Wrestling With the Box of Proof

In less than 2 months I will be fifty years old! It doesn’t bother me at all. Back in January I wrote a post about my love of fight and how I need to wrestle a few demons before June 9^th arrives. One of those fights involves my mother. Not her, but her death.

I often wonder what Mom was experiencing when she turned fifty in 1987.  She had no idea there were only nine years left in her life. How could she know? No one knows that sort of thing. 

Mom loved hunting for partridge.

The reason I face this demon right now is because it was 13 years ago this weekend that my mother lay in her bed at home, and though I was unaware of how soon she would meet the last day of her life, I believe she knew full well that there  were only a couple of weeks left.

A month earlier my mom and dad called to tell us that Mom had pelvic cancer. Right away I went online to do my research. I found the treatments I was sure her doctor was already prescribing, hoping always for a good outcome of more years, hopeful that chemo and radiation would buy time and allow her to live longer than just 59 years. Surely Mom would live till her 60^th birthday on July 23^rd of that same year. Surely.

We talked on the phone even beyond what our budget would allow. I kept asking her about the treatment. It hadn’t started yet. I understood the medical system in Canada and how frustratingly slow it could be. She reassured me her doctor was doing all he could. 

My sister, Mary, went to visit Mom regularly. She started being a little bit more open with me about the seriousness of Mom’s cancer, how she really wasn’t doing well. I wanted to go back to Canada to be with her. Yet every time I talked to Dad and Mom they gave no clue that it was quite so serious. I wrote an email to one of  Mom’s closest friends, a pastor we’d known for a few years, and asked her if Mom’s cancer was aggressive, if I should come home. But she answered that she wasn’t aware that it was that serious. She’d visited Mom a few times at home, and she ‘seemed to be okay’. Surely I could believe her. Surely. 

It didn’t matter what they all said. I really wanted to go be with mom. My gut told me I should be there. I knew she needed me. Whenever we were in Canada Mom would come and stay with us for a few days or weeks. It would get a bit stressful because even though Mom loved Peter dearly, she always took my side of any issue no matter what, and poor Peter had to go toe-to-toe with both of us. Each time she came she knew that I would help her get into a healthy diet and exercise routine, that I would take her to meet my friends, that we would do a few new things and see a few of my favorite places, and she could always count on me to take her to my hairdressers. Now that Mom was sick, I wanted to take care of her again, to do all the things I knew she loved. I wanted to shampoo her hair and set it in rollers and give her a bit of a modern hair-style, and not old-lady curls. I wanted to be the one to give her sponge baths when she couldn’t make it to the tub. I would have massaged her feet and tickled her back, brought her breakfast in bed and spent long afternoons doing nothing but talking about all her childhood memories. 

But I couldn’t go. We had no extra money for the flight. We wondered if I were to go back to visit her, then what if she held on for a long time? Would I be able to stay away from home and baby Amanda and young Joel’s homeschooling for that long? And what if I did visit, only to return back to Thailand and have Mom pass away shortly thereafter? How could I ever afford to fly back to attend her funeral?

It was a horrible dilemma and I never wish it on anyone. 

So I prayed.

I think it was more like I conjured holy optimism… fasting, praying, trying my hardest not to sin during those days so that God would have to hear me, so that I could somehow earn his favor to be spared this pain, so that I could convince him to let Mom survive the cancer. 

I kept sending links to Dad about treatments and options and hoped that mom would be starting any or all of them soon. Time was ticking. I could envision that horrible pelvic cancer spreading irreversibly by the minute.

Then on May 16^th a call came. At midnight. We always knew that a call at midnight was a worrisome thing, unless it was just a case of forgotten time zones. I recognized the voice of my oldest sister, Judy, trying to stifle her sobs saying, “Patti, honey, I think you need to come back home now if you want to see Mom one last time.” 

Peter was out in a small village near Buri Ram for the week and I had no idea how to contact him. We didn’t have cell phones. Desperation became a taste in my mouth. I was in an angry panic. I had to get on the soonest plane and get back to Mom right away! How could ministry go on as normal when I was losing my mom? I screamed silently and angrily at Peter from the depths of my guts, “Where the hell are you? How can anything in Buri Ram be more important than me getting back to Mom right now?” 

