Two peas in a pod.  Joined at the hip.  Any other expression you could come up with of that nature would pretty much describe my friendship with Kenny, the boy who lived in the house beside mine on Kelmore Road when we were growing up.

I was an only child.  Kenny had an older brother, but it didn’t seem as though they had much to do with each other.  So Kenny and I became the brother and sister we never had.  We once declared that we were going to get married when we grew up.  He was going to be the farmer.  I was going to be the farmer’s wife.  Farmer’s wife??  I guess life was different in the 60’s.

Above is an old photo of the two of us and another older boy standing in my front yard in the winter of ’61 which made us both about 4 years old.  The way we were looking at each other is priceless…this was the way we were together, always laughing, always playing and coming up with a new plan, a story plot, a great idea.  In the winter we built snowmen and snow forts.  Kenny’s older brother liked to smash whatever we made to bits. In the summer we held stage plays in our back yards. We charged the neighbourhood kids 5 cents to come and watch us fly by the seat of our pants through some improvised play or pantomime. My mother brought out Kool Aid for the audience. My Dad got mad because we’d messed up the lawn.  We used bed sheets for curtains and found all kinds of props to use, inventing stories as we went along.  In one play, all we had to start with was the idea that he was Red Skelton and I was Mrs. Skelton.

Mrs. Skelton?  I guess, well, it was still the 60’s.

One time I was playing with Kenny in his basement while a group of adults were having some sort of party upstairs.  Kenny decided we needed candles.  We found and lit a whole bunch of them, placing them everywhere around the room.  One fell into a stuffed chair.  I guess Kenny must have screamed or something;  the next thing I knew a bunch of adult males were frantically dragging the burning chair out the basement door, trying to put it out.  Needless to say, our little basement party was over after that.

Another time, we were in his back yard and Kenny showed me a package of his grandmother’s heart pills.  They had been thrown in the garbage and he decided they looked interesting and rifled them out.  He convinced me that it was okay, they were just candy, and so we ate some.  Heart pills.  When my mother the nurse found out, she hauled me home to the bathroom, forcing me to drink salt water and hoping I would throw the pills up.  I never did.  I was more afraid of throwing up than having swallowed those pills.

I don’t think we were any worse for the wear.  But.  Heart pills.

One summer we decided to get sleeping bags and sleep overnight in the tent in his back yard.  For some reason, the adults had a bit of a problem with that.  We didn’t.  It was just us, Kenny and Irene.  They came to their senses and let us sleep in the tent. On our first day of Grade 1 in the elementary school across the street, Kenny was not happy because he really missed his mom.  For some reason, I did not experience the same trauma, so we spent the whole recess holding hands while Kenny cried.  He was a lot more sentimental about things than I was.

Our most exciting (or stupid) adventure happened one Saturday night, when we decided to dress up as robbers and sneak around our own houses.  We even smeared dirt on our faces to complete the effect.

Kenny had a flash light, and we pretended we were going to rob his house.  As usual, we got pretty caught up in our own drama, and at one point we came running out from behind some bushes to the street, just as a police car was driving past.  Talk about timing.  Because we were so immersed in our pretend robbery, we turned around and (stupidly) ran away from the police.  They immediately pulled over and jumped out of the cruiser, high-tailing it after us.  Kenny ran one way, I ran the other and hid under his backyard deck.  They nabbed Kenny and hauled him out under a street light.  They started questioning him.  Kenny cried “No, it’s okay, I live here!  This is my house!  We were just playing!”  I kept my mouth shut under the back deck.

They verbally reprimanded him and finally let him go.

I came out from under the deck and we soberly said our goodbyes.  I went home and told my mother the story and she said “Well, I’m glad you got caught…what a stupid thing to do!”  Yep, stupid.

I’m sure Kenny would be able to remember many things that I haven’t told here.  We were very lucky that we lived in a nice, safe (other than our shenanigans) middle-class neighbourhood with a school across the street and lots of other kids to play with.  And we were lucky to have each other.  Thanks for the memories, Kenny 🙂

1982.  I’m guessing, but I’m pretty sure that this was the first year that I attended a local company Christmas party for the first time.  I wasn’t married, but my date was in his second year of working at the little television station in Victoria.  It was a kind of a roller coaster evening.  The party was held at a down town Victoria hotel, and it was very different from the Christmas teas that I was used to attending at the Vancouver Public Library.

