My desire to become a writer was born back in high school when my favourite English teacher hammered home grammar and told me that I had potential if I could learn to spell. I never did learn to spell and I ended up being a veterinarian, so the writer inside me went to sleep. Until now. I wish more than anything that I had taken up writing for the same reasons other empty-nesters start putting pen to paper; middle-aged angst and boredom. Of course, like every other empty-nester, I have an empty bedroom but mine is staying empty forever and theirs will remain empty until the clean laundry runs out.
I have several authors I love, but for different reasons. I have a lot of Hemingway, but I am not sure if I like his writing. I collect and read Hemingway to try to figure out what made him "the Great Hemingway". Much of what he wrote I am just confused by, but I do try to emulate him by keeping my sentences shorter than I used to. My father introduced me to Raymond Chandler, master of the drug-store pulp-fiction. The thing I loved about Chandler was that his scene development was so perfect you could practically smell the mould in the orchid greenhouse as the detective "got the scoop". James Lee Burke, the best-selling author of the "Dave Robichaux" mysteries, has that same talent: his swamps and bayou scenes are hot and steamy. You feel like you are in Louisiana smelling the bass fish spawning. Reading these authors I am reminded of my English teacher's description of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": a novel where the central character is the dark African river which winds through the entire story.
Today, as I mowed the lawn in the crisp early morning air, I realised that I have written 34 posts without one reference to where we live, where Calista came to go to school and where Calista died. I doubt I will do my favourite authors any justice, but it really is unfair to both my readers and this beautiful corner of the world that I have omitted all description of Powell River and Comox.
Calista was born in the deep, cold valleys of the Yukon, but she really grew up a prairie girl in Regina, Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan really is beautiful, but it is a subtle sort of beauty that one has to immerse themselves in to enjoy. To the westerners in BC it is nothing but flat barren farmlands, while a native son sees the rolling ocean of grass, they smell the rich black soil as the wind swirls it off the tilled fields and they love the ever changing sky. Mountain dwellers see the apparently infinite horizon and never seem to look up and see the living sky; the prairie's answer to the mountains of the west. I am not sure Calista ever looked up because once she saw the mountains of her birth her heart was lost to them; regardless of where her parents ended up, she belonged in the west, on the coast, with the sea wind in her hair and the mountains above.
Once Jack Cowin and Calista had finally determined that my girl's destiny indeed was photography, they started to cast about for schools that were worthwhile. Jack wanted Calista in a focused program where her down-to-earth need for functionality would be served. He just could not see her thriving in a formal university program. Jack contacted several of the more prestigious schools in the American Midwest and they all offered to look at her work just on Jack's recommendation. Roni was terrified that Calista would end up in Chicago, far from us and on the wrong side of the border. I was terrified I would have to decline Jack's generosity simply because my bank account could not afford American tuition. Calista had other ideas in mind: she looked west and found North Island College, a small campus in a coastal town of Vancouver Island.
I had hit a glass ceiling with my career. I was too old to purchase the large clinic I was working for; the bank rightfully assessed that I would never be able to pay off the considerable loan within the remainder of my career. I was too well paid to ever be employed elsewhere for more money. My back was in a corner and the only hope was to purchase a smaller clinic with a lesser price and hopefully make it profitable enough to fund my retirement and Calista's education. Since our Calista was heading west, we looked west toward Comox. Comox would fit perfectly; my girl could go to school and I could finish off my career near where I grew up. And I would never have to worry about frostbite or wind-chill factor again.
Comox is a small town about three hours north of Victoria and one hour north of the ferry docks at Nanaimo. The major industry of Comox is the military base there, but there are so many things going for that area that I suspect that it is the next great discovery of the retiring baby-boomer generation. The twinned towns of Courtenay and Comox centre around a river estuary (the Comox river). Courtenay lies inland while Comox starts on the coastal side of the river. Hanging above the towns is the towering mountain chain that cuts down the centre of Vancouver Island. The crown jewel of the Comox valley is the Comox Glacier, visible from every corner of both Comox and Courtenay. The last time I spent with Calista in Comox, back in February, she laughed as she pulled out of her apartment and commented how she could barely believe it was that view was what she woke up to ever clear morning. It must have been spectacular to see as the first rays of the sun bounced off the massive white expanse of the hanging glacier.
In the summer of 2009 Roni, Calista and I travelled west to scout out business prospects in southern BC. Our goal was to find something in close proximity to one of Calista's college prospects, so Comox was on our short list. Sure enough there was a small animal clinic for sale when we enquired and we arranged a walk through. If nothing else, a site-seeing trip to Vancouver Island with a ferry ride over the wide, blue Straights of Georgia would be a nice holiday outing for the family.
Arriving in Comox we scouted the area like a troop of army rangers. We reconnoitred the business prospect, the shopping potential, and the real-estate. The overwhelming beauty of the valley and the twinned towns caught us off-guard, but I think the final straw was when we stopped at a beach park along the estuary and were amused to read a sign warning us to leave baby seals on the beach should we find one alone. Baby seals. Calista was like a ten year old kid begging for a puppy. We had not even looked at the college campus and she had found her home. She was not too concerned if it was "our home", but it was definitely hers.
The clinic was a winner, though it was right at the very edge of our price range. I knew I was going to have to pull every string I knew to swing the financing for the million dollar sale price, but my family was pretty much determined that they had found their home. (Ok; more specifically: Calista was moving to Comox, Roni was following her and I could follow if they let me.). We checked out the college campus and North Island College really is one of a kind. Nestled in a grove of pine trees, the buildings are all a matching group of cedar shake clad "Craftsman" style structures which, in a mixture of soft pastel browns and reds, blend well with the forest surroundings. The campus is tiny, perhaps less than ten buildings loosely connected by covered walk-ways and paved trails. There was a very nice public recreational centre just at the edge of the campus and well developed residential neibourhoods suggested that finding a new house would be no challenge. If all went well, the Flemings would have a new home town within a few short months.
Things did not go well in the least. Negotiations on the sale were botched from the moment go as the agent for the vendor provided us with hopelessly inaccurate documents, the vendor switched his mind as often as he changed underwear, and the bank seemed to waffle hopelessly on whether they would back me at all. After approaching several banks we finally found a Comox branch that would back us, but by this time the vendor had decided I was a bad gamble and was no longer bargaining in good faith. Finally, late one night with tears in her eyes, Roni told me that she was done with this and we should just drop the whole deal and settle back into our lives in Regina. I agreed; the stress was opening cracks in our marriage and without a happy wife, there is no hope for a happy life. I take great satisfaction knowing that the vendor has not sold that clinic at any price to this date.
Roni and I settled back into our routine life, she commuting to a law firm downtown and me returning to my associate job at a nice clinic in South Regina. My professional situation was far from comfortable; my new, young boss was at a complete loss as to what to do with this ageing, greying associate only slightly younger than her own father. I was an expensive asset, earning just barely enough to justify keeping. The writing was on the wall and Roni and I understood that we were working on borrowed time. Calista was still headed west regardless. Finally, an old friend, Joe Colontino, called us with a lead on a small clinic in a tiny village near Comox that was selling for a very affordable sum. Enter Powell River, British Columbia.
Powell River was, in the not too distant past, the home of the largest pulp and paper mill in the world. It has everything that the pulp industry needs: easy ocean access to receive abundant logs to pulp, unlimited fresh water for the mill and to provide hydro-electric power and Vancouver only 80 miles to the south to provide global markets and a ready labour force. The one rub is that Powell River is practically an island; surrounded on three sides by deep ocean passages and walled by the jagged coastal mountain ranges on the fourth.
Anybody looking at the map could be forgiven for thinking that Powell River is "just a hop, skip and jump" from Vancouver. Certainly, the air time of the tiny 18 seat turbo-prop aeroplanes that service our airport is only 20 minutes to Vancouver and on the map Powell River really is "just about there". The problem is that Powell River really is one of those places that "you just can't get there from here", at least not by road. No matter how you travel, the only practical way to drive to Vancouver from Powell River is to take two ferries and cover miles of winding, narrow highway. Vancouver is decidedly not "just a hop, skip and jump" away. But, once you arrive in Powell River you are truly on a little island of paradise.
From Saltery Bay in the south to Lund to the north, there is only 50 kilometres of paved highway. Lund is the northern terminus of the famous number 101 that extends all the way to the tip of South America. Here, near Powell River, the highway threads along the western edge of the Coastal mountains, barely two cars wide and never straight. To the east of the highway is a vast wilderness made of mile high peaks separated by massive fresh water lakes that wind around the base of the mountains. The lake system is a huge chain forming an arc looping inland from a point near Saltery Bay, through a series of connecting valleys and exiting to the north at the headwaters of Powell River. Powell River itself is the shortest terminal river (as in "exiting into the sea") in Canada, being less than one mile long. A determined canoeist can cover the entire circuit in under 7 days, though they better be prepared to undertake some pretty demanding portages to complete the circuit.