Convinced that God decided against healing Mom ( an idea I have also wrestled with and learned much about prayer and control and outcomes and faith) and I believed that anything I said wasn’t going to move Him one way or the other, I got mad at him too and screamed, “I loathe the day I came to this country! I left everything and everyone for You and you won’t even show up for this!”

After many phone calls, I flew out of Khon Kaen the next day, and went to Bangkok, where I would stay overnight at the home of friends and take a Cathay Pacific flight to Toronto the following morning. It was May 18^th in Thailand, but still the 17^th in Peterborough, Ontario. I woke up early, got dressed and came downstairs with my suitcase. My friends were ready to drive me to the airport and we were heading out the door. 

Then the phone rang. 

It was Peter.

He was calling to tell me that he’d talked to Dad on the phone.

Mom had just passed away.

That was one difficult flight. 

And so this is what I have fought with mom about since that day:

 

Mom, why didn’t you tell me?

 

During the weeks after her death I wanted to know why she never told us how serious it was. I would have been there earlier if I’d known. I could have been there. 

One quiet morning when it was just me and Dad I asked him, “Dad, why didn’t Mom tell anyone how serious it was?” 

He sat there in the timeless pose of my father, legs crossed, shoulders relaxed, a mug of coffee in one hand and a cigarette dangling in the other. He took a long puff on his cigarette, then purposefully tapped the ashes into the ashtray as he did when he was pensive. With a frown in his eyes his words came out all covered in smoke, “She didn’t want people to suddenly treat her differently just because she was dying. She didn’t want people who normally would not have given her the time of day coming over and pretend to care.”

I couldn’t fault her for that. To me it felt like one last passive aggressive guilt-tripping Mom thing. But it’s true, isn’t it? When people know you are dying, they treat you differently. They take the time, they make time, and they are generous with loving gestures. If you knew your loved one was dying would you have to scramble to make up for lost time, working hard to let them know how much you loved them? Or would there be a solid trail of evidence left over the years that proves you had loved them?

In my wrestling I have to believe Mom knew I loved her. I wasn’t one of those ‘no-time-of-day-ers’ Dad was talking about. My four sisters – Judy, Mary, Robin and Sam- were all there around her in the end. My sisters said that it seemed like Mom was holding on, painfully, waiting for me to get there. They told me she asked for me, softly, “Where’s my Patti?” There is a strong family resemblance among us Livingstone girls, and my dear sweet sister, Robin, even tried to impersonate me at Mom’s bedside so that Mom would finally let go. 

I always felt like I failed her in the end but today, with you as my witness, I am letting go. I was always angry about the lousy financial restrictions of our work that caused Mom having to die without me by her side. And I was always just a little bit angry with Mom for not having trusted me with the truth about her cancer. I’m letting it go. Finally.

A few days after the funeral, my sisters and I gathered in Mom’s room. We sorted through all her things, dividing up all the keepsakes we wanted to have, crying and laughing and remembering. I have a box full of treasures from that day. And do you want to know the interesting thing about the things I chose to keep for myself? The things I chose to keep were pretty much all gifts I had given her over the years. There are unorganized piles of photos of great moments together, and it was proof that I had been in her life all along. Mom’s things were a trail of evidence that I had loved her not just because she was dying, but that I had always given her the time of day.

 And as I think of her, I will go through my box of her things, things that I had given her, the Box of Proof full of evidence that I had loved her well in life. And surely there will be peace. Surely.

My Ugly and My Brains: Part 1

Secretly I’d always wished for longer teeth. What a thing to wish for! I would never tell anyone that, but that’s what I believed would change my face from ugly to pretty. It didn’t take me long to discover the power of a pretty face and a great body. Growing up it was a power I never had. My older sisters, however, had lots of it. I would lament my ugly fate compared to them. Mom and Dad would try to convince me otherwise but I knew that my face had let me down.

Mom always insisted, “Oh honey, you’re beautiful in your own way.” Or, “Don’t worry, you’ll fill out one day. And then you’ll wish you were skinny again!” And she’d laugh at her own words, as if she knew something I didn’t know.

“You’re only saying that because you’re my mom.” Sigh.

Peter Wilson, a very cute eighth-grader, stopped me in the playground one day. I couldn’t believe it. He wanted to talk to me? Really? Peter Wilson? Had he seen something in me that others hadn’t? Did he want me to help him with his spelling? He looked at me with a confidence that comes in knowing you are cute. He smiled. He spoke in that melting cute-boy voice, and my heart sank like a penny in a pond when he folded his arms and asked, “Why don’t you look like your sister?” A group of boys watched and laughed from the side. I knew exactly what was happening and what he meant and that I was nothing but a joke. Without missing a beat I hung my head in theatrical despair, made sad eyes, kicked the dirt, and sighed as if it were an old old story I had to tell yet one more time, “I’m adopted.”

