holding up a cautioning
finger, urging him to be careful. But my nephew Sebastien
(mathematician, magician, athlete), who was here a moment
ago, is gone, chasing Uncle G in a hilarious bit of pre-supper
mirth. “Sebastien’s fine, Mom,” I tell her, “he’s with Gareth.”
When we gather with the others at the table, Mom wants to
ask nine-year-old Lydia (wise and clever, already a graceful,
passionate writer, already bitten by the travel bug) a question,
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h o l y s h i p w r e c k 3 27
but angles her face far too low. “It’s okay, Beppe,” Lydia says,
placing her hands gently on Mom’s cheeks, tilting Mom’s head
upward. “I’m right here.”
We admit Mom into permanent care on 18 January 2013, three
weeks after Christmas and six days before her seventy-seventh
birthday. Mom still recognizes us by name, walks without
support, forms some complete sentences, engages in simple
conversations, and feeds herself. She’ll never know our “little
girls,” Nora and Adeline, and she’ll never know our “big girls,”
Yiga and Jasmine, the delicate South Asian transgender teen-
ager seeking refuge in Canada whom Yiga recognizes as a sister
and adds to our ad hoc family.
Mom receives excellent care and nevertheless falls several
times. After a stroke in May 2014, she declines precipitously,
but until that August, when she gets up abruptly and walks
away from the piano in the multi-purpose room, we still reach
her through music. I visit Mom without my iPod now and
look back on the project I began seven years earlier. In the
original plan, the letters Mom and I exchanged when I lived
in Uganda are a pretext for our weekly conversations—a pre-
text for the text we’ll quilt together of Mom’s life and mine.
Desire fuels the original plan and unfulfilled desire discovers
that, even in conditions of optimal cognitive function, letters
are difficult to understand outside of their original context.
And yet—sometimes simply by their presence—the letters
prompt the meditative excursions Mom and I make every
week, examining political events, remembering family his-
tories, and musing on the nature of mind, brain, body, and
spirit, the business of being alive, the possibility of death.
Freed up now to revisit our archived conversations, I’m regu-
larly startled by what I’ve forgotten, our conversation on 15 Feb-
ruary 2008, for instance, one week before Harry goes into the
hospital, when Mom and I talked for hours but didn’t ever get
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to the letters I’d brought along, when she told me, in a long con-
versation about biblical interpretation, “I can’t get rid of the idea
that we’re making our own God. We imagine our own God.”
After a lifetime committed to what she’s understood to be
Christian principles of loving-kindness, compassion, peace-
making, and work for global and economic justice, Mom
often expresses uncertainty now about God’s existence. On
15 February 2008, she adds, “I think it’s not so important
to think there is a God, or maybe there is not a God. I think what’s important is—for human beings anyway—to survive
together—that they treat other human beings alike.” “Like
the Golden Rule?” I ask, and Mom says, “Jah. The Golden
Rule. If you live by the Golden Rule, I think, then you pretty
well have everything covered what you as a human being are
due to other creatures.”
I love Mom’s claim and am baffled by it. What did she
mean, I wonder, listening to her recorded voice? Maybe not.
“what you as a human being are due to other creatures,” but
“that you as a human being should do to other creatures”? Or maybe “that you as a human being owe to other creatures”?
What I want Mom to have meant is all this and a radical,
poetic expression of trans-species interdependence: “what
you as a human being are, due to other creatures.”
On 15 February 2008, our discussion of shared and mutual
responsibility prompts Mom to consider, too, the passion-
ate desire of life for life, and to remember the atomic bombs
that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I remem-
ber thinking,” she says, about that destruction of life in all
its forms, “if it is like that then—then you’re better off run-
ning toward the—” she pauses, searching for the word. I sug-
gest “centre.” “Jah,” Mom says, “the centre.” “You think,” she
explains, “‘You’re not going to get alive out of here.’ But still,”
she adds emphatically, “you would try to run away from it.
You would not run toward it.”
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h o l y s h i p w r e c k 329
By January 2015, Mom no longer speaks recognizable words
in any of the five languages in which she was once fluent. She
vocalizes only to communicate her almost constant distress,
irritation, or anger. She often sounds like an animal in pain.
Confined to a wheelchair, she’s fed her meals of puréed food,
and registers only the barest awareness of others around her.
On Fridays I find Mom bent almost double over the tray
attached to her chair. I lay my face beside hers, hold my head
to hers, massage her arms, and tell her that I love her, hoping
to balance off at least some of the distress. Because I can’t help
thinking, every single time, that it’s anger she’s expressing, at
us, for not helping to end things before they got to this point.
She so clearly did not want to get to this point.
On 21 September 2015, Omke John responds promptly to
another of my urgent emails asking about Frisian phrases.
“I’m amazed,” he writes, “at how accurately you interpret your
mother’s expressions and the words. Based on what you pro-
vide, I am quite sure she said, ‘ Ik ferskuor mij,’ literally, ‘I tear myself apart,’ or ‘I tear myself up.’”