If that canoeist does complete the circuit, they can be assured of seeing some of the most spectacular, pristine mountain scenery found anywhere in Canada. The Knucklehead Mountains, site of some world-class rock climbing, tower over the canoe route, and the steep, rocky terrain limits road access to the entire area, so the intrepid canoeist might be the only person on the lake route on any given day. This is just a taste of what the area has to offer.
Lund is the last port at the gateway to Desolation Sound, an inland fjord so extensive that Captain George Vancouver thought it might be the entrance to the fabled North West Passage when he first sailed these waters. Desolation Sound has become a destination for boaters globally due to the easy access to idyllic, isolated anchorages in crystal clear water filled with marine sealife. The world under the sea is another reason to come to this part of the world.
The Powell River area is renowned for its crystal clear waters and it's abundance of both fauna and flora. Giant Pacific Octopuses, sea anemones, urchins, crabs, fish of all species and any number of marine mammals crowd our waters. You rarely look out on the harbour without seeing a seal, sea lions are considered a bit of a pest (a 2000 pound highly territorial pest), Pacific White Sided Dolphins are once again abundant, and Orca whale sightings are relatively common. Unfortunately, the best diving is done in the cold of winter when the waters most clear. The water remains cold year around, but it really is quite unpleasant to dive off that boat when the air temperature hovers just above freezing. You know you are not returning to the surface to warm-up quickly in the summer sun.
The climate here is the one thing that Calista and her mother really took issue with. It's a temperate rain forest. And it does rain a lot. One heck of a lot. Practically all the time in winter. The developers of this area must have had some sense of irony when they named this coastal refuge "The Sunshine Coast". Sure, we are marginally drier than Vancouver, and we get far less snow that Comox, but we still get what can be best described as torrential downpour for the majority of the months between the end of October and the end of June. Heck, even the summer is pretty darn wet here. Of course with all that rain comes both good and bad. The forests here literally define " the deep dark forest" of Brothers Grimm fame; the trees grow quickly and tall, choking off the sun from the floor below and allowing only the native Salal vine and some ferns to survive. When that forest is cleared for housing development what is left behind is a barren soil devoid of all nutrients which barely grows grass much less anything else. Deforestation of the rain forest is a tragedy everywhere, not just in the Brazilian jungles.
My house in Powell River is a new bungalow, sitting separated from my neighbours by empty lots on both sides. My driveway is about the steepest grade allowable and if we do get the odd skiff of snow in the winter, my Mustang basically just becomes an expensive out-of-control sled coming down to the street. Calista laughed the first time she saw the house perched up on the hill; she said she had no idea she was coming to live atop Mount Olympus. If I stand in my front windows and look west, craning my neck just a little bit to see around the northern tip of Texada Island, I can see Little River Docks, the Comox ferry terminal. The day Calista died I spent hours sitting at that window, staring across the wide blue straights of Georgia, willing my girl to just come home. I still look out that window daily, dreaming for a moment that the ferry will bring her home.
This Sunday, rather than just sitting around moping, Roni and I took some excursions to find some of the favourite beaches of Powell River. Getting out of the house seemed like a great idea at the time, but we both quickly became quite morose. We were doing things that we would have preferred to be doing with Calista and each new discovery just marked one more thing that we did not get to do with our girl.
Much of the pain involved in her loss is the slow realisation that things really are not going to get better. This new reality is a permanent situation; it will not pass. Somehow, I think, all of us survive adversity because we understand that tough times never last but tough people do. These tough times are guaranteed to end, but only at the end of my life. That might be a very long time.
Monday, 16 July 2012
Friday, 13 July 2012
Eight Weeks, One Day: Causes of Death
I might post an entry to my blog on a Monday or a Tuesday, and Wednesdays are nice. Fridays are Ok and either day of the weekend is fine. But never on a Thursday. I won't do Thursdays because that is the day the wounds open up and Roni needs my support completely. Posting on a Thursday would feel like walking on Her ashes.
I know my title suggests that I might know something today that I did not know before, but that would be lying. We still have no idea what killed Calista and we probably never will. Idle speculation and suspicions are just the results of a grief stricken fool grasping at any straws he can to find meaning in his barren life. On the other hand, I have had some good suggestions from wonderful people.
I have bandied around the idea that Calista was taken by one of these rare cardiac arrhythmias that we see in young people periodically. Typically the story runs something like this "Young star athlete collapses suddenly while jogging back down the soccer field". Usually the story has a special section explaining where the funeral/ memorial is to be held and where to send the donations or flowers. Once in a rare while there is a happy ending because a good EMT or a great Doctor recognised the symptoms of acute exercise induced cardiac arrhythmia and pulled out the defibrillator. These arrhythmias can occur at any time, but typically occur when the young person is active or under the influence of adrenalin. The most common arrhythmia (or the one I found the most references on) was something called Long QT syndrome.
I am not sure if I had any awareness of "Long QT" syndrome until one of my colleagues at a private veterinary web forum suggested that Calista might have died from this uncommon problem, but I vaguely knew about athletes dying young suddenly. Here is my round-about, highly inaccurate description of the heart cycle and how Long QT might kill your child.
If you can think of the heart as just a big electrical pump that contracts as a wave of electricity moves through the pump sequentially, this will work well for you. Picture a crowd of fans at a Saskatchewan Roughrider football game (I show my bias) and they all decide to cheer their team by doing "the wave". The fans all start by standing up (relaxing the heart muscle) and then the fans at the North end of the stadium sit down quickly first, followed row by row until the wave reaches the South end of the stadium and they are all seated (heart muscle contraction). Then everybody stands up again almost at the same time (heart muscle relaxation). The rate of the wave travelling down the stadium (always in the same direction) depends on how long people remains standing between "waves". When the wave is going slow (slow heart rate) the fans stay standing for longer, when the wave is going very fast, they are basically just jumping up and down. The rate of standing up and sitting down always stays about the same, it's the amount of time the fans stay "relaxed" that determines the rate of the successive "waves" (heart rate).
Now here is some important points (not related to Calista, but interesting none the less). The only time the fans get to breath, eat and drink beer are when they are standing, relaxed. If they are jumping up and down constantly, they go hungry and get out of breath. Doing the wave rapidly for long periods of time just tires out the fans and, of course, beer sales plummet. The situation is bad for everyone all the way around. Now, take this analogy a little farther. Maybe the fans start drinking early and get quite drunk by half-time (middle aged man?) and now the wave is getting pretty sloppy as fans start falling over drunk. This would be somewhat comparable to cardiomyopathy. On the other hand, maybe the game started with a few renegade Winnipeg Blue-Bomber fans mixed in with the hometown crowd; these guys are intent on screwing up the "wave" cheer, but they are just biding their time, waiting for a likely opportunity to strike. Either way, they are planning on destroying the organised wave pattern by hopping around randomly and disrupting the orderly cheer. Maybe their best time to strike is when things are really chaotic and exciting in the stands, like at the one yard line with only one down left. This is comparable to Long QT syndrome: a congenital abnormality you harbour for your whole life, waiting for an opportune time to strike and ruin the organised wave of your heart's contractions.
Doctors record the electrical wave through the heart with an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG depending on whether you insist on traditional German being used). The ECG is broken into the "p" wave, the "QRS" wave, and the "T" wave, which basically translate to "trigger", "contraction" and "relaxation" (not exactly by any means but who wants to go back to school now?). The spaces between these waves are "the intervals". The QT interval is the space between the beginning of the ventricular (bottom of the heart) contraction and the relaxation of the whole heart. Now remember back when I compared this whole thing to a crowd sitting down and standing up: the time it took to do both was always constant no matter how fast the wave was cheering. The innate intervals of the heart cycle are usually constant, its the time the heart remains relaxed that determines the heart rate. If the innate intervals alter or change sporadically, then the heart gets out of proper synchronisation and pumps that aren't synchronised don't work.
Obviously this is a pretty simplistic view of cardiology, but I'm not exactly Einstein, so it's the best you are going to get.
Long QT syndrome is characterised by,,you guessed it...a long QT interval. The syndrome is usually congenital, passed from parent to child genetically, but it is not truly just one disease. There are many variations on the Long QT syndrome, each with it's own inheritance. Almost all the syndromes are associated with sudden death in people under thirty, and many or most of those deaths occur during athletic activity. It seems that excitement with the accompanying natural secretion of adrenalin increases the likelyhood of the prolonged QT interval inducing chaos in the natural synchronisation of the heart and inducing a potentially fatal bout of ventricular tachycardia. The version of "V-Tach" they see is my favourite (because it sounds so exotic) "Torsade de Points", or, in English, "Fence of Points". An ECG that looks like a fence of points is a clinician's nightmare; the patient is about to die without immediate intervention. You might get that intervention on a soccer pitch or at a hockey rink with thousands of spectators, but it's just not happening at a private house in the early morning hours surrounded by a few friends with no medical training.