Well, I wasn’t. Everyone could tell.

Truth was, though, my face and my body had let me down. You can’t make pretty happen. I tried. I wanted longer teeth with no gap. I attempted to shape chewing gum over my top teeth, and I’d practiced smiling in the mirror, hoping the gum would stay in place. I tried tying my bangs ontop of my head, hoping that it would make my hair look like ‘bubbles’, a very trendy hairstyle at the time. I was trying for Gidget but I got Pebbles Flintstone. Afraid that sleeping on my stomach would stunt my boob growth, I always slept on my back. To this day I cannot sleep on my stomach. Some people’s teeth are just longer, their hair is thicker, their femininity is femininer. You can’t make pretty happen. But…you can make smart happen! And smart gets awards. Long teeth don’t. I discovered the power of brains. It was a slow awakening. Slow but sure.

I was an early reader. Before I started kindergarten I was reading Hop on Pop.

In my first grade class at Grandview Public School in Oshawa, we had a wonderful carpet and we weren’t allowed to sit on it except for reading time. The teacher would sit in her white rocker and we would become little cross-legged ladybugs, amazed every single time that she could read backwards and upside down, in order to allow us to see the pictures the entire time.

One day, Miss Montgomery called my name. She asked me to sit in her reading chair. There was a collective catching of breath among my friends, six-year-old awe, as I climbed into the rocker. Getting my balance, I sat near the edge and the wood was smooth and cool on the back of my knees. My feet dangled above the floor, finding each other, threadbare socks with a hint of big-toe pink showing through. Beautiful Miss Montgomery spoke again, and asked what book I would like to read. I told her I loved the book about the Three Billy Goats Gruff, so she went to the book shelf and then handed it to me. Again, more awe and another reverent  inhale from my classmates.

Respect.

I read.

I did voices, a gruff big billy goat voice, a medium middle billy goat voice, a small little billy goat voice, and a villainous troll voice.

I read.

Mindful of my friends, I turned the book around and panned it slowly, left, then front, then right, then center, so that everyone could view the pictures from any angle on the carpet.

The awareness of the power of brains began to take root that day. It’s an unmistakable sense of privilege that started to creep up on me.

Years later, that awareness went deep into my core at the final assembly on that beautiful last Friday in June, 1971. It was awards day. I had recently gotten out of the hospital from an injury where I’d been hit in the eye with a baseball and suffered a serious hyphema. Come to think of it, I’d almost argue that getting injured and being in the hospital brought  as much ( if not more) respect than being smart; people treated you differently, carefully, considerately.

The students were seated in rows, on the floor of the gym. I was given a chair. See what I mean? Special.

I remember nothing much about that day except that at one point, my name was called. I was receiving an award. Not just any award. I was receiving the Honour Student award. That day I vowed to myself that my name would be called every year during awards ceremony, that I would get that coveted Honour Student certificate, and I would proudly proclaim, “I made the honour roll.”

When that summer ended, the first-day-of-school zeal was in turbo charge, and my mind was fixed on getting that honour award. But I had competition. The competition sat facing me, our desks pushed together in a group. My competition was just like me, only in the boy version.

The competition was Grant Goodes.

(to be continued)

 

Irresistible Goodness Part 1of 3: Canned Peas? Seriously?

 

Canned peas? Seriously?

 

 

It’s the Jolly Green Giant’s fault. He is the root of all canned peas evil, as far as I’m concerned. I can remember  few foods I disliked more. Truth be told, I thought the term ‘Picky Eater’ was created for me, and proudly wore my nickname ‘Picky Pat’. I ate very few things. Captain Crunch cereal was one. A strange cut of beef called a ‘minute steak’ fried till it dried was another. Oranges. And Pixie Stix.

When No One Was Looking

I don’t remember June 9th, 1961 nor do I remember being born. This fact surprises me.

I have such vivid memories of my first few years when we lived on John Street. It makes me wonder what causes children to be so aware of them selves at such a young age. One day we were driving along in the car when my son, Joel, who was only 4 at the time, declared to the family,