All My Puny Sorrows (26 page)

At a certain time—when Tina was still being operated on, having veins taken out of her leg and put into her chest, and the word from the doc was that everything was going very well—my mom and I and my cousin Sheila and my uncle Frank trekked over to psych to say good morning to Elf. We’d managed to find a wheelchair for my uncle—he hadn’t wanted to use it but we insisted and he tried to do a couple of wheelies down the hall. We filed past the nurses’ desk in psych like some pathetic
army’s last line of defence and one of them said oh, um, how many of you are there? And my mother said there’s one of each of us. But, said the nurse, you can’t all go in at the same time. We know that, said my mom, and kept walking. We all fell in behind our field commander and marched (and wheeled) onward, ever onward.

Elf was sitting on her bed writing. I looked at her notebook and saw the word
pain
written at least fifty times. I picked it up. Shopping list? I said. I flipped it over so the others wouldn’t see it and we sent silent messages to each other with our eyes. We all had a conversation then about god knows what. Sheila told us about a young mom she was treating for tuberculosis. She was so young when she had her kids, said Sheila, that when they caught the chicken pox she did too. She was so young that on the day she finally married the father of her kids she also lost a twelve-year-old molar.

Elf picked up her notebook and tore out a blank page and wrote a short letter, folded it and gave it to our uncle to give to Tina after her surgery. He put his arm around her and said blessings on you, girl, and she told him she was sorry that he had to visit her here. He said no. We don’t apologize for being sick, for being human, for being weary (Uncle Frank has obviously never been a woman). Elf said but still, she was. Elf was an atheist normally but these days she didn’t seem to mind people promoting comfort in His name. My mom and Sheila and I talked louder about nothing much so that Elf and my uncle could think they were having a private conversation about sadness and giving up and strength.

We talked about the Blue Jays spring training for a while. Starters and Closers. Then we were all holding hands. My uncle
then initiated a prayer session. And my mother softly began to sing
du
again, you, you, you are always in my thoughts, you, you, you give me much pain, you, you, you don’t know how much I love you. My mother and my uncle sang it out in Plautdietsch, they knew the words by heart, and Sheila, Elf and I certainly knew the
du, du, du
part which we sang resolutely. Then we sang a hymn, “From Whom All Blessings Flow.” Mennonites like to sing in tense situations. It’s one option if you’re not allowed to scream or go nuts emptying a magazine into a crowded plaza. I began to cry and couldn’t stop no matter how hard I tried. When the others left Elf’s room to go back to see how Tina was doing I lingered behind and whispered to my sister it’s time to fight now. Yolandi, she said, I’ve been fighting for thirty years. So you’re leaving me to fight alone? I asked her. She didn’t answer me.

I took her hand and said Elf, I have a plan.

MY AUNT
’
S SURGERY IS OVER
. So is her life. At first everything was going well, very well, and then even after the surgery everything was looking good. The doctor came out to meet us all and pulled off his mask and smiled and shook our hands and said he was happy with the way things had gone in there. But then her organs started to fail one by one and even though the doctors and nurses attempted to save her they failed too and in the end we lost Tina.

We sat on chairs in the waiting room, our heads in our hands, we were in a row, staring at the floor. We’d thought it was
a slam dunk. We cried quietly. We whispered. Our platoon had taken another unexpected hit and Uncle Frank couldn’t speak at all. We forgot about his insulin shot. Sheila told us that lately Tina had been calling him while she was in Winnipeg to remind him. My mother had lost her last sibling, her closest sister. She stood up and left the room and I stepped into the hallway after her and saw her lean her forehead against the concrete wall.

The nurses in Cardiology gave Sheila a plastic bag that said
Property of Ste. Odile Hospital
on it. Aunt Tina’s fuzzy slippers and sudoku book and Kathy Reichs’ novel and glasses and toothbrush and moisturizer and purple fleecy track suit and slinky black camisole and high-top white Reeboks were in the bag.