Diagnosing Long-QT syndrome is not easy in the least. Prolonged QT intervals are not always apparent in a patient with the syndrome and not all patients that demonstrate prolonged QT intervals have the syndrome. Furthermore, while the disease is known to be inheritable, a parent does not always show the DNA markers for any one of the known Long QT abnormalities. Many of the people will have some symptoms of heart disease such as sudden weakness or fainting spells, but just as many people collapse or die suddenly with no warning whatsoever. My research shows that the specialist will typically take all the symptoms and the family history into account, assign a point value to each factor in the work-up and diagnose on the "score" produced. Its basically a statistical crap-shoot with the penalty for a mistake being death. Cardiac Russian Roulette as it were.
So, why would I write about this here today? Well, because it fits quite well and it makes my alternative of "something really bad happened" less likely. My daughter was an athlete and she was noted to have collapsed suddenly for no apparent cause, followed rapidly by death. Certainly she was not active when she collapsed, but that is not a consistent finding with Long QT syndrome (common yes, but not consistent). Many of those affected with the syndrome just die without warning while not doing anything much at all. My daughter also did have a couple of unexplained incidents of fainting when she was growing up. We investigated those fainting spells, but I am not sure the doctor ever actually checked her ECG. Calista was amazingly healthy growing up and she never actually saw a doctor on a regular basis. Most of the time we were seeing the doctor for minor stuff and once for an allergic reaction to laundry detergent. I am not sure that any of the doctors we ever saw would have known how to turn an ECG machine on much less how to diagnose Long QT. There is one more thing though: my own history.
I have always had an unnaturally low heart rate and very low blood pressure. I always assumed those two abnormalities to be a good thing, at least until last December. In early December, about two days after I had some minor surgery, I collapsed suddenly in my bathroom while putting some eye drops in. It was first thing in the morning and all I remember is things suddenly getting real black and then waking up when an ambulance driver rolled me over onto my fat ass. I was covered in a cold sweat and pretty much unresponsive on the floor of my bathroom. The ambulance crew had a heck of a time finding a pulse or managing to find a vein on me and I am pretty sure my systolic blood pressure never got above 80 for three or four hours. At that time my ECG was normal, but nobody has any idea what it looked like when I collapsed and I'm not sure that an emergency room clinician would necessarily recognise Long QT syndrome (or even look for it). To this day it remains a bit of a mystery what happened, but you can bet that everyone is running around trying to solve that mystery now that my Calista, my only child, decided to take a permanent nap 8 weeks ago.
Its kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has been pulled down and eaten by wolves; too little too late. At this point I'm not sure either Roni or I really care if my petty little health problem is diagnosed now that a long life just means a longer sentence in Hell. On the other hand, that brings up another issue altogether.
Perhaps if I had not been a typical man and decided to avoid doctors like the plague they would have discovered a possible familial disease. Maybe if I had not been such a jackass about my own health my daughter would have been screened for Long QT syndrome and diagnosed in time to save her life. Maybe my silly male pride killed my only child. Now there is something to think about for the rest of my life.
Sometimes it really is important to take care of yourself. If not for the obvious, do it for your kids. I keep on reminding myself that I have numerous nieces and nephews, the majority of which are under thirty. I am pretty sure the screening process is relatively easy (but, yes, not very accurate). For everyone needing more information on Long QT screening, check out this website: http://www.simonsfund.org/.
The wee bit of research I did on Long QT syndrome made me pretty sure that it is what took my girl. I will now play "What If" for the rest of my life. Wonderful.
I know my title suggests that I might know something today that I did not know before, but that would be lying. We still have no idea what killed Calista and we probably never will. Idle speculation and suspicions are just the results of a grief stricken fool grasping at any straws he can to find meaning in his barren life. On the other hand, I have had some good suggestions from wonderful people.
I have bandied around the idea that Calista was taken by one of these rare cardiac arrhythmias that we see in young people periodically. Typically the story runs something like this "Young star athlete collapses suddenly while jogging back down the soccer field". Usually the story has a special section explaining where the funeral/ memorial is to be held and where to send the donations or flowers. Once in a rare while there is a happy ending because a good EMT or a great Doctor recognised the symptoms of acute exercise induced cardiac arrhythmia and pulled out the defibrillator. These arrhythmias can occur at any time, but typically occur when the young person is active or under the influence of adrenalin. The most common arrhythmia (or the one I found the most references on) was something called Long QT syndrome.
I am not sure if I had any awareness of "Long QT" syndrome until one of my colleagues at a private veterinary web forum suggested that Calista might have died from this uncommon problem, but I vaguely knew about athletes dying young suddenly. Here is my round-about, highly inaccurate description of the heart cycle and how Long QT might kill your child.
If you can think of the heart as just a big electrical pump that contracts as a wave of electricity moves through the pump sequentially, this will work well for you. Picture a crowd of fans at a Saskatchewan Roughrider football game (I show my bias) and they all decide to cheer their team by doing "the wave". The fans all start by standing up (relaxing the heart muscle) and then the fans at the North end of the stadium sit down quickly first, followed row by row until the wave reaches the South end of the stadium and they are all seated (heart muscle contraction). Then everybody stands up again almost at the same time (heart muscle relaxation). The rate of the wave travelling down the stadium (always in the same direction) depends on how long people remains standing between "waves". When the wave is going slow (slow heart rate) the fans stay standing for longer, when the wave is going very fast, they are basically just jumping up and down. The rate of standing up and sitting down always stays about the same, it's the amount of time the fans stay "relaxed" that determines the rate of the successive "waves" (heart rate).
Now here is some important points (not related to Calista, but interesting none the less). The only time the fans get to breath, eat and drink beer are when they are standing, relaxed. If they are jumping up and down constantly, they go hungry and get out of breath. Doing the wave rapidly for long periods of time just tires out the fans and, of course, beer sales plummet. The situation is bad for everyone all the way around. Now, take this analogy a little farther. Maybe the fans start drinking early and get quite drunk by half-time (middle aged man?) and now the wave is getting pretty sloppy as fans start falling over drunk. This would be somewhat comparable to cardiomyopathy. On the other hand, maybe the game started with a few renegade Winnipeg Blue-Bomber fans mixed in with the hometown crowd; these guys are intent on screwing up the "wave" cheer, but they are just biding their time, waiting for a likely opportunity to strike. Either way, they are planning on destroying the organised wave pattern by hopping around randomly and disrupting the orderly cheer. Maybe their best time to strike is when things are really chaotic and exciting in the stands, like at the one yard line with only one down left. This is comparable to Long QT syndrome: a congenital abnormality you harbour for your whole life, waiting for an opportune time to strike and ruin the organised wave of your heart's contractions.
Doctors record the electrical wave through the heart with an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG depending on whether you insist on traditional German being used). The ECG is broken into the "p" wave, the "QRS" wave, and the "T" wave, which basically translate to "trigger", "contraction" and "relaxation" (not exactly by any means but who wants to go back to school now?). The spaces between these waves are "the intervals". The QT interval is the space between the beginning of the ventricular (bottom of the heart) contraction and the relaxation of the whole heart. Now remember back when I compared this whole thing to a crowd sitting down and standing up: the time it took to do both was always constant no matter how fast the wave was cheering. The innate intervals of the heart cycle are usually constant, its the time the heart remains relaxed that determines the heart rate. If the innate intervals alter or change sporadically, then the heart gets out of proper synchronisation and pumps that aren't synchronised don't work.
Obviously this is a pretty simplistic view of cardiology, but I'm not exactly Einstein, so it's the best you are going to get.
Long QT syndrome is characterised by,,you guessed it...a long QT interval. The syndrome is usually congenital, passed from parent to child genetically, but it is not truly just one disease. There are many variations on the Long QT syndrome, each with it's own inheritance. Almost all the syndromes are associated with sudden death in people under thirty, and many or most of those deaths occur during athletic activity. It seems that excitement with the accompanying natural secretion of adrenalin increases the likelyhood of the prolonged QT interval inducing chaos in the natural synchronisation of the heart and inducing a potentially fatal bout of ventricular tachycardia. The version of "V-Tach" they see is my favourite (because it sounds so exotic) "Torsade de Points", or, in English, "Fence of Points". An ECG that looks like a fence of points is a clinician's nightmare; the patient is about to die without immediate intervention. You might get that intervention on a soccer pitch or at a hockey rink with thousands of spectators, but it's just not happening at a private house in the early morning hours surrounded by a few friends with no medical training.
Diagnosing Long-QT syndrome is not easy in the least. Prolonged QT intervals are not always apparent in a patient with the syndrome and not all patients that demonstrate prolonged QT intervals have the syndrome. Furthermore, while the disease is known to be inheritable, a parent does not always show the DNA markers for any one of the known Long QT abnormalities. Many of the people will have some symptoms of heart disease such as sudden weakness or fainting spells, but just as many people collapse or die suddenly with no warning whatsoever. My research shows that the specialist will typically take all the symptoms and the family history into account, assign a point value to each factor in the work-up and diagnose on the "score" produced. Its basically a statistical crap-shoot with the penalty for a mistake being death. Cardiac Russian Roulette as it were.
