Something Evil This Way Comes

This post is a long time overdue.

On some level, I have been waiting for the right elements to come together, so I could put this together as well as can be. I have been waiting to get some pictures so I could embed them in this post. I still don’t have the pictures. And I don’t seem to be sleeping, and things Catherine-related seem to be occupying my mind, so here I am.

I’ve thought about the process of writing this post for quite some time. I’ve tried to anticipate in advance just how candid and exposed I wish to be with the big old world about this.

I can’t say just how that will go, because, even after two months of trying to work through the details, I still have no idea what I will say here. What is there to say? Why, there is the need to say everything and the need to say nothing, because how can I ever, really, explain.

Without meaning to sound maudlin or self-indulgent, I don’t really think I have met anyone who knows how I feel, because how could they? Just like I have no idea how anyone else is feeling, except for what I imagine they might be feeling. But I am still imagining.

So, the nuts and bolts, the meat and potatoes, of this thing is that my…. ex-girlfriend, very dear friend and a bunch of other things I don’t have words for, died in a plane crash off Saturna Island on November 29/2009. There is a lot written on the internet about that. It was in the Globe and Mail, on the CBC website, it was everywhere. It was a big news story. You can google it.

There is something very strange about losing a loved one and having that loss be national news. On one hand, people around you are perhaps more kind, because everyone knows a lot, real or imagined, about the situation. It also means that you are confronted with the facts of your loss over and over and over and at times when you may not be expecting it, like sitting at work or a diner and glancing at a newspaper. It also means that some people will make a point of speaking to you about the details they have heard on the news, whether they are part of that world or not. It means your grief is news, and that makes a hard process more than a little strange.

One of the weird aspects of all this has been the internet. Because Catherine was not a very cyber-ish gal, she was much more in person, in the flesh, and it’s strange to see how her death has been handled by the internet. I mean, how much the internet has been a tool that allowed people to meet or converse or grieve, in a way that would have been much more difficult without it. Maybe that’s irony. I hear people always think things are ironic when they are actually just odd coincidences, and I don’t want to make that embarrassing mistake right now. But if the situation was different and the roles were somehow swapped, it’s unlikely that Catherine would have relied on the internet for information and communication the way many of us did for her death. She wasn’t a Facebook-y sort of gal.

So, Catherine died and I’ve had about 2 months to start processing that, and yet I find myself not quite up to the task. I raise my hand in unabashed admittance that I am in a profound state of denial. I quite literally can’t imagine never seeing Catherine again. It simply makes no sense to me, so, it seems I don’t believe it. I hear denial is a bad coping mechanism, but for right now, it’s what I have to work with. It will all turn into some sort of train wreck at some point, and that will be ugly but right now, that’s what I am doing. The closest I have come to dealing with it was when I was really sick with the flu a couple of weeks ago. I was too sick to sleep, and I ended up laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, letting some tiny speck of it all seap in.

I suppose it’s rude of me to be charging ahead and not giving you the back story, the history, the where it all began.

The world of Spike and Catherine began at a Hallowe’en dance in 1985. We danced together.

I don’t really dance.

It started something.

I was seeing someone at the time who, in retrospect was probably suffering from borderline personality and who treated me in ways that probably qualify as abusive. Catherine was horrified by how this woman treated me, and actually drilled it through my thick melon that I deserved to be treated better than that.

To every woman I ever dated who thought I expected to much, I say, take it up with Catherine. Seriously.

No one had ever treated me as well as Catherine did. She found out what my favorite flowers are and made a habit of having bouquets delivered to my home. No one has ever done that. She would take me out for brunches of eggs benedict and mimosa’s. I had never had a breakfast that was more complicated than bacon and eggs. I could go on, but the point is, she looked after me, and no one had ever done that before. She put great thought and effort into it, and it was completely and utterly about me, not what her last girlfriend had liked so I would probably like it, too. Catherine had a way of paying attention and making you believe you were worth it. I haven’t had a lot of that in my life.

We went out, and we broke up and we kept the parts of our relationship that we liked and made ourselves friends. For 25 years, we were there in each other’s lives.

When I knew I had to have this big spooky surgery for what might turn out to be cancer, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t, Catherine was out of town, on vacation with her partner. A mutual friend was picking them up at the airport. I told him, before he picked them up, “You can’t tell Catherine about the surgery and all that crap, not when she first gets home.” And, he’s a good guy, so he didn’t. I spoke to her about it a couple of years ago, told her I had told our friend he shouldn’t tell her. Not like she couldn’t know because that is obviously stupid, but she had just had a holiday and I wanted her to be able to stay in that relaxed frame of mind for a little while, before my big exciting dramatic life came crashing through her door. So, I told her about my moratorium on the news, and she told me that when she heard I was in a sticky situation, medically speaking, the words than ran through her mind were, “You can’t take my Spike.”