First of all, a dinner/dance is obviously different from an afternoon tea.  The most excitement we would get would be from the type of goodies we got that year.  A lot of retired librarians came back for that event year after year, and the tea flowed.  I was in my early 20’s and a room full of old librarians did not impress.

Okay, there was one other party that I never missed when I worked at the library.  If you happened to be working Christmas Eve, the folks in the bindery (these were the people who repaired and refurbished many of the books) had an all day party because they were upstairs in the building and out of sight of the public.  And the booze flowed.  We would go up on our breaks and have a drink, and needless to say we took a lot of “coffee” breaks on Christmas Eve :-).  One year I remember showing up at my parents house completely drunk at about 3pm.  I had a hangover before Christmas Eve had even begun.

But a big company staff party in the fancy hotel where they actually gave away great prizes, including a brand new TV, was totally new and exciting to me.  The food was fabulous, there was live music and a lot of crazy partying.  That first year, there was a sales guy who, in a Rob Ford-like drunken stupor, asked my date where he picked up the hooker (me).  I was young and over-sensitive and I ran off to the bathroom and balled my eyes out in one of the stalls.  He was just having a laugh, but I wasn’t used to his kind of character.  I was used to librarians.

That same sales guy, who realized what a stupid thing he had said, later apologized profusely.  And at every Christmas party we attended after that, he would get down on his knees and beg my forgiveness.  He was actually a good guy, just a bit of a goof.

Every year there was different music to dance to, but there were always old favourites like the B-52’s “Love Shack” and the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”.  The occasional live bands we had were pretty good too and pumped out the top 40 hits, along with some older favourites.  That party was the only time in the whole year that I would dance.  And I danced. A lot.

The only Christmas party I had to leave early was when I was pregnant with my first daughter. But I still managed to finish dinner! At another Christmas party, something was wrong with one of the seafood buffet dishes and a lot of people got sick afterwards.  On even another occasion, a particular bad year for staff because there were looming lay-offs, the drinking was particularly heavy.  That was my introduction to, and my first AND last encounter with Sambuca.  I cringe just thinking about it.  The next morning my two young daughters came into my bedroom and laughed at me.  “Mummy’s got a HANGOVER!” they squealed.  Well, it sounded like they were squealing. Really loud.

There were memorable moments, sad times, silly gaffs, funny things that happened, and there were many staff who came and went through the years.  One couple once bragged to us that they had been to 20 consecutive parties, the husband having been an employee at the station for that long. The next year, as if he had jinxed himself, he was laid off and they were gone.

There was another year that we found out the station was going to be permanently shut down.  No one had stepped up with an offer to buy it from the owners, and we were preparing ourselves for the end.  That particular party was held at the Empress Hotel, one of the oldest and nicest hotels in Victoria.  It was beautiful, and the food was lovely, the music was great.  That year, a disposable camera was put on every table so that we could all take our own pictures of each other to be posted at the station later.  There’s one picture from that year of myself and one of my good friends, sitting there with tears in our eyes.  We really thought it was over.

Just months before the station was set to close, my husband was laid off.  And then, magically, the employees along with some help, bought the station, and my husband was hired back.  And guess what?  It was all in time for the next Christmas Party :-).

There’s a group of people that I know from the station who have been to many of the same parties. We used to be the “young” ones.  This year we were laughing at how we had somehow turned out to be the “old” ones.  We were having to work harder at recognizing some of the songs that were playing, and when one of the “kids” asked if we wanted to go to the bar for tequila shots, well, I had visions of that Sambuca incident and decided it was not a good idea.  I just can’t do that any more.  Just as well.

All in all, we have attended 31 consecutive staff Christmas parties.  I hope I haven’t jinxed myself.

One comment you often hear about grief is how different people grieve in different ways.  Well, not only do people grieve in different ways, they grieve differently for each loss, whatever that loss may be.  It can be a still, quiet kind of grieving over a long period of time.  Some people cry and cry, others do not.  Some take time away from things, other people jump right back in to work or school, finding comfort in ordinary tasks.