So, why would I write about this here today? Well, because it fits quite well and it makes my alternative of "something really bad happened" less likely. My daughter was an athlete and she was noted to have collapsed suddenly for no apparent cause, followed rapidly by death. Certainly she was not active when she collapsed, but that is not a consistent finding with Long QT syndrome (common yes, but not consistent). Many of those affected with the syndrome just die without warning while not doing anything much at all. My daughter also did have a couple of unexplained incidents of fainting when she was growing up. We investigated those fainting spells, but I am not sure the doctor ever actually checked her ECG. Calista was amazingly healthy growing up and she never actually saw a doctor on a regular basis. Most of the time we were seeing the doctor for minor stuff and once for an allergic reaction to laundry detergent. I am not sure that any of the doctors we ever saw would have known how to turn an ECG machine on much less how to diagnose Long QT. There is one more thing though: my own history.
I have always had an unnaturally low heart rate and very low blood pressure. I always assumed those two abnormalities to be a good thing, at least until last December. In early December, about two days after I had some minor surgery, I collapsed suddenly in my bathroom while putting some eye drops in. It was first thing in the morning and all I remember is things suddenly getting real black and then waking up when an ambulance driver rolled me over onto my fat ass. I was covered in a cold sweat and pretty much unresponsive on the floor of my bathroom. The ambulance crew had a heck of a time finding a pulse or managing to find a vein on me and I am pretty sure my systolic blood pressure never got above 80 for three or four hours. At that time my ECG was normal, but nobody has any idea what it looked like when I collapsed and I'm not sure that an emergency room clinician would necessarily recognise Long QT syndrome (or even look for it). To this day it remains a bit of a mystery what happened, but you can bet that everyone is running around trying to solve that mystery now that my Calista, my only child, decided to take a permanent nap 8 weeks ago.
Its kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has been pulled down and eaten by wolves; too little too late. At this point I'm not sure either Roni or I really care if my petty little health problem is diagnosed now that a long life just means a longer sentence in Hell. On the other hand, that brings up another issue altogether.
Perhaps if I had not been a typical man and decided to avoid doctors like the plague they would have discovered a possible familial disease. Maybe if I had not been such a jackass about my own health my daughter would have been screened for Long QT syndrome and diagnosed in time to save her life. Maybe my silly male pride killed my only child. Now there is something to think about for the rest of my life.
Sometimes it really is important to take care of yourself. If not for the obvious, do it for your kids. I keep on reminding myself that I have numerous nieces and nephews, the majority of which are under thirty. I am pretty sure the screening process is relatively easy (but, yes, not very accurate). For everyone needing more information on Long QT screening, check out this website: http://www.simonsfund.org/.
The wee bit of research I did on Long QT syndrome made me pretty sure that it is what took my girl. I will now play "What If" for the rest of my life. Wonderful.
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Seven Weeks, Six Days: Letter to Calista
My second session with the grief counsellor was this week. I probably bored the heck out of the poor woman; once my mouth started moving, I am not sure I really stopped talking for over ninety minutes. I am not even sure what I said; I just blundered around, making odd, disjointed, unrelated comments. One thing I did realise though; this is going to be a long process that I am not sure I am prepared to make. On the other hand, I can see that Roni gets a lot out of those sessions, so I will support her and continue with my own private appointments. I still think that it might be just a scam to keep you from offing yourself long enough to find meaning in life again. So how does a guy that loved being "Daddy"( especially when there was snazzy shoes to buy) find his way after his family has been downsized suddenly?
Obviously writing this blog has become a real outlet for my grief. My readers may have noticed that the period between blog posts is becoming progressively longer. I would love to say that it represents a healing process, but I suggest that it is more of a stagnation. My grief is not getting lighter, it is entrenching, becoming more intractable. Over the last seven weeks I have really gotten to know my Calista better than ever and her loss has become more profound to me; she was everything I had hoped for and so much more. That kind of loss just cannot be pushed aside; I will not be finished with all this until the world knows their collective loss. That is how a "Downsized Daddy" finds his way.
Calista's final portfolio arrived home yesterday. Roni and I leafed through it and compared the marks she earned to the photos we selected for the array. In a class where the highest mark was in the mid-seventies, we managed a very respectable 70.5 points. That's right: I said "we". The portfolio was a complete figment of the paired imaginations of Roni and I. We had a vague idea of Calista's major interest (12 required submissions) and not a clue about her minor interest (8 required submissions). We guessed with a little help from her friends and our own hearts. The results were pretty impressive since we managed to miss submitting one of her photos for her major (it was on her flash drive, but somehow it never was printed) and we selected one photo for her minor that clearly had no business being there. We got zero points on those two mistakes, costing Calista possibly a full ten points. Ten points would have put her clearly at the head of her class. Where she belonged. Sorry honey, we did the best we could but it in no way reflected your true talent.
Roni and I shipped that portfolio straight to the man who started the whole ball rolling: Jack Cowin. I hope it will be a surprise, but I am told he reads this blog, so it might be that I just unwrapped his present for him. I cried as I wrote the attached letter and as I packed up the portfolio. It's not from any attachment to the assignment since we have most of those photos already on our wall. The tears come from the fact that this is the last submission of my daughter to the man that "Took her from crayons to perfume" (plagiarised from "To Sir With Love"). It all seems too final for me: the last submission. Damn, there the wave catches me again; it's being happening more often this last little while.
Much of the support we have been receiving this last little while has been from fellow bereaved and some of those people I call "collateral damage". I am still firm in my belief that only people that have lost someone really close to them or that have been caught in the direct fall-out of this sort of tragedy can relate to what Roni and I are going through. We members of the Club of the Damned have our own basic language that allows us to discuss our loss without inciting the pained look of discomfort that seems to plague the rest of the world. We can discuss our visceral reactions to certain situations without worrying that the listener will think we are crazy: our inability to drive along certain roads or pass the hospital without shedding tears or having to catch our breath. The Club of the Damned understands immediately while the rest of the world nod politely and look for the exit sign.
Don't misunderstand me; I am not upset by the lack of understanding from those who have not been in my shoes. I celebrate it. Thank whatever God you want that most people do not know what it is like to lose a child. I would never wish this on my worst enemy and I am really very glad that the vast majority of my readers and the rest of society has forgotten what its like to have a 50% infant mortality. We all need to thank modern medicine, nutrition and sanitation for this blessing; less than two hundred years ago most parents could expect to bury half their children before maturity. I have said before and I need to repeat it here: just trying to say something meaningful is enough. The fact that a person cared enough to offer condolences and cared enough to recognise the insufficiency of those condolences is absolutely enough. It is all you can offer and its all good.
One of the more peculiar reactions I have had to Calista's death is my obsession with taking up what can only be called "crusades", especially when it comes to the young women that were my daughters close friends and the young women that Roni and I were already friends with. I tend to keep track of Calista's friends and have made it very clear that I will always be there to support them if they need it. Julia, one of the 20-something volunteers at the veterinary clinic has become a close friend of my wife and her daily trials and tribulations have somehow become my cross to bear. If her employer is giving her a hard time about hours and pay (something that seems to very common in regards with young women; has society always treated women with such lack of respect?) then I have to actually stop myself from walking on down and excavating her manager an new rectal orifice. I guess, after twenty years of being "Daddy", when your anchor line is cut loose suddenly, you start looking around for new anchors. On the other hand, I really need to remind myself that those young women have their own fathers and, really, my behaviour could be interpreted as a bit creepy if a person did not know the context.
I also need to try to come back to Earth with regards to both the memorial scholarship and the photography contest. I keep on having flight of fancy that the scholarship fund will just take-off and become a million-dollar super-scholarship, insuring the survival of Calista's beloved photography program at NIC and permanently memorialising her name. Certainly something like that could happen if I win a lottery, but to win a lottery I would have to remember to buy tickets, something I never do. Until I win though, I have to keep on hoping for a miracle like a book deal from a publisher or offer on the movie rights for my story. Both of these have about the same likelihood of occurring as my lottery win. In truth, I probably should just keep on puttering away at the scholarship, depositing whatever amount I can find from my clinic and my family, hoping to make it self-sufficient within my lifespan On the other hand, since the NIC Foundation is the sole beneficiary of my will, it will be instantaneously wealthy once I depart. I guess I probably shouldn't tell the college administration that little fact; they may just help me depart a little quicker.
