Certainly Not Cool Enough To Blog

After de-slugging the pepper patch on Saturday evening, My Beloved and I sat on our tiny patio (the lottery win I'm planning for this Friday will eliminate the "tiny" in that phrase) and watched the evening melt into dusk.

Everything seems to turn grayish-purple in the blue half-light of dusk - skin, grass, trees, fences. It's an ethereal and melancholic sort of time, I find. A time for fairies and gnomes and things hiding just out of sight.

And yes, I'm aware that almost every time is somehow a melancholic time for me. Dawn, noon, dusk, midnight - I can usually find a little melancholy in each of them if I look hard enough.

But you don't have to look hard at dusk. It's there in the deepening shadows, the blue pall, and the impossible stillness.

And in that half-light, as I stared out at the freshly watered lawn, I remembered a hazy, long-ago conversation My Beloved and I had back when we believed we would, I could, have children. He didn't want too many gardens. He wanted lawn - space to play with his children on the grass in our backyard. I agreed, picturing a chubby-legged toddler in a sun bonnet feeling grass on her toes for the first time.

The lawn still has space. Ample. There are gardens too, like our slug-ridden pepper patch. But nothing more.

So as my eyes fought against the dark on Saturday night, my mind drew a tousle-headed boy running in an arc across the lawn towards my chair, his arms thrown open in that glorious way that boys do when they're let loose on a patch of grass in the summer. He ran towards me, his mouth stretched into a crazy, wide open smile - and then he slipped quietly away into the shadows. Just before he reached me.

My mind will always be drawing pictures of the boy, I guess.

I know I'll see him no matter where I go, but I often wonder if a different place might hurt less. He was expected here. This house is missing him. I see where he should have been. I remember the plans I had and the pictures I drew when he was wriggling and kicking inside me.

Dusk falls everywhere. But it falls hard here.

The other day I was rooting blindly through the back of my night table drawer (which needs a very thorough sort, as I've discovered) desperately looking for Chapstick, when my hand closed around a little pink notebook tucked beneath some papers.

I had a vague sense that I knew what it was when I pulled it out, but opened it anyway.

Inside were notes from our baby classes scrawled in My Beloved's handwriting. I guess I must have figured that since I was making the baby, taking notes in class was his responsibility.

The first few pages listed breathing exercises and labour tips. Then there were some doodles he drew while we were in L&D the week before Thomas was born, including one of a little baby saying "Hi Ma!" and waving. That was the day they told us they were too busy to admit me - even though my blood pressure had spiked high enough for my OB to send me there with the intent of having me induced - and sent us home.

The last page with writing on it simply listed numbers. Contraction intervals.

I closed the book, put it back and left the room; the wind knocked out of my wheezy sails.

It seems like a lifetime ago.

Huh. I guess it was. It was.

My Great-grandfather died in Toronto during the flu outbreak of 1918. He left his wife and 5 children behind, the youngest just a baby. Because his family never accepted my Great-grandmother after they discovered that she conceived their first child out of wedlock, they snatched him back and buried him in a cemetery filled with his ancestors - away from her.

When she died just five years later (of a broken heart, my Grandma always said), she was buried with her parents. In a different cemetery altogether. Eternally separated from the man she adored, much to the satisfaction of his remaining family, I'm sure. There was space to bury her with her husband, but she wasn't.

There's no one left to confirm why this happened, although it's pretty easy to speculate that the simple reason was because she wasn't welcome there.

Years ago my parents and I paid a visit to the cemetery where he was buried. It's tucked away in an old residential area of the city, sun dappled and quiet. We hunted for his stone, anxious to find the resting place of the man we knew so little about. A man who had become somewhat mythic over the years, mostly because he was willing to forsake the support and affection of his family to marry the woman he loved.

We found the little pocket of ancestors all bearing my Grandmother's maiden name. Dozens of them scattered along the sloping hills of the cemetery where they'd been laid to rest generations earlier.

But we couldn't find him.

A visit to the cemetery office confirmed that he was indeed buried there, and they gave us the reference points so we could return to the specified row to check again.

When we did, all we found was an empty space. No marker. No stone. Nothing to indicate that he was buried there at all.

For whatever reason, his family saw fit to reclaim him but not to mark his resting spot. Presumably his window, left to care for their five young children, didn't have money to spend on a stone for her beloved. His grave was indistinguishable from the lawn around it. Unless you were looking for him, like we were, you'd never have known he was there at all.

I happened to pass by the cemetery after a meeting last week, and the story of the missing marker popped back into my head.

I was talking to my parents about it yesterday. It has probably been 15 years since we discovered the missing marker, and I couldn't remember if it had been taken care of or not.

As it turns out, his grave still remains unmarked. Life got in the way and no one got around to getting a marker.

