turned out. I vowed to quit smoking, so I could keep up with her. Eventually, I did. Quit smoking, that is.
Last month we went home to the Yukon. My family loves her, especially my mother. I think she is actually the daughter my mother always wanted. She is so smart and dresses so fine and almost has her PhD and it almost makes up for my mom having me and my even blacker sheep sister as her real children.
I drove her out to one of my favorite places in the world, the Carcross Desert. White sand and mountains and so much sky all over the sky. Some dirt bikers had accidentally burned a huge heart shape into the sand with their back tires. We stood together in the centre of that accidental heart, and it seemed like the perfect spot to put that big old diamond ring on her finger.
My family is beside themselves. At dinner, my cousin Dan insists that I tell his sister the whole story of how we met. It’s so romantic, he says. It is just such a love story.
The Rest of Us
I GOT THE CALL ON A SUNDAY NIGHT. My gran was in the hospital, and the doctor had advised the family that it was time. Time to call everybody home.
I arrived bleary-eyed at the Whitehorse airport the next day. My mom and Aunt Nora were both there to meet me and my cousin Robert and his girlfriend. They looked so tired and worried; the skeleton was showing behind their faces, their eyes red-rimmed and puffy. They took us directly to the hospital, our suitcases stowed away in the trunk of the car.
I knew my gran wasn’t going to look good, and I thought I had steeled myself for the worst. Still, my heart stopped and dropped when I laid my eyes on the tiny shape of her, the outline of her hips and legs barely visible under the green sheets and blanket. Impossibly frail and little. Almost gone already, it seemed. I had promised myself I would be strong for my mom, that I wasn’t going to cry. So much for that.
“Talk to her,” my Uncle Dave said, waving two fingers at Robert and me. “The nurses say she can still hear us.”
And so we did. All afternoon we sat and talked. To her, to each other. Remember her bad cooking? Baloney roast? Boiled hamburger? Lemon hard cake, cousin Dan had dubbed her attempt at meringue. How she loved us all, no matter who we were, no matter what we did. I volunteered for night shift, and sat next to the laboured breathing shape of her with my two uncles, whispering stories through the dark to each other, into her ear, slipping our warm hands under the covers to grasp her limp, cold ones.
By early the next afternoon all of us were there. Five of her children, eight grandchildren, plus partners. I began to worry that we were pissing the nursing staff off a little, them trying to work around us, asking us to leave the room so they could change her sheets. Ten or fifteen of us at a time, filing like exhausted soldiers out into the hallway to stand around, teary-eyed and sometimes bickering. I asked one of the nurses if we were driving anyone nuts yet, wasn’t it hard trying to do her job with the whole lot of us underfoot? She shook her head and said no, that the First Nations people had taught the nursing staff what an extended family could really look like, and that it is often easier when the family is there to help keep an eye on a patient. She said that what was really hard was when someone was dying without anyone there at all. This choked me up a little, and she shoved a no-name box of Kleenex across the counter at me with a latex-gloved hand. She had said it out loud. The doctor was kind, and had talked around it. Don’t get your hopes up, she had said. We are keeping her comfortable, the doctor said. The doctor didn’t lie, but it was the nurse who actually said the words. My grandmother was dying.
Florence Amelia Mary Lawless Daws passed away a little after eleven a.m. on May 13, surrounded by seventeen members of her family. Our hands made a circle, all touching her tiny body as her chest rose and fell, and then
Last month we went home to the Yukon. My family loves her, especially my mother. I think she is actually the daughter my mother always wanted. She is so smart and dresses so fine and almost has her PhD and it almost makes up for my mom having me and my even blacker sheep sister as her real children.
I drove her out to one of my favorite places in the world, the Carcross Desert. White sand and mountains and so much sky all over the sky. Some dirt bikers had accidentally burned a huge heart shape into the sand with their back tires. We stood together in the centre of that accidental heart, and it seemed like the perfect spot to put that big old diamond ring on her finger.
My family is beside themselves. At dinner, my cousin Dan insists that I tell his sister the whole story of how we met. It’s so romantic, he says. It is just such a love story.
The Rest of Us
I GOT THE CALL ON A SUNDAY NIGHT. My gran was in the hospital, and the doctor had advised the family that it was time. Time to call everybody home.
I arrived bleary-eyed at the Whitehorse airport the next day. My mom and Aunt Nora were both there to meet me and my cousin Robert and his girlfriend. They looked so tired and worried; the skeleton was showing behind their faces, their eyes red-rimmed and puffy. They took us directly to the hospital, our suitcases stowed away in the trunk of the car.
I knew my gran wasn’t going to look good, and I thought I had steeled myself for the worst. Still, my heart stopped and dropped when I laid my eyes on the tiny shape of her, the outline of her hips and legs barely visible under the green sheets and blanket. Impossibly frail and little. Almost gone already, it seemed. I had promised myself I would be strong for my mom, that I wasn’t going to cry. So much for that.
“Talk to her,” my Uncle Dave said, waving two fingers at Robert and me. “The nurses say she can still hear us.”
And so we did. All afternoon we sat and talked. To her, to each other. Remember her bad cooking? Baloney roast? Boiled hamburger? Lemon hard cake, cousin Dan had dubbed her attempt at meringue. How she loved us all, no matter who we were, no matter what we did. I volunteered for night shift, and sat next to the laboured breathing shape of her with my two uncles, whispering stories through the dark to each other, into her ear, slipping our warm hands under the covers to grasp her limp, cold ones.
By early the next afternoon all of us were there. Five of her children, eight grandchildren, plus partners. I began to worry that we were pissing the nursing staff off a little, them trying to work around us, asking us to leave the room so they could change her sheets. Ten or fifteen of us at a time, filing like exhausted soldiers out into the hallway to stand around, teary-eyed and sometimes bickering. I asked one of the nurses if we were driving anyone nuts yet, wasn’t it hard trying to do her job with the whole lot of us underfoot? She shook her head and said no, that the First Nations people had taught the nursing staff what an extended family could really look like, and that it is often easier when the family is there to help keep an eye on a patient. She said that what was really hard was when someone was dying without anyone there at all. This choked me up a little, and she shoved a no-name box of Kleenex across the counter at me with a latex-gloved hand. She had said it out loud. The doctor was kind, and had talked around it. Don’t get your hopes up, she had said. We are keeping her comfortable, the doctor said. The doctor didn’t lie, but it was the nurse who actually said the words. My grandmother was dying.
Florence Amelia Mary Lawless Daws passed away a little after eleven a.m. on May 13, surrounded by seventeen members of her family. Our hands made a circle, all touching her tiny body as her chest rose and fell, and then
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