As far as the photography contest goes, it is proving to be a bit of a tough nut to crack. I believe my idea is a pretty good one: have a contest based on the production of professionally valuable photographs rather than "art" photographs. By putting the emphasis on photography as a commodity we are honouring the program my Calista loved and specifically her personal area of interest. She just liked doing pretty photos that could be sold for advertising dollars. The construction of the contest in this way would mean that the contestants could apply any professional technique available to them to produce a marketable image, including computer manipulation. The only strict rule would be that the image must be an original work created independently by the contestant. Judging from the complete lack of response thus far, I would have to say that none of the people I have contacted thought much of my idea; either it is not original or too progressive. One would think this sort of frustration would discourage me, but I am enjoying the challenge. Anything that keeps me busy also keeps me from thinking too much and getting weepy.
Keeping busy seems to be the key to avoiding complete misery and perhaps finding my way out of the undertow and breaking waves of grief. If I can find some "great work" to accomplish, perhaps I will, in some small way, fulfil Calista's potential. My support of her friends and young Julia, her memorial scholarship and the photography contest I hope are all some way to "pay the debt forward" for the next generation. Unfortunately, to get here, I paid far too high a price; I think the world owes me one Calista in mint condition. I would have done it for free if I had known that was my destiny.
One of my supporters gave me an excellent idea the other day: I should write a letter to Calista as a way to reconnect. I think that is a great idea, but I would have to say that this entire blog is one long letter to my daughter, trying in some way to show how much she meant to her mother and I and really, how much we miss her. Hell, we even miss her dirty laundry pile left unceremoniously next to the washer in the basement. Eventually I will be able to bring myself to actually write that "letter to my daughter", but right now it still would hurt too much. All I would be able to write would be "It's time to come home honey. You are welcome home anytime". That is just about the last thing I said to her anyway.
She really needs to come home soon; she has to be running out of clean clothes by now.
Obviously writing this blog has become a real outlet for my grief. My readers may have noticed that the period between blog posts is becoming progressively longer. I would love to say that it represents a healing process, but I suggest that it is more of a stagnation. My grief is not getting lighter, it is entrenching, becoming more intractable. Over the last seven weeks I have really gotten to know my Calista better than ever and her loss has become more profound to me; she was everything I had hoped for and so much more. That kind of loss just cannot be pushed aside; I will not be finished with all this until the world knows their collective loss. That is how a "Downsized Daddy" finds his way.
Calista's final portfolio arrived home yesterday. Roni and I leafed through it and compared the marks she earned to the photos we selected for the array. In a class where the highest mark was in the mid-seventies, we managed a very respectable 70.5 points. That's right: I said "we". The portfolio was a complete figment of the paired imaginations of Roni and I. We had a vague idea of Calista's major interest (12 required submissions) and not a clue about her minor interest (8 required submissions). We guessed with a little help from her friends and our own hearts. The results were pretty impressive since we managed to miss submitting one of her photos for her major (it was on her flash drive, but somehow it never was printed) and we selected one photo for her minor that clearly had no business being there. We got zero points on those two mistakes, costing Calista possibly a full ten points. Ten points would have put her clearly at the head of her class. Where she belonged. Sorry honey, we did the best we could but it in no way reflected your true talent.
Roni and I shipped that portfolio straight to the man who started the whole ball rolling: Jack Cowin. I hope it will be a surprise, but I am told he reads this blog, so it might be that I just unwrapped his present for him. I cried as I wrote the attached letter and as I packed up the portfolio. It's not from any attachment to the assignment since we have most of those photos already on our wall. The tears come from the fact that this is the last submission of my daughter to the man that "Took her from crayons to perfume" (plagiarised from "To Sir With Love"). It all seems too final for me: the last submission. Damn, there the wave catches me again; it's being happening more often this last little while.
Much of the support we have been receiving this last little while has been from fellow bereaved and some of those people I call "collateral damage". I am still firm in my belief that only people that have lost someone really close to them or that have been caught in the direct fall-out of this sort of tragedy can relate to what Roni and I are going through. We members of the Club of the Damned have our own basic language that allows us to discuss our loss without inciting the pained look of discomfort that seems to plague the rest of the world. We can discuss our visceral reactions to certain situations without worrying that the listener will think we are crazy: our inability to drive along certain roads or pass the hospital without shedding tears or having to catch our breath. The Club of the Damned understands immediately while the rest of the world nod politely and look for the exit sign.
Don't misunderstand me; I am not upset by the lack of understanding from those who have not been in my shoes. I celebrate it. Thank whatever God you want that most people do not know what it is like to lose a child. I would never wish this on my worst enemy and I am really very glad that the vast majority of my readers and the rest of society has forgotten what its like to have a 50% infant mortality. We all need to thank modern medicine, nutrition and sanitation for this blessing; less than two hundred years ago most parents could expect to bury half their children before maturity. I have said before and I need to repeat it here: just trying to say something meaningful is enough. The fact that a person cared enough to offer condolences and cared enough to recognise the insufficiency of those condolences is absolutely enough. It is all you can offer and its all good.
One of the more peculiar reactions I have had to Calista's death is my obsession with taking up what can only be called "crusades", especially when it comes to the young women that were my daughters close friends and the young women that Roni and I were already friends with. I tend to keep track of Calista's friends and have made it very clear that I will always be there to support them if they need it. Julia, one of the 20-something volunteers at the veterinary clinic has become a close friend of my wife and her daily trials and tribulations have somehow become my cross to bear. If her employer is giving her a hard time about hours and pay (something that seems to very common in regards with young women; has society always treated women with such lack of respect?) then I have to actually stop myself from walking on down and excavating her manager an new rectal orifice. I guess, after twenty years of being "Daddy", when your anchor line is cut loose suddenly, you start looking around for new anchors. On the other hand, I really need to remind myself that those young women have their own fathers and, really, my behaviour could be interpreted as a bit creepy if a person did not know the context.
I also need to try to come back to Earth with regards to both the memorial scholarship and the photography contest. I keep on having flight of fancy that the scholarship fund will just take-off and become a million-dollar super-scholarship, insuring the survival of Calista's beloved photography program at NIC and permanently memorialising her name. Certainly something like that could happen if I win a lottery, but to win a lottery I would have to remember to buy tickets, something I never do. Until I win though, I have to keep on hoping for a miracle like a book deal from a publisher or offer on the movie rights for my story. Both of these have about the same likelihood of occurring as my lottery win. In truth, I probably should just keep on puttering away at the scholarship, depositing whatever amount I can find from my clinic and my family, hoping to make it self-sufficient within my lifespan On the other hand, since the NIC Foundation is the sole beneficiary of my will, it will be instantaneously wealthy once I depart. I guess I probably shouldn't tell the college administration that little fact; they may just help me depart a little quicker.
As far as the photography contest goes, it is proving to be a bit of a tough nut to crack. I believe my idea is a pretty good one: have a contest based on the production of professionally valuable photographs rather than "art" photographs. By putting the emphasis on photography as a commodity we are honouring the program my Calista loved and specifically her personal area of interest. She just liked doing pretty photos that could be sold for advertising dollars. The construction of the contest in this way would mean that the contestants could apply any professional technique available to them to produce a marketable image, including computer manipulation. The only strict rule would be that the image must be an original work created independently by the contestant. Judging from the complete lack of response thus far, I would have to say that none of the people I have contacted thought much of my idea; either it is not original or too progressive. One would think this sort of frustration would discourage me, but I am enjoying the challenge. Anything that keeps me busy also keeps me from thinking too much and getting weepy.
Keeping busy seems to be the key to avoiding complete misery and perhaps finding my way out of the undertow and breaking waves of grief. If I can find some "great work" to accomplish, perhaps I will, in some small way, fulfil Calista's potential. My support of her friends and young Julia, her memorial scholarship and the photography contest I hope are all some way to "pay the debt forward" for the next generation. Unfortunately, to get here, I paid far too high a price; I think the world owes me one Calista in mint condition. I would have done it for free if I had known that was my destiny.
One of my supporters gave me an excellent idea the other day: I should write a letter to Calista as a way to reconnect. I think that is a great idea, but I would have to say that this entire blog is one long letter to my daughter, trying in some way to show how much she meant to her mother and I and really, how much we miss her. Hell, we even miss her dirty laundry pile left unceremoniously next to the washer in the basement. Eventually I will be able to bring myself to actually write that "letter to my daughter", but right now it still would hurt too much. All I would be able to write would be "It's time to come home honey. You are welcome home anytime". That is just about the last thing I said to her anyway.
She really needs to come home soon; she has to be running out of clean clothes by now.
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Seven Weeks,Two Days: Land Mines and Cheap Sun Glasses.
We spend so much of our time denigrating our fellow humans and sometimes with good cause, but often with little other reason than it is the popular thing to do. I am here to tell you today that in general humans are much better than we all think; the measure of anyone is not how they perform in the best of times, its how they stand-up in the worst of times. Practically everyone, even complete strangers from the other side of the planet, has been absolutely wonderful and supportive over these last horrible 7 weeks. Thank-you: even when words fail, the very fact people tried speaks loud and clear.
