Death Starts in the Feet: A Remembrance Day Fugue for my Father

As this Remembrance Day winds its way down, and I sit at the fire to escape the damp bleak that is Southern Ontario in November, I can see my ten-year-old hand in my dad’s with his wide, wide fingertips, and white fragile knuckles scarred from burns when he was young.

It would have been 1978 and we were watching the parade march to the Thunder Bay Armouries.  It couldn’t have been that cold because I can see my hand in his.  Or maybe it was cold but dry which, as we say in the north, is a different kind of cold.  That is the cold that I’m used to, not the cold damp of here.  I’ve been in Southern Ontario for far longer than I lived up north, but the climate of Lake Superior is where my bones grew and so it is still that type of cold that I'm used to and I like my fire because it dries my insides and warms me up.

I think that 1978 might have been the only time in my childhood that my dad and I went to a Remembrance Day parade.  The next year my mom was sick with brain cancer, and the years after that she got sicker, and then after she died and until I left home I think we might have been just too sad.

My dad was born in 1926.  He was 17 when he signed up for the war in 1943. He was then shipped “south” for training, at Camp Borden I think.  When the war ended, he was on a train west to be shipped out, further west.

Here he is in his uniform. My dad was disappointed that he didn’t get to go overseas after all that training. But I think that bit of luck is perhaps why I exist at all and - shortly before he died, when he recounted the stories over and over and over – I told him so.

The next Remembrance Day I spent with my dad was long after I was no longer a child.  It was in Millbrook, after he came down here to me with the beginnings of dementia and a host of other things.  He squeezed into his old legion jacket and put on his beret and we went downtown.

I can't remember if my dad was well enough to come out for another Remembrance Day downtown. I think there might have been one more, preceded or followed by breakfast at the restaurant, and I think he may have been adamant that he was in Kenora.  I can't remember now if that was Remembrance Day or not.  As my dad's dementia progressed, the present mattered less and less to him, and perhaps that is why I don't remember either. They always had a Remembrance Day service at the long-term care facility in Millbrook where he lived and I definitely remember those.

The last one was in 2009.  I had taken the day off work with the plan to head over after lunch for the service but the nurse called me first and told me to come early because my dad had gone into congestive heart failure and the doctor was on his way in.  

Decisions had to be made. We would skip the Remembrance Day service and head to the hospital instead.  Or at least that is what I thought the decision would be.

And so I arrived and sat on the bed while Dr. Van Loon explained to my dad what was going to come for him.  His heart was failing and would continue to fail.  His circulation would move to the centre of him and that meant that his diabetes would be complicated and his feet, already in major trouble, would get much much worse.  Dr. Van Loon didn’t tell us that my dad's foot and leg would go black halfway up the calf before he died. 

Dr. Van Loon also didn’t tell us that there would come the day when my dad was going to be getting into bed for the last time and it would be obvious that it was so.  No-one could have known that when that day came, in December, my dad would demand that the nurses leave him alone, demand that they stand back away from him against the wall, while he took 10 minutes sitting at the edge of his bed planning his route - planning the full trajectory of his torso and legs, mapping it in his mind – before he gathered his strength and swung his legs onto the bed for what we knew was the last time.  

And then with his characteristic flair, and knowing that there was an audience (my dad loved an audience) he raised both legs straight to the ceiling, held his black toes perpendicular to his body for long enough to inspire something greater than awe, and then dropped them and lay flat.   And that was that.  He didn’t really move again, though he continued to speak and sing for a while more.

One of the things he said, while pointing at his toes, and while he was giggling at his own black humour, was this:

"Just remember, death starts in the feet." 

Before all of that, on Remembrance Day when the first decisions were made, Dr. Van Loon told my dad that he could go into the hospital to see what might be done, as per his Level 4 "keep me alive" instructions, or he could stay where he was and get ready for what was coming.

And my dad, as though the years of annual care-planning meetings and my railing against the Level 4 note had never happened said:  

“Well, why the hell would I go anywhere else?  I’m staying right here where they’ll be good to me.” 

And they were.  For five weeks, right to the end, they were so, so good to him.  I can’t think about the nurses and the PSWs who cared for him, and me, without weeping.  

After my dad made his decision, Dr. Van Loon explained the palliative orders.  He said it could be days or weeks, there was no way of knowing.  While Dr. Van Loon was talking I could hear that the Remembrance Day service in the main hall had started without us.  And then Dr. Van Loon left.

My dad and I tried to listen to the Remembrance Day service from his room until it ended and then sat in the quiet.  We sat side by side on his bed, and he grabbed my hand.  I tried really really hard to be a big girl.  I tried really hard not to cry.  I can see my grown-up hand with its bitten fingernails being squeezed by his, with the wide wide fingertips and paper-thin white knuckles with purple veins.

And then from that quiet, the piper from the Remembrance Day service came down the hall with his bagpipes, stood in the doorway to my father’s room, and played for a good long while.