Because that’s what we were, or it’s part of what we were. When I was struggling to stay alive, one of the considerations in the plus column was that it would have upset Catherine if I didn’t.

I find this part difficult to express. We don’t really live in a culture that values relationships with ex-lovers.  And the having been lovers part was significant and was the base of the thing, but it really was an old love and was way more involved than simply ‘ex-lovers’, in the standard sense. Catherine was, among other things, the person I knew would remember my birthday, would make sure we exchanged presents at Christmas and would call on Saint Patrick’s Day. People who have family might not understand how big those little things are, that being remembered stuff. Catherine did many, many things for me over the years and those details of remembering me through those times was stuff that made me feel loved, even when things in my life were hard.

In some ways, I have hesitated to write about Catherine’s death because I have been so overwhelmed by some many details and so many people. It’s probably not hyperbole to say that there were 600 people at Catherine’s service, There was a lot of crying. And some singing. And some laughing and story-telling. And a great deal of whiskey was consumed. A lot of emotion was emoted that night. Catherine knew a lot of people and helped a lot of people and lots of them showed up to thank her and talk about their relationships with her. And that was good.

And not to sound maudlin or self-pitying, but….

I heard what people said, and it sounded true and I certainly believed them, but it all sounded so different than how I related to her. One of the differences was, if you love someone for 25 years and were in a ‘relationship’ with them, odds are you may have had an argument or two over the years. I knew Catherine well enough to have gone to the mat with her once or twice, and it wasn’t to grab a quick kiss, and I knew the 360 degree, stereoscopic, surround sound Catherine, and how she could be angelic, or she could flay you with a sentence and leave you there wondering where your arterial blood had disappeared to. I say this about her because I could and can do the same. I knew her well enough to fight with her, because our relationship was worth fighting for and, because I thought that one of the points of our relationship was to be there for each other and to also tell the other one if she was full of shit, As sweetly as possible, but at the end of the day, one of the great values of knowing someone so well and so long is that you know when they are full of it, and you also know when they are starting to come unwrapped or maybe steering their little sanity bus too close to the cliff. We did all those things for each other over the years. During the time when my parents were dying, I had become really isolated, which made all the hard things harder. I was really really hurt and really really nuts, and Catherine made a point of reaching out to me in those dark times.

I don’t know what else to say. It’s already too much or not enough, but probably both.

It doesn’t make any sense to me. And when she died, I realized that somewhere along the line I had decided that Catherine would live longer than me. Now, I admit, I had about a year to lay in bed and think about things like that and at times it seemed the only person I might outlive would be the Queen Mum. I’m not sure if that’s where the idea took root, or whether it just logically seemed that if Catherine could survive her adolescence, she would probably live forever. In my mind, she was on a porch, with her long hair turned silver and white, and she was still helping people, listening, making people feel listened to, subtly nudging people in the right direction. Not to be maudlin and self involved, but I don’t know how to make sense of a world where I am here and she is not.

Now don’t go freaking out… it’s not a statement that has an undercurrent of dramatic action.

I just mean it doesn’t make sense.

And I have a curse, well several actually, but one of them is, if something doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s important to me, oh my, do I keep turning that thing around and around and around and thinking about it and trying to make sense of it.

It’s a curse. And I have it going on now.

And it’s not the garden variety, ‘why would the universe take Catherine and leave George W Bush or… name your favourite dickwad tyrant here.’

But it’s just so stupid. The world was a better place with Catherine in it, and she had lots of life left in her, so why isn’t she here?

You don’t have to answer that. And if you say everything happens for a reason or some other Shirley MacLaine crap, I’ll send you a virus in the return mail.

The world, if it wants to be good, is going to have to put more effort into that with Catherine gone.

That’s the corny thing that I would like. I’d like people to just try to be nicer, kinder, more forgiving, more inclusive as a way of honouring Catherine and as a way of trying to balance the void left with the loss of her. I’d like it, but I am not sure people can do that, including myself. No one knows better than me that we can say all sorts of lofty things about how we will behave in the future when we feel our little earthbound cages being rattled. I’d like to think we might all really try to be better about whatever our particular selfish defect of character might be. Stretch ourselves. It’s like some sort of psychic socialism. We all have to be better in the world to replace the good things the world lost when it lost Catherine.

