Episode 2

As I said before my wander into my uni-memories, my father remembered every house. I was super impressed.  I also felt heavier with every stop…how was he holding it together?  I could not imagine the agony he must be feeling as he walked to the houses to take pictures of the places where he made homes with my mother.  It must have been excruciating.  He walked into the shrapnel hurricane of memories like a fucking champ, once again reminding me why he is one of the strongest people I know.

Only one house got to me.  Only one house augured holes in me so palpably, I remember feeling pain in my solar plexus that nearly doubled me over.  James Cres.  The last house where I was part of the family…the last house I lived before I moved out here…It did not look at all like I remembered it.  For one thing, it looked significantly smaller than I remember it being when I lived there.  I was 23 when I moved out of that house, so it wasn’t the whole “everything looks big when you’re little” argument…I mean… I am pretty short but I don’t think that was it.  The trees were much bigger, for sure and the dark colour of the paint may have had something to do with it.  It just seemed so much smaller.

After wandering around the city, we drove out to the lake where we had a cabin for a number of years, and had arranged to meet my Aunt (dad’s sister) and Uncle to follow them to their house on the same lake.  It is a paradise. 

We enjoyed a lovely dinner and were having nice conversation when they began to talk about the Humbolt Bronco’s bus accident and how my cousin was there to reconstruct the events…walking among the horrors the morning after.  Something inside me snapped.  Only 24 hours prior, on the way to Regina, I was pulled over to the broad shoulder of the prairie highway, to receive a phone call with the news that yet another student had died in a car accident – bringing back all of those feelings from 6 years ago. 

I sat at the dinner table listening to them talk about my cousin dealing with the heads and legs and arms at the scene of the accident and I could not contain the tears.  I tried so hard to be together until after dinner.  I tried so hard to be an adult and to “be strong”  in the face of all of this, in the face of this loss, my loss, their loss…and I couldn’t do it.  I pushed my chair away from the table.  The last thing I remember was my hand on the door handle.  I felt the steepness of the wooden stairs to the beach and I remember the water.  I sat in the lake and sobbed.  I have not cried that hard in a very, very long time.  I cried angry tears for all of the days I walked as a silent monument to mature grieving, the days I held it together at school, the days I held it together for my dad, for my children, for my sister who doesn’t even talk to me anymore.  I cried for the pieces of myself that were gone into the decades I left in this place that barely remembered me anymore.  I felt myself dissolve into the sandy lake shore and gave it all to the waves splashing over my weary legs. 

I understood the story of half-boy – how the angry young man became whole by weeping into the river, by seeing who he really was, who he saw himself to be.  The harder I cried, the more I felt myself re-membered to this lake where I had cried, broken hearted, so many times.  Of all of the places I carried, I least expected this one to be the place where I was to be re-membered the most. 

I am not sure how long I sat in the water but when I “came to,” I felt so embarrassed for rushing away from the table like a moody teenager, that I almost didn’t join everyone on the side deck.  I almost went to bed because I didn’t think I could face my dad or my aunt or uncle.  I chose to put on my big girl panties and joined them with a mumbled “sorry.”  They were great and after some time visiting, I decided to take my drum to the water and sing for everything I had cried for.

It was perfect.  The sun burned off the remaining afternoon clouds, creating a magenta road to the horizon…like the vision Wab Kinew described in his memoir that helped him re-frame his role in his father’s life as he died of cancer.  I thought about this sun road as a path the newly deceased young woman would take back to the spirit world, the path my mother had to take.  I smudged, prayed, and played the song I was promised I would hear if I listened to my heart beat.  I drummed to the beat of my broken heart and sang the song to the sun, the dead, the living, the broken, the healing.  I opened my heart, opened my mouth, and stood in the water and kept singing until I saw her wave to me as she walked into the sun…the young woman.  I knew mom was there already and she showed me by making the clouds resemble feathers.  It was beautiful.

We rested for a day in this paradise. My uncle nailed it when he said it was a healing place.  I don’t know about dad, but I really needed that rest day.