He did not get to fight in the war, but my dad was a brave, brave man.

Feet and Blood

My feet. My feet are 42 years old and I will have them with me, I hope, until the day I die. I spent the first 40 years of my life completely ignoring my feet and what they do. Mostly, I have lived my life in my mind. I am a lawyer. And working in law means working with ideas of justice, and fairness, and trying to achieve a right result. In my work I hear all about people’s problems with their fellow humans and then I try to use my mind to solve them. I love my work, but often the conflicts and the disputes between people are very silly – mostly about money, or power, or ego, or just plain gossip and ill will.

Quite differently from all of that, when I went for a long walk in Spain eventually I felt as though I was rooted to the earth with my feet, step after step.

In Spain they say this: paso por paso – step after step.

In Zimbabwe they say this:  famba shavanaka - walk well.

My father says this:  put one foot in front of the other, until you walk off the cliff.

I realized on the Camino that solitude is important to cultivate, important to take and protect for oneself. Without solitude life becomes sticky - sticky with life, sticky with people, sticky with the world and its wants.  As I walked in Spain, my daily life was physically tactile. I left my mind and started to feel my way through grief. I began to feel the power of my own body, and the vibration of my own spine. And I started to think about the energy and the sound that lives deep within each human. And about music, and whales, and physics, and math.

I know for a fact that human beings have a sound deep within because I heard it in my brother's arm. When my brother was receiving dialysis, one of his arteries was brought to the surface of his skin and connected with a smaller vein to form a fistula. The sound and the vibration that ran through his fistula was as strong as the ocean.  The truth is that the song and the force of my brother's beating heart could be heard at the surface of his skin.  His very life had a sound.

For most of us, that sound is deep within and more or less silent while we go about the business of living.

In Zimbabwe, I became friends with a woman named Mirriam and spent a lot of time rubbing her foot.  She had lost her left leg and foot to a crocodile, and lost her baby to the river at the same time.

Mirriam told me the story in English, and she mixed up the “I” and the “You”.  So the story became this:

“You holding onto tree” 

“Crocodile eating you leg” 

“You take baby off you back” 

“You put baby on ground” 

“You baby fall into water” 

“You … Kushinga….” 

“You holding onto tree” 

She said:  "My baby died."  I said:  "I had a baby die too."   She said:  "My brother is dead."   I said:  "My brother is dead too."   She said:  "My mother is dead."   I said:  "My mother is dead too."

We understood each other, Mirriam and I.

One day when Mirriam's dressing was changed on the stump of her left leg and she cried for her mother:  "Amai! Amai!"  I had to give her my arm to bite because there was nothing else I could do.

Kushinga is a Shona word that has no direct translation in English.  It was explained to me as a particular form of courage; an active courage; courage in action.

I like to think that the sound in my brother's fistula, that sound in all humans that remains hidden most of the time, is something akin to kushinga.  A quality of sound, a quality of life, that can sometimes become a verb.

Paso por Paso - Normandy - July 1944

When I came home from Spain at the end of July, 2009, I was extremely fit.  My husband especially commented on the strength of my wrists and I responded that this was from my fifth day.

It was.  I pounded my walking poles on that day, up despised hills on a dusty path.  You'll have to read my letter to Elvira in Chapter 5 to see what that was all about.  It was a day of anger, or something beyond anger.  It was a day of very strong emotion - such that I had not experienced before or since.

At the end of my letter to Elvira, after trying to explain a lot of things, I said this:

"At one point, as I was trying to collect myself on the path, a Spanish man quietly passed me on the left and looked at me directly.  He meant to look at me, and he said, "Paso por Paso."  I didn't know what he was saying.  I now know that he was saying, kindly, "Step by Step."  This is the Camino."

I got a letter in the mail today from a man who is in his nineties.  This is part of what he said to me in five pages of beautiful script that are a gift to me to be cherished until my dying day:

"Thank you for the gift of The Camino Letters.  I enjoyed it immensely, but also felt drained by it as I shared your highs and lows.  Oddly enough it took me back to July 1944 when, with a draft of NCOs and soldiers I landed in Normandy and marched inland to somewhere in the bridgehead.  We were burdened with all our kit and had no idea how far we had to go; it was Paso por Paso indeed!  This is a book I shall keep and dip into again and again."

He ended his long letter by saying:  "I think God is indeed using you as "an instrument of his peace."

Me of little faith.

Gosh.  Life is this.  This is life.

Magic

An eagle flew over my car as I was talking with my friend about a particular poet in chains.  The eagle broke my listening ear and reminded me of all of the winged creatures, and the creatures who should have wings.

I've thought about that eagle all day. I've been working hard to steady my course these past few weeks - thinking about what it means to walk inside my own shoes, and what it would feel like to be an autumn spider.  Eagles are another sort of creature altogether.  Eagles don't have shoes, or webs.