A Final Farewell

It’s a grey day here. April. The snow is falling in soft flakes that leave the pavement wet and the grass green. I’m at loose ends. I don’t know how to respond, don’t even know if this is my story to tell but, I am a small part of it and as I often have, I’m using writing as a way to make sense and make peace.

My dad’s only brother, the last of four siblings, will die in a little over an hour. I know this because he has requested and been granted medical assistance in death. My cousins tell me that he has very little quality of life left and that he is ready for whatever is next whether that be an afterlife or a nothingness.

There should be some way to mark this. In Canada these particular circumstances are new to us. My cousins tell me there will be a celebration of my uncle’s life before he is given the injections that will end it. This appeals to me because it brings a touch of familiarity to the situation. I know about celebrations of life. My mind moves to my father’s memorial service so many years ago. The minister used an image of morning sun reflecting off the belly of a rising airplane. I think of an airport terminal, a goodbye when a loved one is heading out on a new adventure. It is not our turn to travel and we wait until the plane moves away from the gate and rumbles onto the taxi way out of sight before we turn away from the window to walk back into our lives without the traveller. We are sad because he is leaving us but we are at peace because he is firm in his resolve and is ready to go.

I know of no rituals specific to this from of death so I make my own. I am alone in the house, Richard is at work and has left a note of support and comfort at my place at the table. I have put on clothes that give me comfort, sweat pants and a favourite grey plaid cotton shirt, wool socks. I have made myself a cup of tea. It is earl grey and it is strong. I remember many cups of tea with my mother. If she had had the choice to end her life sooner I know she would have taken it. She said to me rather crankily at one point, “I wonder how much longer this will take.” I could only give the answer that she so often gave me, “I don’t know, Mum, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

I have promised to light at candle at the appointed time and as I collect the candle, the one we lit at Richard’s mother’s memorial service, I remember a cross made from oak by my great uncle. I’m not thinking specifically of Christian ritual this morning but the cross ties together our three generations. For the first time when I take the cross out of its base, I examine the mortise and tenon and notice a knife line on the tenon cheeks, evidence of my great uncle’s workmanship. I remember my father telling me that Art, my great uncle, made a number of these crosses to give to chaplains. He made the cross removable so the chaplain could take the cross off the base and put it in his suit jacket pocket. I always thought the cross too big and bulky for that.

I look around for a place to put the candle and the cross and decide on the small table under the window in the living room where I can look out at the snow and the greening world. I go to the kitchen and retrieve a box of wooden matches from the metal container that stayed always on the second shelf in my mother’s kitchen. I wonder why I don’t just use the barbecue lighter but that seems wrong somehow. When I take out my phone for a photo of the cross, the candle and the matches, a message appears on the screen ‘camera failed.’ I try several more times and the same message appears. This has never happened before and the timing is curious. I have other cameras but have come to depend on the phone to always be there, available and easy to use. I choose not to spend the next half hour searching the internet for fixes for the camera.

I check the clock . Time moves slowly now and I think of all of my cousins, children of the four Hood siblings. I wonder where they are and what memories they recall as the last of a generation passes from this earth. I imagine a hospital room my uncle in a bed with his children around him. In my mind’s eye there are tears in the room but in my mind’s ear there is laughter. May it be so.

Yarn ends

 A couple of days ago I was chatting with a friend about crocheting and knitting. I mentioned that my mother had left a bag of squares to be made into a small afghan. These are a collection made from all the odds and ends of yarn she had, the crazy quilt of the afghan world.  I've been trying to find someone to finish the project because I didn't want to just toss them. I realized that if I wanted to reduce my stuff by a bag of squares, it had better be me who did the finishing.  There are 24 squares. I tried arranging them in various ways and finally decided that there really needed to be 25.

Did I mention that the squares were knitted? I can knit, sort of.  I prefer to crochet because there is only one loop on the hook at a time. Knitting, to me, is something like herding cats. These squares are not just knitted straight up and down: they are knitted from corner to corner which supposedly results in a more even square. I've never knitted squares from corner to corner: it always seemed like too much bother.  My main goal is to finish the afghan so I can find a home for it. Still, it would just look wrong to have one square knitted differently from the others. I headed for YouTube.  Almost every time I look something up on the internet I marvel at how easy it is to find information and I'm so grateful that it is. I spent some time watching videos, some several times before I gave up on them. Eventually I settled on one and began to knit the twenty-fifth square with the only yarn and needles I have. Neither the yarn nor the needles are a match for the other squares.

When I finished the square was larger than the others. Online I found a way of crocheting the squares together. I tried it several times and couldn't figure it out. I gave up and decided I'd use a needle and yarn to put them together.  The result looked ugly.  I took out the stitching and while I was at it decided to pull down the oversized square and knit it up again.  I also went back to the video that showed how to join the squares using single crochet. This time I was able to pick up on the placement of the yarn that I missed before and I began to attach the squares to form strips.  The work isn't brilliant but it is at a place where I can live with it.

The square I made needs to go in the middle. If I could place it somewhere less conspicuous I would but it is just different enough that it would stick out and there is a difference between sticking out and standing out.  It's still a bit larger than its buddies and I'm hoping that won't make too much of a difference. Finishing this afghan wasn't even on my to-do list three days ago and I've spent a good deal of time on it in the last three days while things that were on the list have gone undone. No matter: one of the great things about being retired is, in most cases, things will wait until tomorrow.