Back from BC

And there I, a fragile flake of soul-dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown.

-- Hodgson, The House on the Borderland

Well, Sharee's mom was obviously thrilled to see her younger daughter again. She cried when we got there yesterday. She and her partner, Jack, seemed pretty happy to see me, too. Sheilla told me I was the closest thing she had to a son-in-law at the moment. Hm. Well, I'm not sure how well I can hold up my end of the bargain, because both she and Jack asked me to come back as soon as possible but March is pretty much impossible for me. Maybe next weekend would work, but I need to gather some information first. No matter what, I can still give Sharee support, while she gives Jack a break in his role as primary care-giver. It takes a village to do any number of things, doesn't it? But I think I need to make it up there next weekend again if I can.

Sheilla is clearly a lot sicker than she was when I saw her a year ago, and she's in a fair amount of pain, although she of course has pain-killers. This Thursday she gets some tests that will indicate whether she's fit to have another course of chemo. What I hadn't understood until yesterday is that the cancer has spread to her bones. She has signed the paperwork that tells emergency personnel that she wants to die at home and does not want to be resuscitated, and it is posted around their condo. (I told the story about holyoutlaw's mother a couple of times in response to this, since he shared it with me recently.) Sheilla and Jack told us separately, and then together, that they have a plan to spread some of her ashes in the bay at Ladysmith, using a dragonboat rowed by breast cancer survivors. There will be rose petals on top of the ashes, and the boat will spread the rose petals in a circle. Today she was talking to the president of the local dragonboat association about whether it would be possible to have the same ceremony in Melbourne, so that her other daughter, Heather, could see it. Some of her ashes will also be buried with her mother in a cemetery in Edmonton.

I had a long talk with Jack last night about his family too. The sister who died of polio at age 21, the semi-estranged daughter who is making gestures of rapprochement at age 60, the bright, athletic grandson he is clearly so proud of, working for the government in Ottawa. Sharee told me stories off and on about her friend Dave, who died of lung cancer a couple of years ago. I met him on one of my trips to visit her in Australia, and I have a book he gave me. In the end, Sharee said, he could only eat chocolate, and his aged mother (whom I'd also met) teased him, "Dave, you'll rot your teeth."

I don't know nothin' about nothin'. Sheilla joked with me about how when she moved to Australia at age 22, she thought she knew everything.

"The older we get, the less we know," I said.

"There's truth to that," she said.

Maybe some day I'll really let go of trying to understand it all. Meanwhile, there's work to be done, eh? Meanwhile, there's the reminder that the work will someday come to an end. No matter what, there never seems to be enough time.

It seemed to me, waiting there, that eternities came and went, stealthily; and still I watched. --Hodgson