If that’s too flakey for words, I am gonna blame the lateness of the hour and the fact that tomorrow marks the beginning of another string of check ups and pokes and blood draws and being jammed in a tube, etc, by my pals at the cancer agency. I really should be asleep by now. But I also really should have written this about 7 weeks ago. I’m sorry it is sans images. As soon as I get some, I will slap them in to this post.

And so, little munchkins, it’s late and we should all be asleep by now and I am going to go bunk down. And leave you with the immortal words of Catherine and Tim Curry.

“Don’t dream it. Be it.”

or put another way, in the immortal words of Spike Harris, “This is not a dress rehearsal.”

I’ll try to remember those things if you will.

As I mentioned, I just spent most of August in Costa Rica. It was pretty fabulous. And I took a few pictures while I was there. Unlike the folks I was traveling with, I didn’t spend a lot of time taking pictures of my lunch; instead I was trying to soak up as much of the experience of being there as I could.

That said, I did take a few (around 300) pictures and had the good taste to cull the blurry and the stupid and the ‘what the hell is that?’.
If you’d like to see what cut the mustard and have a wee glimpse at some of the stuff I did and some of the places I went, you can check out the new stuff in the gallery. You can find that here.

Sadly but for obvious reasons, there are no photos of the white water rafting, which was incredibly fun. But cameras and rapids, not a good mix.

It’s been a typically long while since I last posted. Someone left me a little nudge in my comments section and the light went on. The magic one that appears above my head in my more animated moments.

See, it’s a weird thing with we cancer bloggers that if you don’t post for some chunk of time, people begin to worry. It’s a strange kinship. But it’s also a very good thing. It’s an experience unlike any other that I have had. I have become part of a secret club that nobody would ever wish to join, but now that we are here so we do our best to help each other and keep an eye on each other and share information about treatment and surviving in general. And in many cases we could pass on the street and not know each other. But, I am deeply affected by the good things and the bad things that happen in the lives of these folks and I suspect others have the same experience.
It’s strange, but a very good sort of strange and I am awfully glad that folks are out there, doing those things.
I’m also glad for my local face to face comrades. We all share something and, not to be all Sesame Street about it, but the sharing is good.

So, how’ve I been?
You know, I really couldn’t say. Which isn’t a very helpful response because you’d think me, of all people, ought to be able to at least fudge an answer.
But I think my mom’s death sort of hip checked me into some new and different frame of mind. It’s difficult to describe and mostly I am still trying to figure it out.
Some wee snippets of it are things like…. at Christmas this year, I had this small but constant sadness that I would never get a Christmas present from my mom ever again. Now, the reality is, my mom hasn’t been able to participate in Christmas for about 5 years. And I was not someone who believed she would ever have a miracle recovery from Alzheimers and we would all slide back to happier times. But it was the absolute finality of it that kept nipping at me.
And it wasn’t about needing or wanting some more stuff. It was a sense of missing how my mom used to put a lot of care and attention into the presents, and the wrapping itself was a work of art.

When my dad had to step up and take over that detail there was a marked change in the whole deal.
My dad, who has non Alzheimer’s related memory problems in that he just plain spaces things out, would send us each a smoke detector, some wrenches and a few screwdrivers all with their Canadian Tire price tag still on it. Often there would also be a one pound can of beer. Like I said, memory problems.
And I don’t mean to take away from the things my dad did. Because they are sweet in the way he tried so hard to do this thing, a thing he had never done before and here he was, an all grown up man, having to learn how to do the Christmas shopping for his grown kids. And are there any people more difficult to shop for than your adult relatives?
But I digress.

I tried pretty hard to do the ‘it’s just another day’ version of Christmas this year. But on the inside, it was a pretty introspective time. Which is okay. There are far worse ways of spending Christmas than being introspective, and I am guessing at least a few people reading this had them. It’s a tough time for lots of people. This year was tough, but not as tough as I had expected.

Okay, so Christmas is over.

It seems the current plan in family-land is to sell my parents’ home, though I guess I should say ‘my dad’s home’, but right now, I don’t feel like it.
And that creates another strange set of emotions. My dad is now enjoying all the mod-cons of a care facility and no longer needs a house. It all makes sense. So the siblings, and myself if I can squeeze in the time between work and school, will go to that wretched town and empty out my parents’ home and then it will be sold.
Now bearing in mind that this house is not one I have ever lived in myself. And that I hate hate hate the town my dad lives in. I still have this eerie feeling that there will no longer be that home base, that spot you can always sneak back to if the spit hits the spam in your life. The old safety net.
Given that I have never really used it as a safety net, it’s not so much of a loss in real terms. It was some strange under-utilized form of stability so, I suppose I should go create its replacement, though I don’t have a clue what that will mean or what it will look like.