Musing inside our archived conversations, I discover that grief
and mourning and dread filled my mind so completely in the
winter after Harry’s passing that I missed my mother’s com-
plicated ethical courage—willing to hold in tension the deeply
felt empathic truth that, even in the midst of nuclear calamity,
one would run toward the possibility of life, and the firm con-
viction that someone facing the consequences of Alzheimer’s
should have the right to choose her own death. With time to
reflect, I notice too that, contrary to my fears, Mom didn’t ever
ask me to make promises I couldn’t keep. So I massage her
arms now on Friday afternoons, hold my head to hers, stroke
her hair, and tell her, “I love you. You’re a wonderful mother.”
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And then, near the end of my visit on Friday 27 November
2015, Mom exerts unexpected effort, raises her head, turns in
my direction, and dazzles me with a smile. She tries twice to
say something, but it’s incomprehensible both times. “I’m right
here, Mom,” I tell her, basking briefly, “I’m so happy to see you.”
I want singing at the end, a choir of angels.
“De Krystreis fen Broder Iwersen” is a story in the old style, one
for reading aloud on candlelit winter evenings in a long-ago
time. My mother loved this story even more than she loved
Merijntje Gijzens; Pake read it every year on Christmas Eve and
little Geeske revelled in each telling. The story’s set amongst
the tiny islands that constitute North Frisia and run along the
coast of Germany, where small groups of people live robust,
precarious lives, bordering the sea that sustains them and that
sometimes rises without warning to inundate their low-lying
lands and drown them. It’s a hard life, and Broder Iwersen, the
story’s protagonist, supports his family by working half the
year on ocean-going ships. He spends winters on the island,
though, with his beloved wife, attending to repairs and read-
ing and singing through the long cozy evenings with their six
cherished children. Broder is uniquely adept at reading the
sea and the tides, reading the pathways that emerge amongst
the islands when the tides are out, and in the winter Broder
works as a “water walker,” running errands to the mainland.
The story’s suspense begins two days before Christmas,
when a young neighbour arrives to ask if Broder can make an
emergency journey for medicine that the boy’s mother sud-
denly needs. Broder’s wife urges caution; the children will be
heartbroken, she reminds him, if he’s not home by Christmas.
They’ve been practising their carols for weeks, she says; you
cannot disappoint them. Broder, though, is wonderfully con-
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h o l y s h i p w r e c k 3 31
fident: look at the sky, he says, it’s perfectly clear; the weather
will be fine. I’ll reach the mainland tonight, run the errands
tomorrow, and be back on Christmas Day, in time for our
delicious supper and a celebration with the children.
But the weather turns on Broder’s journey home, the
dreaded fog rolls in, and Broder—who’s been meditating with
satisfaction on the extra gifts the errand has paid for—fails to
notice in time that the light of a far northern Christmas after-
noon has turned unexpectedly dark. The sea rolls ominously
all around, the tide is coming in, and Broder is lost just one or
two right—or wrong—turns from home. At home, Broder’s
wife notices the fog before he does and her anxiety deepens.
The children, who’ve been playing in the yard, notice too
and return to the house with worried questions that she can’t
answer. We’ll go down to the beach, she tells them, we’ll wait
for your father there. On the beach, they hear the sea’s roar,
can feel the tide’s imminence, call their father’s name. “We’re
here,” they call, “we’re here,” as loudly as they can, and then
Inge, the oldest daughter, thinks to sing, and all the children
and their mother join in, singing in the harmonies they’ve
practised, the Christmas songs their father loves.
Broder hears, of course, just in time, just before the tide. Just
before the tide, Broder turns to the sound of the singing and
finds his way home through the fog. It’s an adventure, the nar-
rator assures us in conclusion, that Broder and his wife tell many
times in the years that follow, and no one, in all those years, can
dislodge Broder’s conviction that angels joined his children that
dark and dangerous evening to sing him safely home.
My mother dies quietly on the morning of 15 February 2017,
exactly nine years after she endorses an ethic of “surviving
together” and just minutes after Dad leaves the room. I sit with
her for the last time on the night of 14 February 2017, knowing
it’s a good and a welcome death that approaches. At first I don’t
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recognize the music I hear when I hold my head to Mom’s for a
final farewell. And then I do, Geeske and Bertha, biking to the
M.U.L.O., laughing and talking and singing, together again . . .
On 16 November 2012, seven years and four months after the
Alzheimer’s diagnosis; more than one year after the very bad
day with which I began my story; two months before we admit-
ted Mom into care; and four years and three months before her
death, I send my siblings an update on my most recent visit:
I don’t take the iPod on our walks, which is, ironically, where
Mom says the most interesting things. Last week I went
back to our word games, which are much diminished from
our previous accomplishments, and now involve me simply
throwing out a word and asking Mom what it means. She
balked at “enterprise,” so I reminded her that it isn’t a test
of any kind, which relaxed her enough that she could tell
me, after a long pause, about “vacillate”: “If you’re waiting
for someone, and they said they’d come then, but they don’t
come and they don’t come, and you wait, and maybe you’re
with other people and you say, ‘Now where is he?’ and he
doesn’t come and doesn’t come and it’s very late. That’s
vacillating.”
I told her she was right, then asked about
“correspondence,” and that one Mom answered without
hesitation: “That is when, say you have something and then