When a person dies suddenly, there always is little secrets and treasures that turn up sporadically for weeks and months after their death. My own father had bank accounts peppered all over the city in some of the most unlikely financial institutions; my mother found secret cash accounts for three years after he finally gave into the Parkinson's Disease. My daughter, while less than a quarter of her grandfather's age when she died, still has had a few surprises for her mother and I. Little land mines ready to just explode when we least expect them.
I have commented on the appearance that my daughter was subconsciously preparing for some momentous change in her own life. Projects organised weeks in advance, repeated omens that "time was of the essence" and catch phrases that might be interpreted as prescient to those left behind. That general trend came back this last week at least twice. I am still left wondering about my girl and what she sensed might be coming.
My wife finally settled most of Calista's financial matters this week. She had two accounts in two banks, one which she seemed to use as a daily operating account while the other appeared to be a savings account. I have no idea what was in her operating account; we have not received the details yet from the bank ( banks never seem to be too willing to give your money back once they have it). On the other hand, my little girl had over $9000 dollars sitting in her savings account. I was floored. Where the heck did that come from Roni and I wondered? The last time she had been home she had been asking for another draw on her trust account because she was getting a bit shy on the operating finances. What the heck is up with this we thought?
I had my banker look into her finances and he could account for every penny. It seems Calista had been living on her own savings for the most part and leaving the "trust" money alone in her savings account. I am not sure if she had a plan for that money (I know she had her eye on the newest version of the Canon D1s, a ten thousand dollar camera body; I am not sure if she had taken into account the fact she was going to have to get all new lenses as well) or if she intended to just return the money to the family trust unused. I know she was a little defencive about the fact she was a proverbial "Trust Fund Kid"; all her friends were either living at home still or struggling to just get by while she lived pretty well with very few financial worries. There seemed to be a rebellious insistence on being fully independent lately, so I think she might have just being trying to prove she could make it without dipping into the dreaded trust fund. Either way, it is a bit ironic that the largest single contributor to her memorial scholarship will be Calista herself this year.
Financial responsibility coming from a kid who could never pass up on purchasing a pretty pair of shoes and who owned an amazing number of pairs of sneakers. Especially pink and purple sneakers.
Late Wednesday night I was playing with her treasured iPhone, just cruising through some of the files I had already looked at. Those iPhones are one amazing piece of technology. Really. I finally found her Facebook page; it was filled with outdated personal messages (they all stopped right around May 17th, imagine that!) that I skipped over and some inane advertising from various shopping and entertainment sites. My daughter was a Facebook follower of all sorts of celebrities, the only one I actually knew was Ellen Degeneres. Finally, I came across the "photos" setting where most of us have maybe two or three poorly composed, exposed and focused phone-camera candid shots. She had over 200 photos stored in the memory of that phone, most of them pictures of her taken and shared by friends. Think about that for just a moment...
My daughter had left behind a treasure of candid photos of herself taken by her good friends. These are not posed portraits (which are very nice to have, but hardly show the inner soul of anyone), these are pictures of a young woman goofing around with friends, having fun and generally enjoying her life. These are glimpses into the real Calista, the Calista her friends knew and loved rather than the mature, serious Calista that Roni and I always saw at home or at the clinic. While I will always love those portraits of Calista that Jesse gave us, these candid photos are pure gold and they will never fail to make us smile in the years to come.
Calista had also archived a bunch of photos taken over the years; some of the shots were taken by Roni and I, some of them by friends and some of them are school shots. There were many from her high school graduation: she was wearing purple high top sneakers with the gold and red cap n' gown. That was certainly a fashion statement. There were quite a few from her after-grad celebration; I guess off the shoulder dresses were very much in vogue that year. In fact, I think off the shoulder dresses are popular every year, despite the fact very few women of any age can pull that type of dress off successfully. Gravity can pull them off, but not most women. The women reading this will understand as they remember how often they had to adjust their last off-the-shoulder creation. There was an entire series of photos dedicated to her final high-school drama-club play "I Never Saw Another Butterfly"; an excellent production of a dreadful story of the Jewish Holocaust. I loved the effort, hated the play, but my girl loved acting, so I attended (and was quite upset to find that she only had one short line in the entire two hour play). Then there was any number of shots taken while she worked on the Student Rep Council (SRC). Calista actually ran for student body president one year; I loved her original campaign advertising DVD, but I was very glad she lost the election. Diplomacy was never her strong point and I think she would have made a lot of people very angry as a president. And then there were all the pictures of her European trip in grade 12.
Way back in grade 9, Calista came to me all excited about a planned school trip to New York City; for just short of $2000 she could spend 5 days in NY,NY; she would see a Broadway play, visit all the big art galleries (a huge deal for her and I) and get to shop till she dropped. I was somewhat less than thrilled; two thousand dollars was a pretty large amount to put aside in just a few months and the truth be told, neither Roni nor I was all that happy about our little girl going to the Big Apple for any reason. At the time, rather than just say no (something I really never learnt to say to my little girl), I deferred and told her that she could go on the next trip that came up. I guess I did not realise that the school did trips every year, I kind of thought I was deferring the trip idea for a lifetime rather than a season.
Eighteen months later, in the tail end of Grade 10 Calista sat both her mom and I down at the kitchen table for a "family meeting". This was a first for Calista; usually she just asked and received whenever she wanted something. It did not bode well that the conversation started with "Dad; do you remember when you promised you would make the New York trip up to me back in Grade Nine ?". I tried to play dumb but, uncharacteristically, Roni failed to back me up. Roni did remind me that I had promised Calista that she could go on the next school trip that came up. Then the bomb dropped: this trip was a ten day excursion to Italy and Greece. Oh crap.
I was pretty unhappy about the turn of events, but I must give it to Calista, she did her financial homework. The trip was not actually scheduled for another eighteen months, to fall over the Easter break of her Grade 12 year and EF Tours had an entire program where they automatically charged a monthly fee to my Mastercard, so the full amount would be paid in full long before she ever left the ground. How wonderful! I get to send my child thousands of miles away with strangers and go even farther into debt with my good friends over at Mastercard. I have a suspicion that Roni and Calista had discussed the project in detail before I got home from work and that the decision was never really in my hands at all. So of course my girl got to go to Europe in Grade 12 and I am pretty sure she never did a lick of fund raising to help me pay for it; everything was as it should be in the world for Princess Calista.
The trip itself was really quite something and I wholeheartedly recommend the EF Tours program to anyone. They do a pretty good job really and it is quite affordable if you have enough leeway to pay in instalments. On this trip the kids fly through the night to land in Rome in the early morning. From that moment onwards their days are pretty much planned to the second. Three and one half days in Rome, one day in Pompeii, and then an overnight ferry ride over to Southern Greece. The students then spend four days touring Southern Greece and fly home from Athens. We heard from our darling daughter twice; once when she landed and once on the way home (from some airport in Germany I think; I am pretty sure she just wanted to make sure we were at the airport to meet her and that the cat had missed her).
Calista was in fine form for the whole trip. The road warrior of her youth was still hidden down inside the princess of her teen years and jet lag was something other people suffered from. She was terribly disappointed with her class mates though; they were supposed to enjoy tour excursions starting from the moment they disembarked the air plane, but most of the kids were so tired and sick that they had to forgo all day trips that afternoon. They settled on coffee and scones in the Piazza del Popolo. Now how cool is that? Really? I would have done anything to sit beside my girl and watch the Romans stream by, surrounded by Renaissance buildings and fountains built over the remains of an ancient coliseum.
When Calista was off to Rome, I asked her for photos of just a few things: The Pantheon, St. Peter's Square, anything inside St. Peter's Cathedral, and possibly the Sistine Chapel. She got great pictures of the Pantheon (predictably the outstanding domed roof), a few pictures of St. Peter's Square and one of two God-awful pictures of the inside of the Cathedral. We misjudged one thing though: it was Easter and there was hundreds of thousands of people in Rome for the high holy days. Furthermore, the Sistine Chapel was off limits for the Easter masses. The other thing I forgot was that any tours through St. Peter's Cathedral are going to be done at a constant marching pace so the tens of thousands of pilgrims that travel to Rome every year can see the church. Has anyone out there ever tried to take a picture in low light conditions while keeping up the constant pace of a tour-guide? I have a blurry photo of Michelangelo's Pieta behind bullet proof glass and that is as good as she could get.
One classic Calista story came out of this. When the school originally arrived within the Vatican compound, the tour had not actually planned for the students to visit the Cathedral. The papal Easter speech was scheduled and the tour thought that there would be no time for a walk through of the church. As it ended up, the Pope was short and to the point (Calista was pretty sure it was the Pope, but from 450 yards, the little guy in the white hat could have been a trained chimpanzee as far as she knew) and they actually found themselves with plenty of time to visit the Cathedral. The problem now was that my little girl had worn shorts on the excursion and there was no way any woman was entering the Pope's church with bare knees. Not to be denied, Calista tracked down a street vendor who sold large scarfs that could be made into skirts that would just cover her knees. Success!! My girl still owned the holy scarf when we cleaned out her apartment; that and a whole load of much nicer scarfs that she wore around her neck practically every day. How very continental.
