Craig Spence © March 2022
A little bit of me was relieved when Andy passed. I know that doesn’t sound too terrible, that anyone with half-a-heart listening to this confession would say, “Tsk, tsk, don’t be so hard on yourself, dear. It’s only natural.”
And that’s true.
Just the same I can’t forgive myself. And whenever I remember Andy that little pinprick of guilt punctures the membrane of my widow’s sorrow, letting the infection in again.
There is no immunity. I can’t go to Doctor Nahar and say, I’m feeling sick at heart. Do you have something for that? She might, of course. But nothing that would help the real, unaltered me deal with Andy’s memory.
I’ll be on the Number 75 from Saanichton heading downtown and, before I can even see it, I feel the immense weight of Victoria City Hall, where Andy worked thirty-five years. That damned building sits like God’s paperweight dead centre on my map of the world, an immovable, irreducible pile of brick and mortar.
It’s a mausoleum. Some days I am troubled by an urge to get off the bus and go pick up some flowers to lay on its front steps. Not a wreath, or anything maudlin like that. Something less mournfully symbolic… perhaps I could gather a bunch of red hot pokers from our garden before going to work.
I sit on the left side of the bus, if I can, so as not to actually see the ornate heritage facade of Victoria City Hall when I pass by. But that’s almost worse. Instead of seeing it out there as something I will leave behind, I resurrect it in my mind, brick by brick, kilogram by kilogram.
Even as memory it has an inertia so great that – if you demolished it, or bombed it, the dead weight of its rubble would continue pulling everything down with an inexorable, accumulating momentum toward a point of final, absolute stasis.
Going home, I could catch the 75 just past the bifurcation of Douglas and Blanshard, near the northwest corner of Beacon Hill Park. But I always walk the extra block or so to the Government Street terminus by the Legislature. It just seems more official there, like a place where buses are meant to actually arrive and congregate and pick people up to take them places.
Andy used to tease me about that, called me a worrywart. And I enjoyed his teasing. We were nothing, if not an ordinary couple, punched belatedly out of the 1950s, post-war mold when all around us 1970s couples were rebelling against everything we stood for.
Or as Lorraine once put it, in that inimitable way of hers: “You two were cupcakes born into the age of granola bars.” Andy laughed so hard when she said it that Lorraine had to leave the room in a huff. She even shouted an obscenity, something about us “never fucking getting it”.
I suppose that’s true.
Anyway, by the time the Number 75 rounds the corner of Superior and Douglas, lumbering north toward my hometown stop an hour away at Brentwood Bay, I can already feel the gravitational force of City Hall warping my perceptions – like that diagram of Einstein’s theory of relativity creating its vortex in the ‘space-time continuum.’
Neither of us ever questioned Andy’s three-and-a-half decades in the Finance Department. Why should we have? He made good money, had incomparable benefits, and was low enough in the order of things that he needn’t think too much about ‘the job’ when he wasn’t actually at it.
I remember being surprised at his retirement dinner by the genuine fondness people showed Andy – I might even go so far as to call it affection. I knew so little about his work and the people he worked with that it came as something of a revelation when his secretary Alisha – well not his secretary, actually, but a clerk who seems to have adopted him… when Alisha actually cried, forcing me to console her with a hug and pat on the back. “He’s just such a wonderful, gentle man,” she quavered. “He makes everyone smile. Now we’re all going to be glum and business-like.”
Soppy as this scene played out, Alisha spoke the truth. Andy was a gentle man. So I was surprised when she didn’t show up at his memorial service. I could almost hear him forgiving her for forgetting him barely two years into his retirement. “Maybe she just couldn’t face up to it, dear,” I can hear him murmuring, soothingly, helping me get over the insult.
All I have left now is his pension; cancer took the rest of him.
How Andy and I ended up together I’ll never know. How we didn’t end up hating each other – like Lorraine and what’s-his-name (as she calls her ex) – is an even greater mystery. We should have fought, but never did; should have been a pressure-cooker stewing its poisonous brew of hatred and resentment, but weren’t. Somehow Andy tricked me into putting all that aside and laughing, like there was nothing wrong.
Now, of course, I’m left wondering what I could have been if we hadn’t laughed so much.
