My sister's favour

My sister sent me an email in which she told me bad things were going to happen to me if I didn’t do what she wanted me to do which according to her is the right thing to do. We’re not a religious family. I guess you don’t have to be religious to suppose that your morality is better than another’s.

How my sister is acting reminds me of how my mother was with me when I was growing up. She’d cast you out if you didn’t maintain the same perspective as her. I know that now that I’m a grown up I shouldn’t be so worried about being cast out. My therapist told me so. But it’s still a really bad feeling when your sister tells you your thoughts and feelings are going to lead to you losing your husband and children too.

I feel helpless.

It’s like chain letters. I actually emailed back a supposed friend of mine who forwarded me one of those emails that say if you don’t forward the one that was sent to you to other unsuspecting victims, you will pay. Like a plane that had the loved ones of someone who didn't pass the chain letter on, crashed. Someone else who did the wrong thing got a bad disease and is seriously repentant. I said please don’t send me shit like this. I didn’t actually say shit. I’m just showing off to you my audience the possibility of how tough as nails I could theoretically be.

In the first place my sister lied to me to trick me into doing the thing she wanted me to do. But, if you look at it from her perspective since I am such a moral imbecile she had to. The only thing she did wrong, maybe, was not lie better. If you look at it from her perspective, knowing how wrongheaded she knows I am, she was only doing me a favour to help to get me to do the right thing.

From her perspective she has nothing to answer to if I say to her, you lied to me. It’s still all my fault for being the way I am.

I hate thinking about my sister’s perspective. It makes me feel sick.

Spring Saturday Morning

Jacob is making pancakes. Larry is down in his studio making art. Jacob wants to know how much milk, how much baking powder, how many blueberries. He argues for one banana not two because he doesn’t like mashing the bananas. Different arguments. One is time based. He and Larry are going out in two hours to the park to play hockey. He doesn’t have time to mash another banana. Not a very compelling argument.

Larry went to bed alone last night. Left the bed alone this morning. Said nothing. During the night sometimes moved away at my light touch. Sometimes didn’t. It’s our first beautiful spring morning. We have one nice view from our house. It’s from lying in bed, gaze shooting part up, part over, looking through the third window pane, the one on the far left. Tree branches. Every other view shows some form of cold suburban innocuousness. I like curling up alone in bed in the mornings under the red down comforter and looking at the wind moving the branches.

I like them even now when they’re bare. After Larry and I make love on Saturday mornings I always ask him to open the blind on the third window pane so I can curl up by myself for a while and watch the wind in the trees.

M-in-law returns

I didn’t want to go visit Larry’s mother last night. I put my shoes on and sat on a chair in the living room waiting for Larry, Eli and Jacob to get ready, dreading; also hoping that without my encouragement everyone else would take so long that by the time they were ready to leave it would already be tomorrow and it would be too late.

Jenny looked nice when we got there. She had on a shimmering pink top, a pearly kind of pink, like the pink in Japanese paintings of magnolia trees in spring. She had a tan from wintering in Florida and her face looked tight and young and smooth. She had a trim fashionable hair cut.

I settled into fixing up a salad. Larry talked loudly to Eli and me about movies we’d recently seen in an attempt to avoid his mother’s dominating him for the entire evening. Jenny spilled some frozen peas on the floor and on the kitchen mat in front of the sink which I was standing on then didn’t tell me she was pulling the mat up even though I was still standing on it. Larry lectured her for not letting me know. I made a joke about it, pretending Jenny was like a magician doing the table cloth trick. You know the one where the magician pulls the table cloth out from under the table setting and the table setting doesn’t get upset but stays in its place.

You see how visiting Jenny is tricky?

Sure we can agree that Larry acted correctly by being direct with Jenny about pulling the rug from underneath my feet. But what about his initial actions? What about his discussion with Eli about movies? If he’d paid a little more attention to Jenny at the outset would she have felt the need to disrupt the discussion by spilling the frozen peas all over the place?

And what of my actions? Why couldn’t I have just finished making the salad at home the way I usually do? Why didn’t I consider that with Jenny only recently returned from Florida she might not have a critical ingredient such honey available for the dressing causing her to endlessly make hard to pay attention to suggestions while I was also trying to listen to Larry’s entertaining banter, about other possible sweetening alternatives even after I’d made my decision about what to substitute?

Never mind my ludicrous joke comparing Jenny’s inconsiderate actions that might have knocked me off my feet to magician’s doing tricks with table cloths. We’d been there a mere ten minutes and clearly my mind was already seriously in escapist mode.

About my dad dying

Larry’s blogging again. Now I am too. The last one he did was about my dad dying.

Larry actually drew a picture of my dad on his death bed. It’s a beautiful picture even with the oxygen tube snaking up from a pillow like place at the right side of the page to a clear mask covering his nose and mouth.

One piece of supporting medical apparatus at a time, in keeping with my father’s wishes to not be kept alive if there was no reasonable chance of survival, the tube was eventually removed.

Driving back and forth from London for the two weeks we thought he might be okay then was going to die for sure we got into stopping at various Starbuck’s locations for Carmel Macchiatos with soy milk. We don’t usually drink coffee. Drinking all that sweet, soothing, milky coffee was a really nice thing about my dad dying.

The nurse wasn’t sure how long it was going to take my dad to die. It all depended. She was sitting outside of the room. At a certain point of progress, one of the other support staff had turned off the machines in the room showing his vital signs. I think the idea was to make it less macabre. What we didn’t realize, but which of course makes sense since watching over my dad dying was her job, the nurse was looking at an entire other set of machines showing his vital signs at the end of the hall.

She was being really nice but still being vague about the time line and it seemed like we were in a lull and might have to hunker down for a while so Larry went out to get some more excellent soy Carmel Macchiatos for us plus some regular coffee for my brother and sister.

I didn’t want to go in case I missed anything. Then it turned out my brother, sister and I all wanted to be able to see the vital signs so we had the nurse turn the machines back on. Which is when we noticed the heart rate numbers dipping really low which is when the nurse told us, yes, she’d noticed that happen a few times already and thought he might be going but that he’d fought his way back. Which at first made me think he’d fight his way back again but then he wasn’t.

I wished she’d said something earlier about this before Larry went out for the coffees.

The heart monitor was going down but then it stuck at the same low number, maybe thirty. I was looking away from it so I heard the nurse saying it first - that he was gone - before seeing the number zero. But then a few seconds later he breathed again, a big full breath, making me certain the nurse was wrong, my dad was still there. He was on his way back again. He was charging back. But the nurse said, no, that the big breath was just the death rattle.