January 2, 2020

           I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, 2018 was beyond difficult, beyond heartbreaking, beyond anything I’d ever imagine I could ever survive. Besides my husband, Isaac, leaving for work and returning home in an urn, my father, the second closest man in my life, had given up his will to live at 58 and was drinking himself to death. There was nothing I, nor anyone could have done about it. He felt he had nothing left to live for and saw no way out. And then he was gone… well, sort of.

          My dad’s passive suicide attempt wasn’t successful enough and only ended up damaging his brain beyond repair. One day he was in a panic about the possibility of dying and telling me his wishes and the next week he didn’t know what decade he was in. The diagnosis? A self-induced form of alcoholic dementia that happens literally overnight. I still don’t know how to describe what I watched my father go through, but I can tell you how it made me physically feel… like I was punched in the gut and my body was anticipating the next blow.  

          I spent the next 7 months caring for my dad, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It would only be 7 more months until my husband would suddenly complete his physical journey on earth, and in that time, my dad completed his role in mine. The futile struggle I had trying to nurse my father back to health brought my husband and I closer together, allowed the opportunity to see what I was capable of handling and released many tears of anticipated grief. So when the next blow came, I was as prepared as my Dad could have ever helped me to be. He set the stage for choosing my husband and then gave me the template for losing him. 

          About a week before my husband passed, I was at a local vet event, talking to a pet insurance vendor. We already had accident insurance on our cat, Coconut, as she liked to eat things that could kill her, but I was considering changing our plan to include illness. I told the vendor that I felt it was important that our daughter experienced the passing of a pet before she experienced a bigger loss in her life… but I needed to make sure that this cat lived as long as possible because our daughter was only seven. 

          The same week, two years before, we were in Winnipeg packing up our lives to move to Halifax. There were many push and pull factors in our decision to move closer to my side of the family, but the most important one for me was that I wanted our daughter to experience the life and death of my elders. Neither of my parents were sick at the time, but I didn’t want to rob our daughter of the opportunity to experience the death of a loved one at a closer distance before she experienced ours.

           But what I couldn’t change was what was robbing her of the opportunity to experience her grandfather’s life… his drinking. I knew I only had a small time frame each day that she could interact with him before the alcohol would take over and it was next to impossible to get him to participate in life outside of the house. So she got to see a glimpse of him here and there, receive the change that he would dig out of his pockets and empty into her hands and learn about him through my stories.

           When my dad lost his ability to remember what happened five minutes ago, he also lost his ability to remember to drink. If it was out of sight, it was out of mind and for the first time in my 39 years of life, he was completely sober. This opened up the door to a different way of interacting with him. In between orientating him to where he was in relation to time and answering his 537 questions a day about the location of objects that didn’t exist, we finally got to experience life outside of his home together. 

           That summer we visited parks, lakes, oceans, and zoos. I can vividly remember driving one day with my dad in the front seat, our daughter and my husband in the back. It was a beautiful day for a walk, everyone was, I thought, in a good mood, and yet no one spoke a word the entire 10-minute ride there or back. My first thought was filled with frustration about the burden of communication that was always placed on me. Then something shifted and I realized that it was not a burden, but an honour to be the one responsible for holding the hearts of three generations of introverted souls, who depended on me to be their advocate and get them to their destination, that day and in their lives. It was a privilege to sit in the presence of their stillness, while they rested in mine.

          However, this wasn’t the first time I felt silence while in the company of my dad and husband. Ten years earlier, my dad flew to Winnipeg to visit for my 30th birthday and meet Isaac. With both of my men finally in one room, both in silent contentment, I could feel their energy and it was coming in at the same frequency, like a surround sound. They say that you marry your father and when I met my husband, it was no secret who he reminded me of. Although it brought me familiar challenges, it also brought me the familiar feeling of being in the presence of a quiet, sensitive, genuine and caring man.

           While everyone was declaring good riddance to 2018 and wanting a do-over, I felt I had to stand up and be my father’s and husband’s advocate. When everyone was expecting me to want to run away from the most devastating year of my life, I felt that I had to defend my men and speak on their behalf, that the last moments in their lives mattered and I wanted all of 2018 to go down in the story of my life as worth living… for all of us.  

          In 2018, I had the pleasure of witnessing the last eight and a half months of two men’s journeys until one slipped further into dementia after the other slipped away into the afterlife, and not even the pain of bearing witness to the twist in their life’s plot can make me throw away any moment that happened in the last year of them being physically present in our life’s story.