When the kids come into the school each day, they hang their backpacks and jackets up on the cloakroom hooks. On rainy, winter days especially I can’t help thinking of their colourful rain slickers and jackets as cheerful mementoes of who they are, and could be, if we’d only let them. I secretly celebrate recess and lunch times, when they pull their slickers and jackets back on and run outside to play.
When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just a year after he retired we tried not to interpret it as a cruel joke. The deal was, you put in your years, built up your pension, then spent the rest of your evenings on the back porch, shlurping wine and watching replays of Sunset in the Garden of Eden. Or maybe you went on a cruise, or rented a villa in Belize, or took up pickle ball. You sure has hell didn’t expect spend your retirement measuring out your time like cards played off a stacked deck.
We knew he was done. Put on a brave face. But couldn’t help hoping for some kind of miracle, the same way a hungry dog sits by the table, pleading for a scrap to fall off your fork.
Dr. Harmon couldn’t give us anything better than palliative aspirations, though. “With treatment you can have some good years, Andy,” was the best he could do. I suppose he didn’t have the heart to admit the only denomination of time he could pluralize would be months. Nor did he have the stomach to spell out the balancing act we’d have to engage in between the quality of life remaining and the benefits of surgery, radiation, chemo and so on. Who would?
Andy laughed.
He laughed!
And for the first time in our forty years I was infuriated by that laughter of his – as if my blood had been transfused with naphtha and his faux jollity was the lethal, blundering spark that set me off. My whole being erupted – an utterly incomprehensible and confounding rage that turned everything to ashes in an instant… no survivors.
I had to get out of there because it wasn’t right, wasn’t fair for me to be so outraged and I didn’t want Andy to figure out it was anger he was seeing, not remorse or mourning. I walked. All the way down to the public marina and a little terraced bench on Angler’s Lane that looks out over Saanich Inlet. I let the ocean breeze console me, as if my skin was permeable as an angel’s.
Andy never asked where I’d been. But he knew, and forgave everything he did know… as always. And I forgave him his forgiving. He didn’t laugh, and I couldn’t help loving him, the same way a family of refugees loves… longingly, for what’s been irrevocably lost.
* * *
Andy was handy – a trite moniker fitted together as aptly and tightly as the bonds of his genetic code. I sometimes think his mother and father must have deciphered his peculiar talents through a mystical parental forensic, which guided them toward an appropriate baptismal. As Andy put it, he was a ‘hammer and nails’ kind of guy… when he wasn’t at his desk job.
It was Lorraine, the saucy teen, who dubbed him “Mr. Prefix”, that is: “The guy who fixes things before they’re even broken.” Andy never stopped laughing at the label. He even made up a little plaque in his workshop that he took into The Hall and put on his desk. “Mr. Prefix,” it said. “Getting it right before it gets wrong.” It’s in a box in the basement along with all the other stuff he brought back when he finally retired.
But after his diagnosis – or AD as we put it – Handy Andy’s endearing hobby transmogrified into something like obsession. His scraping and banging and wrenching and painting and muttering and mumbling acquired a desperate tempo inversely proportional to his physical strength – his ability to carry on. He became a latter-day Noah, trying to cobble together his ark in a single afternoon – in every single, single afternoon that remained to him.
We could do nothing but watch in anguish and offer hints, which he never even heard let alone heeded, that perhaps he should slow down, that everything was fine. But I dared not push or show impatience. It was, after all, the end of his life, not mine – or as he once put it: “I’m about to become a human-been, my love. There’s chores need doing.” It was more than chores, though.
How do you build an ark? And why? I mean, even if your bloody vessel is watertight, how can you be sure you’ll get every plant, animal and insect on board to repopulate the shore you’re going to wash up on? And what makes you believe there’s even a world needs repopulating – or that the one you’re leaving isn’t entirely healed before you’ve even breathed last. There’s an existential conundrum for you!
***
Heading home, past the layer-cake architecture of City Hall, the traffic usually thins on Douglas – at least in my direction – and the Number 75 accelerates. The built form flattens out, the crystalline structures of downtown – such as it is in Victoria – giving way to the stucco and parking lot topography of suburbia, then finally to the rural stretches of Saanich.
Country air is easier to breathe. I know that’s silly to say, but I swear, city air has a density and texture I can feel in my lungs and taste at the back of my throat. Dr. Caruthers says the pressure I feel in my chest and the queasy sensation in my gut is anxiety. He prescribed pills to make the symptoms go away, but I’ve left the prescription unfilled because I have this feeling the symptoms are really Andy’s spirit inside me, communing in the only way open to him.