"Oh", I said, feeling sad for the man who remains invisible in death.

"But you know what?", My Dad said, "It doesn't matter at all now, does it? It just doesn't matter at all."

I think he meant that in the grand scheme of things, an unmarked grave isn't a big deal, especially when it has been unmarked for 90 years. He's in heaven. He's been reunited with his beloved. We know where he is, body and soul, even if the world at large doesn't.

All's well that ends well.

But of course, my mind wandered to where it was lingering last night.

It doesn't matter because it's possible that soon there will be no one left to care. After we die, the simple fact is that there's just no one left to care. No one to remember him, or the love story that was so sweetly passed down through the years.

And this is what eats at me.

It's not that I think the story of my family is more interesting than anyone else's, and I realize that that it doesn't hold great historical importance to anyone but me. But it's just heartbreaking to think that it's conceivable that those stories may one day simply disappear. That all those people who lived and loved and died will truly vanish when I close my eyes for the last time.

I never imagined that this would be something I'd find myself absorbed in, this fear of being one of a forgotten people. When I was actively researching my family tree back in my early twenties, the farthest thing from my mind was the notion that there might be no one for whom my hours of research would one day be a cherished gift.

My Dad's right. It really doesn't matter. There are greater worries in life. Far, far greater tragedies. I know this to be true.

But it's another sorrow to add to the list. A small one, true. But yet another sorrow just the same.

And it's not fair. It's just. Not. Fair.

We were out for a walk tonight, My Beloved and I, when we passed by a house from which the most delicious smells were emanating. Dinner. Dinner done right, as far as I'm concerned. Smells that have people passing by on the sidewalk trying to figure out a way to wrangle an invite means clearly you're doing something right as far as meal prep goes.

My Beloved thought it smelled like some sort of a casserole - a conglomeration of delicious scents indistinguishable from one another lead to his conclusion. And that's exactly what it smelled like to me too.

And so, naturally, my mind drifted back to the 1970s. The time of innocence, safety and casseroles.

You know that scent memory thing that happens when you smell something that takes you back? It's more than just a "hey, I remember that smell" experience. Your body floods with images, feelings, memories and emotions all triggered by that one brief hit of familiar scent.

So I'm walking through the casserole scented air and feeling my childhood.

Feeling it.

I stayed outside skating in the backyard for so long that night would fall and my fingers and toes would be numb. I'd come in through the back door and find myself bathed in the warmth of the kitchen's glow while I sat on the stairs to unlace my skates. I'd smell dinner on the stove. I'd watch my Mom busy herself with the last rushed tasks before serving while I took off my coat and mittens. I was warm. Safe. Spent. Happy.


It all rushed through me in an instant. And while I tried to hang onto its sweetness, a sadness crept into my heart.

I don't have a child who will remember coming into the warmth of my kitchen when it's cold outside.

This thought - this reality - makes me unbearably sad. For me, for Thomas, for all the babies who almost were.

I have it to give, and no one to give it to. The simple, tiny pleasures I'm not sure some people are even aware of - they are lost to me. My kitchen still hums with activity, but there's no one to remember any of it. There is no one for whom my cookies hot from the oven will one day be a comforting memory they cling to for a moment's respite from the cruel world.

And...if there is never a child, one day I'll be forgotten too.

Except for the fact that he wasn't there when we needed him to be because he was in surgery delivering someone else's child, I don't remember very much about the OB who delivered Thomas.

He wasn't around all that much. I think he came in just once before the decision to move to a C-section was made after 19 hours of labor and three hours of OB-less pushing.

But I do remember the brief visit he paid to us in my hospital room the day Thomas died.

It was evening, and dim in my room. He hovered near the door, reluctant to move further in, and he leaned almost casually against the wall.

He had the unfortunate nervous habit of punctuating everything he said with a smile. And now, as I look back, it's horrifying to think that he should have stood there grinning just hours after my child died while telling me that "next time" they'd do a C-section at 37 weeks and all would be fine.

Next time. Fine. Sure.

In my haze of shock and grief I found this comforting. I grabbed his words and held them tightly to me. Next time. Good, we'll just sweep this present catastrophe away and look to next time when everything will work out just perfectly.

I suppose it's what he had to do to sweep away whatever feelings of culpability he may have had. Promise the stricken parents that you've figured out a foolproof way for this not to happen again. There. Done. Ahhhhh, much better.

It was the last time we saw him. I was there for a full 6 days, and he came in just once. His ridiculous grinning and blathering was finally interrupted by the coroner and he bid a hasty and grateful retreat.

Funny what comes back to you for no good reason.

I wonder if he ever thinks of us. I wonder if he remembers us at all. I often imagine people leaving me to run gratefully home to their own lives, and if anyone had cause and opportunity to do just that, it was certainly him.