I experienced my first death when I lost my mother.  I was only 14, and I didn’t know much about life, let alone how to grieve for the loss of it.  I didn’t see her die, I was kept away from it.  The loss of my mother at such a young age was enormous.  It was terrifying.  What is death?  Where did my mother go, if anywhere?  Why did she have to leave me?  What do I do?

I was off for a couple of days from school but eventually I had to return.  My home room teacher assigned someone to watch me, to make sure I was okay.   Other kids looked at me funny.  They didn’t know how to talk to me, what to say.  It was almost like I had some kind of death disease and they could catch it.  I remember coming home from school one day and just calling out to my mother, just to hear the sound of myself saying it. It took a lot of years to figure it all out for myself, and I took many paths trying to find answers to all of my questions.  Every year on the anniversary of her death, I would count back.  One year, five, ten years, fifteen years.  I would cry almost every time I added another year.

When I lost my Dad only a couple of weeks ago, my feelings were equally as profound, but not about the same things.  I am 56, not 14.  The world is a whole different place at this point in my life.  I’m not terrified, the way I was the first time.  I know what death is, and I know my father didn’t go anywhere.  He just died.  And it was simply time for him to leave me.  I’m not sure I was prepared, however, for what dying really looks like and watching him go through it.

I experienced the loss of many others in between the deaths of my parents;  relatives, friends, acquaintances. Almost every time, it would be like revisiting my mother’s death.  Not as intensely, of course, but something of it would remind me of being 14 again.  That fear would come back, that sense of how utterly vulnerable we are, and how it could happen at any time to any one. Where did they go?  What does it mean?  For a long time after my mother died, I was afraid to ask my Dad what it looked like to see her die.  I kept envisioning some sort of terrifying, thrashing, screaming event, having only ever seen it in the movies.  It was always curious to me to see obituaries saying that people died “peacefully”.  What is peaceful about death? I heard people talking about it as if it were a kind of “high”, experiencing someone’s death.  I never got that.

Last year I think I had a sense that it wouldn’t be long before my father was also gone.  I remember I started to have anxiety attacks and heart palpitations to the point of going to the doctor, which is a rare thing for me.  I thought it was physical, and then realized it was about me coming to terms with the fact that my father was going to die soon too.  What was that going to be like?

When I went over to the mainland for the last time, I was relieved to hear the doctor say that my father would likely have an easier time of it because he had pneumonia in one lung.  He said “If there’s any easy way to go…”   Dad had been refusing medication and food for several days, and the nurses had begun to give him regular doses of morphine to keep him comfortable.  He was pretty much asleep most of the time, except for occasional twitches.  On the last morning, however, as soon as we got there I could hear that his breathing was somewhat more laboured than it had been the day before.   And by the late afternoon, he was twitching and moaning from time to time.  I was worried that he was suffering, so the nurse gave him another dose of morphine and said she would do so every hour from then on.  I asked her how long it would take the morphine to kick in, and she replied it would take about fifteen minutes.

It was the longest fifteen minutes I’d ever experienced.  And when we reached that goalpost, he didn’t stop struggling.  At one point he opened one eye, and seemed to be trying to communicate. We kept talking to him, trying to calm him.

Then his body suddenly seemed more quiet.  I wondered if he was breathing at all.  And that’s when it happened.  He took in one big, deep, final breath, and let it go.  I knew right away.  “He’s gone,” I said.  I remembered hearing about that at some point in the past, about a person taking one big last breath and then dying.  That’s how I knew what it was.  I ran out to the hall to try to find a nurse.  When a group of them saw me coming, they came running.

It took a long minute checking for a pulse before the nurse finally said “He is gone.”  The next few minutes and hours were a blur…we were trying to call people, trying to grasp it had actually happened, someone brought us tea and sandwiches, we made more phone calls.  I kept thinking about that last breath and how profound it was to watch him take it.

I spent some time all alone with him once everything else had been done and everyone was gone.  I tried to say everything I needed to, I hugged him and kissed him and hugged and kissed him some more.  I didn’t want to have any regrets.  I didn’t want to leave him.  But then I had to.

I was walking down the hall of the care facility a little while later when it hit me.  That last breath.  I remembered.

A few years after my mother died, I finally got up the nerve to ask my Dad what it was like.  He said it was not anything like the movies, it was very peaceful.  She was there one minute, and then she took one long, last breath, let it go, and then she was gone.