We had a family meeting right there on the spot. Sheila would take her dad home to my mom’s apartment in a cab to make phone calls and to figure out how to get Tina’s body back to Vancouver. I would go tell Elf what had happened and then go get more groceries and especially more coffee, something very bold from the Black Pearl my mother specified, no more of this Starbucks stuff. My mom would take Nic’s car and go to the funeral home way down on Main Street to talk to her pal Hermann, another Mennonite, and see what he could do for them in terms of an urn and cremation.

I sat on a bench by the Assiniboine River and e-mailed Nic from my BlackBerry. I told him that in five or six days my mom and I would be going to Vancouver for Tina’s funeral and could he make arrangements to come home from Spain earlier so Elf wouldn’t be alone. I phoned my kids and told them what had happened and they were silent on the phone, incredulous. I could hear their non-stop music playing in the background. I waited for them to be able to speak. And then we said goodbye.
Suddenly the skies became dark purple with flashes of light and the wind picked up and made waves on the river. It was a typical prairie storm, angry with the dryness it had been forced to endure, and everyone around me ran to take cover from the hail. I crawled under the bench and lay there, very still, and listened to the giant balls of ice pummel the wood above me. I saw gum and graffiti, even there, on the underside of the bench. Initials and hearts and curses. I thought about my aunt and my mother sliding unscathed under that massive semi truck on their bikes, coming up on the other side laughing and breathless. It must have felt amazing.

Now I’m learning something. Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat. It’s the same for thinking, writing and life. It’s true what Jason said about cleaning a septic tank. My aunt came to Winnipeg to be with my mom, to help her, except then she died. My mother sat in moonlight on her balcony writing a eulogy for her sister. The city was spread out in the soft darkness, calm after the big thunder and hail storm, still moist and warm like a woman very satisfied in love. My mother was often asked to write eulogies because she had a breezy style that was playful, good with details and totally knife-in-the-heart devastating. I made food, a big pot of pasta, and then after dinner I went for a walk with Sheila and we sat on the curb outside my mom’s apartment block together while she talked on the phone with her sister who was back in Vancouver waiting for the sad delivery of her mother’s ashes. What can I say? said Sheila on the phone. What can I say? We finally went back inside and my mother listened to Sheila talking about Tina for quite a long time
and then at midnight Sheila went into her bedroom. I knocked on her door and offered her some more of the chocolates. She took them and I hugged her and said good night,
schlope schein
, the way her mother used to do and she hugged me and we both cried and I brought her more Kleenex from the other bedroom. I found my mother out on her balcony and suggested she go to sleep. She said no, she needed to write a few things down. She wouldn’t mind being alone for a while.

Is this almost too much? I asked her. Almost, she smiled. I left her alone to write the eulogy.

I went back inside and found my uncle Frank sitting by himself on the couch in the living room in the dark. I hadn’t seen Uncle Frank cry before. He told me Tina was older than he was in years but much younger in her soul.

Is that true? I asked him. You married an older woman?

Well, I had to, he said. Before I could get him to explain what he meant by that he told me that Tina died fast the way she did everything and we both agreed that that’s the way we wanted to go too. Lingering is the worst, said Uncle Frank. Your grandfather, Tina and Lottie’s father, lay in a bed for nine years. Before that he was the most rip-roaring chap I’d ever known. He was his own man. Then he had that stroke. He lay in bed so long that his arm fused onto the side of his torso. The skin grew together, it didn’t know what else to do, and he was stuck that way.

Really?

Really! he said. Thankfully your mother pulled the plug when she did. Well, not literally pulled the plug, but one day she just decided to let him die.

What?

We were all taking turns suctioning him—his lungs, I mean. Your mom, Tina, all the kids and their various spouses. It was the end. He was finally dying. His lungs were filling up and we were all doing shifts, suctioning. Do you know what that is?

Well, not really. But I can imagine.

Nine years in bed and before that oh, the energy of that man, the life in him.
Yoma!
(Plautdietsch expression loosely translated to “Damn!”) It was your mom’s turn to be with him and it was just the two of them. It was late. He said Helena, Helena, that was his dead wife’s name, your grandmother, I’m coming, I’m coming—

Wait—what? He thought he saw grandma?