Calista amassed quite a collection of cheap sun-glasses on her European vacation, each pair more gaudy and tasteless than the last. In each photo we have of that trip she seems to sport a different pair; some green, some orange, one pair of huge aviators which seemed to be a favourite, and a couple of pairs that only a teen-ager would wear. One of the classic photos that we had to laugh about was a group photo of some of her close friends in a circle, each one sporting another pair of Calista's collection. When we retrieved her car from the house that she died at I had to collect two pairs of cheap sun glasses off the seat before I could even sit down. Those pairs are still kicking around her little Smart Car. We must have close to a dozen pairs between her car, her bed room and the basket hidden in our front closet. They were just a variation on her costume fetish.
The best pictures of her trip had to be the "kids goofing around" shots. There were a series of pictures with her and two or three of her friends doing "Vogue" poses while standing on top of various Greek monuments. I am sure the Greeks were very pleased to have our good Canadian kids climbing up their 3000 year old marble antiquities just so they could "strike a pose". I also am sure that my girl Calista was behind the whole escapade since she seemed to be very good at posing for the camera (and that is exactly what her portrait photography instructor told me too). Right now, there is no greater treasure to me than these photos: they show my kid at her very best; having spontaneous fun with her friends. That is something parents rarely ever see.
I expect to run across many "land-mines" as we sift through the flotsam and jetsam of her young life cut short. Most, I hope, will bring a smile to our face, albeit with a generous helping of tears at the waste. The windfall of memories that came with the finding of those photos Wednesday night was a two edged sword though. Both Roni and I laughed and cried at the same time, but after the lights were turned off and the quiet of the house was ascendant, the wave took Roni and dragged her under deeper than it had in weeks. She cried as hard as she did that very first terrible day, perhaps even harder. The sobs wracked her body and I was sure she was going to either pass out from hyperventilation or vomit from the abdominal heaving. The only coherent thing she could say was "Why?". The sooner the coroner can come to some conclusion the better.
When a person dies suddenly, there always is little secrets and treasures that turn up sporadically for weeks and months after their death. My own father had bank accounts peppered all over the city in some of the most unlikely financial institutions; my mother found secret cash accounts for three years after he finally gave into the Parkinson's Disease. My daughter, while less than a quarter of her grandfather's age when she died, still has had a few surprises for her mother and I. Little land mines ready to just explode when we least expect them.
I have commented on the appearance that my daughter was subconsciously preparing for some momentous change in her own life. Projects organised weeks in advance, repeated omens that "time was of the essence" and catch phrases that might be interpreted as prescient to those left behind. That general trend came back this last week at least twice. I am still left wondering about my girl and what she sensed might be coming.
My wife finally settled most of Calista's financial matters this week. She had two accounts in two banks, one which she seemed to use as a daily operating account while the other appeared to be a savings account. I have no idea what was in her operating account; we have not received the details yet from the bank ( banks never seem to be too willing to give your money back once they have it). On the other hand, my little girl had over $9000 dollars sitting in her savings account. I was floored. Where the heck did that come from Roni and I wondered? The last time she had been home she had been asking for another draw on her trust account because she was getting a bit shy on the operating finances. What the heck is up with this we thought?
I had my banker look into her finances and he could account for every penny. It seems Calista had been living on her own savings for the most part and leaving the "trust" money alone in her savings account. I am not sure if she had a plan for that money (I know she had her eye on the newest version of the Canon D1s, a ten thousand dollar camera body; I am not sure if she had taken into account the fact she was going to have to get all new lenses as well) or if she intended to just return the money to the family trust unused. I know she was a little defencive about the fact she was a proverbial "Trust Fund Kid"; all her friends were either living at home still or struggling to just get by while she lived pretty well with very few financial worries. There seemed to be a rebellious insistence on being fully independent lately, so I think she might have just being trying to prove she could make it without dipping into the dreaded trust fund. Either way, it is a bit ironic that the largest single contributor to her memorial scholarship will be Calista herself this year.
Financial responsibility coming from a kid who could never pass up on purchasing a pretty pair of shoes and who owned an amazing number of pairs of sneakers. Especially pink and purple sneakers.
Late Wednesday night I was playing with her treasured iPhone, just cruising through some of the files I had already looked at. Those iPhones are one amazing piece of technology. Really. I finally found her Facebook page; it was filled with outdated personal messages (they all stopped right around May 17th, imagine that!) that I skipped over and some inane advertising from various shopping and entertainment sites. My daughter was a Facebook follower of all sorts of celebrities, the only one I actually knew was Ellen Degeneres. Finally, I came across the "photos" setting where most of us have maybe two or three poorly composed, exposed and focused phone-camera candid shots. She had over 200 photos stored in the memory of that phone, most of them pictures of her taken and shared by friends. Think about that for just a moment...
My daughter had left behind a treasure of candid photos of herself taken by her good friends. These are not posed portraits (which are very nice to have, but hardly show the inner soul of anyone), these are pictures of a young woman goofing around with friends, having fun and generally enjoying her life. These are glimpses into the real Calista, the Calista her friends knew and loved rather than the mature, serious Calista that Roni and I always saw at home or at the clinic. While I will always love those portraits of Calista that Jesse gave us, these candid photos are pure gold and they will never fail to make us smile in the years to come.
Calista had also archived a bunch of photos taken over the years; some of the shots were taken by Roni and I, some of them by friends and some of them are school shots. There were many from her high school graduation: she was wearing purple high top sneakers with the gold and red cap n' gown. That was certainly a fashion statement. There were quite a few from her after-grad celebration; I guess off the shoulder dresses were very much in vogue that year. In fact, I think off the shoulder dresses are popular every year, despite the fact very few women of any age can pull that type of dress off successfully. Gravity can pull them off, but not most women. The women reading this will understand as they remember how often they had to adjust their last off-the-shoulder creation. There was an entire series of photos dedicated to her final high-school drama-club play "I Never Saw Another Butterfly"; an excellent production of a dreadful story of the Jewish Holocaust. I loved the effort, hated the play, but my girl loved acting, so I attended (and was quite upset to find that she only had one short line in the entire two hour play). Then there was any number of shots taken while she worked on the Student Rep Council (SRC). Calista actually ran for student body president one year; I loved her original campaign advertising DVD, but I was very glad she lost the election. Diplomacy was never her strong point and I think she would have made a lot of people very angry as a president. And then there were all the pictures of her European trip in grade 12.
Way back in grade 9, Calista came to me all excited about a planned school trip to New York City; for just short of $2000 she could spend 5 days in NY,NY; she would see a Broadway play, visit all the big art galleries (a huge deal for her and I) and get to shop till she dropped. I was somewhat less than thrilled; two thousand dollars was a pretty large amount to put aside in just a few months and the truth be told, neither Roni nor I was all that happy about our little girl going to the Big Apple for any reason. At the time, rather than just say no (something I really never learnt to say to my little girl), I deferred and told her that she could go on the next trip that came up. I guess I did not realise that the school did trips every year, I kind of thought I was deferring the trip idea for a lifetime rather than a season.
Eighteen months later, in the tail end of Grade 10 Calista sat both her mom and I down at the kitchen table for a "family meeting". This was a first for Calista; usually she just asked and received whenever she wanted something. It did not bode well that the conversation started with "Dad; do you remember when you promised you would make the New York trip up to me back in Grade Nine ?". I tried to play dumb but, uncharacteristically, Roni failed to back me up. Roni did remind me that I had promised Calista that she could go on the next school trip that came up. Then the bomb dropped: this trip was a ten day excursion to Italy and Greece. Oh crap.
I was pretty unhappy about the turn of events, but I must give it to Calista, she did her financial homework. The trip was not actually scheduled for another eighteen months, to fall over the Easter break of her Grade 12 year and EF Tours had an entire program where they automatically charged a monthly fee to my Mastercard, so the full amount would be paid in full long before she ever left the ground. How wonderful! I get to send my child thousands of miles away with strangers and go even farther into debt with my good friends over at Mastercard. I have a suspicion that Roni and Calista had discussed the project in detail before I got home from work and that the decision was never really in my hands at all. So of course my girl got to go to Europe in Grade 12 and I am pretty sure she never did a lick of fund raising to help me pay for it; everything was as it should be in the world for Princess Calista.
The trip itself was really quite something and I wholeheartedly recommend the EF Tours program to anyone. They do a pretty good job really and it is quite affordable if you have enough leeway to pay in instalments. On this trip the kids fly through the night to land in Rome in the early morning. From that moment onwards their days are pretty much planned to the second. Three and one half days in Rome, one day in Pompeii, and then an overnight ferry ride over to Southern Greece. The students then spend four days touring Southern Greece and fly home from Athens. We heard from our darling daughter twice; once when she landed and once on the way home (from some airport in Germany I think; I am pretty sure she just wanted to make sure we were at the airport to meet her and that the cat had missed her).