That’s about it for now. Things are different. Still strange, still difficult more often that I would wish for (but who can’t say that?) but in a calm sort of way.

And to leave this on a trashy pop culture up-beat note, I am currently smitten, in a movie-star smitten sort of way, with Helena Bonham Carter. I watched the 5th Harry Potter movie one day last week and saw Sweeney Todd the next. Helena Bonham Carter does evil so good.

I just spent 4 glorious days in this groovy cabin. I actually spent 2 months in this very cabin last winter. Back then, it didn’t look quite as splendid. That was because there was snow all over the ground as well as fallen trees and crap. Much chain saw action was necessary back then.This weekend was completely glorious. I drove off the ferry and I felt my shoulders start to drop.

The cabin is kind of bare bones. And there is a different cabin that I sleep in when I am there.
But here is the pretty cool part of the story.

I ordered my copy of the last Harry Potter book from that evil bookslinger that sells things basically at cost. Being a cheap bastard, I opted for the free shipping feature.
Now, I work 12 hour shifts and, from what the folks at Amazon were telling me, the book was due to arrive on one of my work days. So I arranged with my landlordy that she would take delivery for me and I would give her a container of yummy corn chowder. She did her part by being home and available. But the Mensa dudes at Canada Post apparently couldn’t read the sign I left on the door of the building, saying to buzz the landlordy. So, in spite of the sign, they buzzed my place, I wasn’t home, and they sent my book to a local post office, where it is still waiting to be picked up.

That was a speed bump interfering with my plan for a perfect weekend, but that was okay because I had a big armful of books with me for my little vacation.

So, I was on Galiano, having an amazing dinner of halibut grilled on the barbeque and we started chatting pop culture. I mentioned being vexed by Amazon. My friends mentioned that they had a copy and, since they had already read it, it was available for reading.
Well, really, it was all I could do to stay and finish dinner.

And that’s how I spent my time away. Laying in a chair, in the sun, on the deck of a wonderful cabin, reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Gallows. It was marvelous.

The other wonderful thing about being at the cabin is… there are bees. Lots and lots of bees. They swarm around the fuscia plants at the cabin. You can stand right in the middle of them, and they just keep buzzing around, doing their bee thing, completely uninterested in hurting you, and rubbing their little bee feet together and making with the honey.
I liked that a whole lot.
And the eagles.
And the dragonflies.
And some brilliant yellow little birds that maybe were some sort of finch, I dunno. I just really liked them.
And the strange thing that kept making splashing sounds in the pond, but I never did figure out what it was.

And then one morning, I woke up and saw that a rat had chewed through the screen on my cabin window and had helped himself to a goodly chunk of my peach.
Well, what the hell.
I thought it was funny.
The owner of the property felt considerably less jolly about the whole affair. What with the rat-liness of the whole thing. Me, I thought it was an ambitious mouse but the owner of the property says rat, rat, rat.

And now I am back in the city. Did my week’s worth of work and now I am on holidays till August 13th.
It’s Gay Pride in my town, so that will take a big chunk of the first half of that time.
And then, after that, I may just toss some food in my cooler and head off camping by myself.

And then… if everything works out, which really remains to be seen, a week long kayaking trip later in the month.
Come September I know I will have to buckle down with work and school and having no life and so I plan on running a bit wild this summer and leaving the cats in foster care a bit too often.
I’m sure they’ll deal.

Happy Pride, folks.

Yikes, I have been remiss with my little website.

But let me take a stab at correcting that.

Today, I am sad to announce that my beloved stove top espresso maker is Officially Pronounced Dead.

It’s bean a long, glorious, delicious and invigorating relationship. And I have been in denial for a while. I saw that the metal was starting to strain and crack in the basket, but ignored it. I noticed the flavour was starting to be less than it had been in the past, but just put an extra effort into cleaning it. But today, at approximately 3:45 pm, the coffee maker officially spit its last blast of steam thru a blend of beans and made it quite clear that there would be no second cup.

I’m sitting here with only a couple of sips left, trying to think of what bill I should dodge for a month so I can scrape up the money to get the next machine.

Maybe that’s not very sentimental, but I take my joe pretty seriously and this is a bad time of the week to be left with no joe.

Maybe I should set up a paypal account like other folks have….