Yes. Not thought. He did see her! So your mom made an executive decision, that’s like her eh? These Loewen girls are spark plugs. She didn’t suction him. She was a nurse then, she’d been trained. She could have done it of course but she decided not to. His lungs filled up with fluid and she held his hand and said the things we say in times like that and let him go. Best thing she could have done for him. Hard, Yoli (he said something in Plautdietsch looking up at the ceiling, a reverie, a memory), but still.

My uncle was such a big guy. He sat on my mom’s flowered couch and cried for his tiny lion-hearted Tina, his spark plug, and I sat next to him with my hand on his leg.

My mother and I were on a plane. Before we left I talked with Elf. She didn’t talk at all. I told her things would be okay, truly, that I needed her, that I understood her, that I loved her, that I’d miss her, that I’d be back for her, that being together in Toronto for a
while would be amazing, that Nora was really looking forward to it too, that I understood that just because she didn’t want to live didn’t mean that she necessarily wanted to die it’s just that that’s sort of how that one goes, that she wanted to die the way she’d lived, with grace and dignity, that I needed her to be patient, to fight a little longer, to hold on, to know she was loved, to know I wanted to help her, that I would help her, that I needed to do some stuff, that mom and I had to go to Aunt Tina’s funeral in Vancouver, that I’d be back, that she’d stay with me in Toronto for a while, a total break, that Nic was here now, back in Winnipeg, that he’d see her every day, that I had to go, that I had to know she’d be okay while I was gone, that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that she could control her life, that I understood that pain is sometimes psychic, not only physical, that she wanted nothing more than to end it and to sleep forever, that for her life was over but that for me it was still ongoing and that an aspect of it was trying to save her, that the notion of saving her was one that we didn’t agree on, that I was willing to do whatever she wanted me to do but only if it was absolutely true that there were no other doors to find, to push against or storm because if there were I’d break every bone in my body running up against that fucking door repeatedly, over and over and over and over. Will you eat something? I asked. Will you talk?

She put her arms up like a baby waking up from nap time and wanting to be held and I fell into them and bawled.

On the way out of the psych ward I stopped at the nurses’ desk. I put my hands on the counter, palms up like I was ready to have them nailed to the Formica. Then I begged. Please, I said, don’t
let her go. The nurses, two of them in sky-blue uniforms and ponytails, swivelled around from their computers and looked at me. Please don’t let her go, I said again.

Sorry, said the nurse closer to me. Let who go?

My sister, I said. Elfrieda Von Riesen.

Why would we let her go? said the nurse. Is she due to be discharged?

No, I said. She’s not. I’m asking you please don’t believe her if she tells you she’s fine because she’ll be very convincing and you’ll think okay, let’s free up a bed, let’s let this one go, but I’m asking you to please not do that.

Sorry, said the nurse. You are?

I’m her sister!

Oh right, said the nurse. You mentioned that. She looked at her files. The other nurse didn’t look away from her computer screen. Why would we let her go? said the nurse again. Did her doctor tell her she’d be leaving?

No, I said. I was gripping the counter like the guy on the cliff in
Deliverance
. No, he didn’t. I’m just trying to get reassurance. I’m worried that you will let her go because she will ask to be let go and she will seem very normal, very sane.

I guess that’s for the doctor to decide, said the nurse.

Okay, I said, but the thing is she wants to die and if you let her go I’m afraid she’ll kill herself even if she tells you in a very convincing way that she won’t kill herself. I could feel my heart throbbing. I was mumbling now, looking down, dribbling words onto the front of my shirt, nobody could really hear me and they strained to make out what I was saying.

Sorry, I beg your pardon? said the nurse. I think the doctor will be the one to determine whether she’s okay to leave.

Just then Janice came around the corner from the rec room and our eyes met and I said oh, Janice! Janice! I’m just asking for Elf not to be let go while I’m gone. I’ll be back to take her home with me to Toronto for a few weeks or months and I’m just asking that—

I was coughing, I couldn’t speak. Janice was holding a guitar. She laid it on the counter and came to where I was standing. She put her hand on one of mine. She looked me squarely in the eye.