Ridiculous! I know. Especially for one who would be branded atheist by most believers. But I’ve become something of a spiritual crackpot since Andy’s passing. I notice things I didn’t before.
For instance, there’s a similarity of design and purpose between coffins and boats. They both convey people and things from one world to another. In a coffin, of course, the words ‘people’ and ‘things’ merge – or you could say coffins convey people’s remains as things. In boats people and things are usually distinct entities – that is, if you exclude slave and – arguably – bride ships.
I would never had discovered the symbolic connection between coffins and boats if I hadn’t been so intensely aware of Andy’s carport carpenter’s hands at work during those last sad, desperate months. His final project was a hand-made front door. This after he had all the windows replaced with ‘more efficient’ triple glazed panes; supervised the digging up and replacing of the perimeter drain tile, which had been damaged by the invasive roots of our cedar hedge; cut a balcony – unfortunately reminiscent of a widow’s watch – into the sloped section of roof off our second-floor master bedroom; replaced our fence…!
The litany of his projects exhausts me. But he always had ‘just one more’ in mind.
He said the front door wasn’t ‘grand’ enough.
God, I still cringe when I remember my slightly miffed retort. “Which way don’t you like it, dear, coming in or going out?” I said, the idiocy, the insensitivity of my comment sinking in like bad perfume. Even Andy was shocked, for a moment, then he laughed, and we hugged, the oranges from a spilled bag of groceries rolling around on the foyer floor.
That was the moment I knew, really knew he was dying, and I would miss his corny jokes, and our ordinary life together, and that laughing is as close to crying as written words are to the page. That was when I realized ‘goodbye’ is not really a word at all… it’s a definition that eludes comprehension.
For weeks we watched him work on that damned door with his saws, chisels, planes, mallets.
“What’s it going to be?” I asked.
He scratched his scalp – close shaved ever since his first round of chemo. “Don’t know,” he said.
“But…”
“I’m following the grain, hon. We’ll see where it takes us.”
I understood then that his work on this planet was well and truly finished, and that this last project was all about him, and me in him, and Lorraine out of me and him, and Bryson out of Lorraine and What’s-his-name and me and him – that in fact, this was a door never meant to be walked through… you were meant to be on both sides at the same time.
It was time for my Andy to leave – that was obvious as cliché.
You have to understand, he’d had never carved anything in his life before. He’d always bought his newel posts, panels and fixtures ready-made from Home Depot or Ikea or whatever. So, encouraging as I tried to be, I dreaded what I might be left with after this, his first ‘artsy’ endeavour.
“Burn it if you don’t like it,” he said, sensing the weight of my anguish. “Honest, love, I mean it. I won’t miss it when I’m gone.”
***
I never had Andy’s door installed, but I didn’t burn it either. Instead I had it set up on a two sided pedestal-stoop (I have no other word for it) in the far corner of our back yard, underneath our giant cedar tree. Lorraine of course had an opinion on the subject: “What, are you crazy, Mum?” she wanted to know. “Who’s going to see it there?”
I still don’t have an answer.
The outer edge of Andy’s door begins as a river rising up from the lower left corner – or the right, if you happen to be standing on the other side. It flows round the panel, transforming itself into a serpent whose head swims in its own current where the circle – if you can call it that – completes. Inside this encircling form is the iconic scene of Eve handing Adam the apple.
Is it her apple? His? Theirs? I can’t say for sure. It doesn’t need saying. All that matters is: It’s an apple.
***
I always get off the Number 75 on Wallace, just past Marchant, then walk up to the Fairway Market at West Saanich Road and wait for Lorraine under the red awning at the store’s entrance, or sometimes I go in and do a little shopping. She pulls up, I get into her SUV, and off we go, back home. She decided to live with me instead of moving into the house she appropriated from What’s-his-name after an ugly, protracted legal battle… he really is an ass-hole.
Bryson is always in his car seat behind us. He says “Hi Nan.” – sometimes brightly, sometimes grumpily, sometimes sleepily… but always in some manner of speaking. And that’s enough, isn’t it? He’ll know what to think of me when the time comes. As for Andy, I don’t think Bryson will remember him at all, except as someone he sees in our family photos albums.
~ The End~
Hope you enjoyed Ways of Parting.
There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.