Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Waiting is exhausting. Like living in a language not your own. You translate continually, filtering the present through the hypothetical, if Michel were here … when Mike gets home… . Soul and sinews poised. Prepared for sudden joy, or sorrow. It does no good to wish you had appreciated life more before the misfortune, we are not made that way. We are made to desire; to cherish and to disregard by turns. Some of us have a talent for happiness — this has little to do with circumstance. Few have a talent for waiting.

Wincing at the sound of the phone, the knock at the door, the clank of the mailbox. But there is no news. No relaxation of soul or sinews. There is, instead, the loss of elasticity. The bow pulled back for too long, once released, sags or snaps.

Grief is a fulcrum. The joint in time between the vanishing of hope and the beginning of loss. Missing link. Allows the living to move forward, and the dead finally to return, smile and open their arms to us in memory.

There has yet to come a moment when his family has been able to say, he is dead . Instead, hope has shaded to the next phase, wherein his parents cannot recall when it was they began to say, “When we lost Mike.”

“How did it go at the benefit Monday night?” asks Nina.

“Fine.”

“No problem with the ‘thing’?”

“The what? Oh. No.”

“What are you feeling, Madeleine?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

JACK IS A MAN without a shadow. It died of neglect. Like a puddle on a hot day, it grew smaller and smaller.

He listens to the news; reads and watches it constantly. More than a strategy of masculine retreat, it fends off curdling panic. He regards his wife warily. Like the keeper of one of a set of dual keys, she can trigger his grief. Her grief can end the world. But the news is soothing. Piecemeal and manageable, with a few sweeping arcs reminiscent of the narrative structure of soap opera — the world turns and nothing changes. The occasional twinge pierces the anesthetic — Walter Cronkite declaring that the war over there was unwinnable, And that’s the way it is… . Flick of the remote as Jack switches the channel.

He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how he has changed. How he looks from the car behind him, through the eyes of a driver he has just punished by slowing down. He didn’t know his staff in Ottawa were afraid of him. He didn’t know his son loved him.

The news allows you to forget. Tirelessly reordering the world, which crumbles daily. Reporters are the king’s horses and men who put Humpty together again, every day, several times a day. News imparts the reassuring illusion of time passing, of change. No need to tap into the undercurrent, which is slower and so much stronger and costs us grief and knowledge. News is a time substitute, like coffee whitener.

He knows who killed his son. The Americans. Their arrogance, their false innocence. Their short-sightedness, their love of tyrants, their greed, their lies. As surely as if Richard Nixon had come into his home and murdered the boy. Because before Vietnam, everything was fine. Crinkle .

Now he is drowning slowly, sitting in his chair. His lungs have been filling quietly, like the North Sea rising over the land. Congestive heart failure.

When mines are abandoned, they often become flooded. Caves fill from within, water leaching from the earth that has been gouged and left for dead. This happens to lungs when the pump begins to fail.

The only way for the earth to heal itself is to flood or to cave in, or both. This is a slow process that begins immediately upon abandonment. Drip, drip, slight shift, crumble and line of scree. Millions of small changes underway, brought to bear suddenly one day in a great fall of earth and stone; or quietly, when the water in the cave finally rises to kiss the roof of its mouth.

The spirit who bideth by himself

In the land of mist and snow,

He loved the bird that loved the man

Who shot him with his bow .

MIMI DOES HER BEST not to cry in front of her husband any more. In the months after they received official word that their son was missing in action, she cried. Jack comforted her and predicted a hundred happy outcomes, a hundred bureaucratic errors, a worst-case scenario involving their boy lost in the shuffle, lying wounded but alive in a field hospital. She endured the incoming tide of sorrow, and the slow draining away of hope. Emotional anemia. She kept busy around the edges, which were all anyone could see. At the centre was a bare patch — it could not be called a clearing. Nothing would ever grow there again. Like irradiated soil. Sterile.

She confides in a few good friends. New friends: Doris, Fran, Joanne. She leans, catches her breath, but never collapses on any of them. If no one ever says “poor Mimi” again, she will have done her job.

No one can keep up with her — the Heart Fund, the Cancer Society, the Liberal Party, the Catholic Women’s League, her nursing job. She keeps busy, but Mimi has never had a talent for sidestepping time. She becomes aware of a metallic taste in her mouth — forty years of smoking has never interfered with her ability to season a sauce, this is new. Something has to change. Something does change. No one is able to tell, not her husband or her daughter. Here is her recipe for grief:

Keep busy. But care that the young couple on the corner have planted a new tree. Care that the woman whose husband died last year has a new dog — a mature mutt from the pound — Mimi doesn’t even like dogs, “Ah, mais il est mignon!” bending to pat his bony head. Care that someone had a baby. Cook something, bring it over. Go for a walk every Thursday morning at seven with Joanne, who, what with her long grey hair and Greenpeace pamphlets, reminds Mimi of Karen Froelich, and therefore seems the unlikeliest of friends. When consumed by jealousy of Fran with her grandchildren, by anger at the number of worthless young men who are allowed to survive, sit in your car with the engine off and squeeze the steering wheel. Cry until your throat hurts and the steering wheel is wet and it leaves a notched impression on your brow. Think of the Blessed Virgin, she knows what you are suffering. If you have the presence of mind — in the way that an epileptic might look for a safe place to lie down at the first sense of a seizure coming on — remove your makeup first. Cry at night, careful not to shake the bed. Get up, empty the dishwasher, bake muffins for your daughter in Toronto. Wait until six A.M., then call Yvonne in New Brunswick, where it’s seven. Gossip, judge, tell her not to judge so harshly, laugh. Look after your husband.

Upward tilt of the head for the morning kiss. Co-conspirators:

“When did you get up, Missus?”

“I’ve been up since six.”

“Something sure smells good.”

Look after him. Women live longer than men. Men are delicate, Mimi ought to have taken better care of hers. Both of them.

Put the kettle on. Look out the kitchen window.

Love what remains.