Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Elf was sitting on her bed writing. I looked at her notebook and saw the word pain written at least fifty times. I picked it up. Shopping list? I said. I flipped it over so the others wouldn’t see it and we sent silent messages to each other with our eyes. We all had a conversation then about god knows what. Sheila told us about a young mom she was treating for tuberculosis. She was so young when she had her kids, said Sheila, that when they caught the chicken pox she did too. She was so young that on the day she finally married the father of her kids she also lost a twelve-year-old molar.

Elf picked up her notebook and tore out a blank page and wrote a short letter, folded it and gave it to our uncle to give to Tina after her surgery. He put his arm around her and said blessings on you, girl, and she told him she was sorry that he had to visit her here. He said no. We don’t apologize for being sick, for being human, for being weary (Uncle Frank has obviously never been a woman). Elf said but still, she was. Elf was an atheist normally but these days she didn’t seem to mind people promoting comfort in His name. My mom and Sheila and I talked louder about nothing much so that Elf and my uncle could think they were having a private conversation about sadness and giving up and strength.

We talked about the Blue Jays spring training for a while. Starters and Closers. Then we were all holding hands. My uncle then initiated a prayer session. And my mother softly began to sing du again, you, you, you are always in my thoughts, you, you, you give me much pain, you, you, you don’t know how much I love you. My mother and my uncle sang it out in Plautdietsch, they knew the words by heart, and Sheila, Elf and I certainly knew the du, du, du part which we sang resolutely. Then we sang a hymn, “From Whom All Blessings Flow.” Mennonites like to sing in tense situations. It’s one option if you’re not allowed to scream or go nuts emptying a magazine into a crowded plaza. I began to cry and couldn’t stop no matter how hard I tried. When the others left Elf’s room to go back to see how Tina was doing I lingered behind and whispered to my sister it’s time to fight now. Yolandi, she said, I’ve been fighting for thirty years. So you’re leaving me to fight alone? I asked her. She didn’t answer me.

I took her hand and said Elf, I have a plan.

MY AUNT’S SURGERY IS OVER. So is her life. At first everything was going well, very well, and then even after the surgery everything was looking good. The doctor came out to meet us all and pulled off his mask and smiled and shook our hands and said he was happy with the way things had gone in there. But then her organs started to fail one by one and even though the doctors and nurses attempted to save her they failed too and in the end we lost Tina.

We sat on chairs in the waiting room, our heads in our hands, we were in a row, staring at the floor. We’d thought it was a slam dunk. We cried quietly. We whispered. Our platoon had taken another unexpected hit and Uncle Frank couldn’t speak at all. We forgot about his insulin shot. Sheila told us that lately Tina had been calling him while she was in Winnipeg to remind him. My mother had lost her last sibling, her closest sister. She stood up and left the room and I stepped into the hallway after her and saw her lean her forehead against the concrete wall.

The nurses in Cardiology gave Sheila a plastic bag that said Property of Ste. Odile Hospital on it. Aunt Tina’s fuzzy slippers and sudoku book and Kathy Reichs’ novel and glasses and toothbrush and moisturizer and purple fleecy track suit and slinky black camisole and high-top white Reeboks were in the bag.

We had a family meeting right there on the spot. Sheila would take her dad home to my mom’s apartment in a cab to make phone calls and to figure out how to get Tina’s body back to Vancouver. I would go tell Elf what had happened and then go get more groceries and especially more coffee, something very bold from the Black Pearl my mother specified, no more of this Starbucks stuff. My mom would take Nic’s car and go to the funeral home way down on Main Street to talk to her pal Hermann, another Mennonite, and see what he could do for them in terms of an urn and cremation.

I sat on a bench by the Assiniboine River and e-mailed Nic from my BlackBerry. I told him that in five or six days my mom and I would be going to Vancouver for Tina’s funeral and could he make arrangements to come home from Spain earlier so Elf wouldn’t be alone. I phoned my kids and told them what had happened and they were silent on the phone, incredulous. I could hear their non-stop music playing in the background. I waited for them to be able to speak. And then we said goodbye. Suddenly the skies became dark purple with flashes of light and the wind picked up and made waves on the river. It was a typical prairie storm, angry with the dryness it had been forced to endure, and everyone around me ran to take cover from the hail. I crawled under the bench and lay there, very still, and listened to the giant balls of ice pummel the wood above me. I saw gum and graffiti, even there, on the underside of the bench. Initials and hearts and curses. I thought about my aunt and my mother sliding unscathed under that massive semi truck on their bikes, coming up on the other side laughing and breathless. It must have felt amazing.

Now I’m learning something. Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat. It’s the same for thinking, writing and life. It’s true what Jason said about cleaning a septic tank. My aunt came to Winnipeg to be with my mom, to help her, except then she died. My mother sat in moonlight on her balcony writing a eulogy for her sister. The city was spread out in the soft darkness, calm after the big thunder and hail storm, still moist and warm like a woman very satisfied in love. My mother was often asked to write eulogies because she had a breezy style that was playful, good with details and totally knife-in-the-heart devastating. I made food, a big pot of pasta, and then after dinner I went for a walk with Sheila and we sat on the curb outside my mom’s apartment block together while she talked on the phone with her sister who was back in Vancouver waiting for the sad delivery of her mother’s ashes. What can I say? said Sheila on the phone. What can I say? We finally went back inside and my mother listened to Sheila talking about Tina for quite a long time and then at midnight Sheila went into her bedroom. I knocked on her door and offered her some more of the chocolates. She took them and I hugged her and said good night, schlope schein , the way her mother used to do and she hugged me and we both cried and I brought her more Kleenex from the other bedroom. I found my mother out on her balcony and suggested she go to sleep. She said no, she needed to write a few things down. She wouldn’t mind being alone for a while.

Is this almost too much? I asked her. Almost, she smiled. I left her alone to write the eulogy.

I went back inside and found my uncle Frank sitting by himself on the couch in the living room in the dark. I hadn’t seen Uncle Frank cry before. He told me Tina was older than he was in years but much younger in her soul.

Is that true? I asked him. You married an older woman?

Well, I had to, he said. Before I could get him to explain what he meant by that he told me that Tina died fast the way she did everything and we both agreed that that’s the way we wanted to go too. Lingering is the worst, said Uncle Frank. Your grandfather, Tina and Lottie’s father, lay in a bed for nine years. Before that he was the most rip-roaring chap I’d ever known. He was his own man. Then he had that stroke. He lay in bed so long that his arm fused onto the side of his torso. The skin grew together, it didn’t know what else to do, and he was stuck that way.