Calista was in fine form for the whole trip. The road warrior of her youth was still hidden down inside the princess of her teen years and jet lag was something other people suffered from. She was terribly disappointed with her class mates though; they were supposed to enjoy tour excursions starting from the moment they disembarked the air plane, but most of the kids were so tired and sick that they had to forgo all day trips that afternoon. They settled on coffee and scones in the Piazza del Popolo. Now how cool is that? Really? I would have done anything to sit beside my girl and watch the Romans stream by, surrounded by Renaissance buildings and fountains built over the remains of an ancient coliseum.
When Calista was off to Rome, I asked her for photos of just a few things: The Pantheon, St. Peter's Square, anything inside St. Peter's Cathedral, and possibly the Sistine Chapel. She got great pictures of the Pantheon (predictably the outstanding domed roof), a few pictures of St. Peter's Square and one of two God-awful pictures of the inside of the Cathedral. We misjudged one thing though: it was Easter and there was hundreds of thousands of people in Rome for the high holy days. Furthermore, the Sistine Chapel was off limits for the Easter masses. The other thing I forgot was that any tours through St. Peter's Cathedral are going to be done at a constant marching pace so the tens of thousands of pilgrims that travel to Rome every year can see the church. Has anyone out there ever tried to take a picture in low light conditions while keeping up the constant pace of a tour-guide? I have a blurry photo of Michelangelo's Pieta behind bullet proof glass and that is as good as she could get.
One classic Calista story came out of this. When the school originally arrived within the Vatican compound, the tour had not actually planned for the students to visit the Cathedral. The papal Easter speech was scheduled and the tour thought that there would be no time for a walk through of the church. As it ended up, the Pope was short and to the point (Calista was pretty sure it was the Pope, but from 450 yards, the little guy in the white hat could have been a trained chimpanzee as far as she knew) and they actually found themselves with plenty of time to visit the Cathedral. The problem now was that my little girl had worn shorts on the excursion and there was no way any woman was entering the Pope's church with bare knees. Not to be denied, Calista tracked down a street vendor who sold large scarfs that could be made into skirts that would just cover her knees. Success!! My girl still owned the holy scarf when we cleaned out her apartment; that and a whole load of much nicer scarfs that she wore around her neck practically every day. How very continental.
Calista amassed quite a collection of cheap sun-glasses on her European vacation, each pair more gaudy and tasteless than the last. In each photo we have of that trip she seems to sport a different pair; some green, some orange, one pair of huge aviators which seemed to be a favourite, and a couple of pairs that only a teen-ager would wear. One of the classic photos that we had to laugh about was a group photo of some of her close friends in a circle, each one sporting another pair of Calista's collection. When we retrieved her car from the house that she died at I had to collect two pairs of cheap sun glasses off the seat before I could even sit down. Those pairs are still kicking around her little Smart Car. We must have close to a dozen pairs between her car, her bed room and the basket hidden in our front closet. They were just a variation on her costume fetish.
The best pictures of her trip had to be the "kids goofing around" shots. There were a series of pictures with her and two or three of her friends doing "Vogue" poses while standing on top of various Greek monuments. I am sure the Greeks were very pleased to have our good Canadian kids climbing up their 3000 year old marble antiquities just so they could "strike a pose". I also am sure that my girl Calista was behind the whole escapade since she seemed to be very good at posing for the camera (and that is exactly what her portrait photography instructor told me too). Right now, there is no greater treasure to me than these photos: they show my kid at her very best; having spontaneous fun with her friends. That is something parents rarely ever see.
I expect to run across many "land-mines" as we sift through the flotsam and jetsam of her young life cut short. Most, I hope, will bring a smile to our face, albeit with a generous helping of tears at the waste. The windfall of memories that came with the finding of those photos Wednesday night was a two edged sword though. Both Roni and I laughed and cried at the same time, but after the lights were turned off and the quiet of the house was ascendant, the wave took Roni and dragged her under deeper than it had in weeks. She cried as hard as she did that very first terrible day, perhaps even harder. The sobs wracked her body and I was sure she was going to either pass out from hyperventilation or vomit from the abdominal heaving. The only coherent thing she could say was "Why?". The sooner the coroner can come to some conclusion the better.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
Six Weeks, Six Days: The Ever after
And there is the rub; I keep on looking for an ending to this tunnel of horrors and I should know better. There is never going to be an ending because life is messy and always has loose ends left untied. On the other hand, there are a few things that I should review that might give some of my readers hope. I, personally, have no hope, just expectations.
I do have some projects on the go, some of which are really working out well, while others are stalling. Other people involved in this little saga have their parts to play out, and I can only hope that they will finally find the answers we all need before we can move on.
The coroner still is chipping away at the case, hoping against all odds to find a cause of death. That is becoming akin to the pot of gold at the illusive end of the rainbow. If her cause of death was not found on gross pathology during the autopsy, it is unlikely to be anything easy like an aneurysm, choking, meningitis or heart-attack. All those common causes of sudden death are pretty evident on post-mortem examination. The coroner already looked at alcohol toxicity; but with a blood alcohol level of 0.03 that is an easy rule-out. She is now going back to the toxicology and looking closely for any detectable levels of any of the common toxic drugs that float around young adult parties these days. Now the police know that the bar-b-cue was far from a wild party, but predators lurk at quiet watering holes sometimes too. Those results are still outstanding.
One thing that is becoming a problem for me is that the young man who was with my girl at the very end is our only source of information of what really happened during those last few hours. I want to trust everyone who tells me that he is a stand-up guy and I truly believe the police did a good job of interrogation before they released him. The issue I have is that the one person who could tell me about Calista's last moments on Earth has never taken one effort to communicate in any meaningful way to either Roni or me and has now apparently left the province for greener pastures. I have to wonder about a young man who is only qualified as a farm worker, who was working full time at a farm in his home town in the busiest time of year for farmers, who suddenly decides to leave home and work "drilling holes" (presumably in the oil fields of Alberta and Saskatchewan) less than two weeks after he is involved in a tragic death. Perhaps understandable for some, but for this father, it does nothing to settle the questions in my mind. Even a simple e-mail giving me the details of his side of the situation would have been far better than silence and a quick departure.
I hope that the completed coroner's report and a closed police file will give both Roni and I some closure so we can move on.
The memorial scholarship through the North Island College Foundation (Courtenay BC: that is a shameless plug) looks like it is going to fly well. The college has been wonderful, the establishment of the fund has been seamless, and between my own resources, Calista's surprisingly large estate, and a generous flow of donations from friends and family, it looks like the scholarship fund will be self sufficient in a very short few years. It may even grow into something very substantial that will help their photography program thrive into the future. If one good thing can come of this, then there can be some degree of closure for Roni and I. Of course, I dream big, so maybe my expectations and my reality are vastly different; the scholarship will probably just be sufficient in the end.
I still want to establish a photography contest in her memory. Through the years, as Calista submitted pictures to various different contests, I learnt a few things about the photography contests. The majority of the contests are sponsored by one magazine or the other, and all of them have either cash or equipment as prizes. I believe most of the equipment is donated in exchange for advertising space in the magazine. All of the contests have very similar categories and rules: landscape, lifestyle (action shots), portrait and art. They all seem to limit computerised manipulation and they have professional and amateur categories. I probably missed all sorts of details there, but you have the gist of it. I wanted to go in a unique direction altogether as an homage to Calista. Calista was enamoured with advertising photography; she liked the idea of creating a photograph that was not just visually appealing, but actually "sold" it's subject. Now I'm not sure at all where this came from, but that was what Calista loved, so I want the show to honour her. For her contest my concept would be that the categories would all be advertising appropriate photography: tourism landscape, modelling portraiture, product advertising still-life and real-estate advertisement architecture. Take off the limitations of photo-manipulation and just make the goal of the contest to create a marketable product ready for public advertising display. I also want the contest to be about promoting young aspiring professional photographers rather than well meaning hobbyists. Perhaps I will be proved wrong on this, but since the program at North Island College was all about producing professional photographers rather than artists, I would like to make this fly.
Right now, despite numerous letters written, stamped and mailed, I have had only a very limited response. Many well-wishers and encouragement, but nobody has actually stepped up to the gangplank and boarded my crazy pirate ship. I just have to remind myself that it is never about how many times you fall down, its all about how many times you get back up again.
Boomer, Calista's favourite instructor (though Shawn was right up there in popularity), had an interesting comment to me the other day: "Pay it Forward". The term "pay it forward" refers to a movie that came out perhaps ten years ago. The concept of the movie was that a little boy convinced the world that we should all do good deeds for each other and by doing so see a greater result in the end. Good deeds creates good karma and it all comes back home eventually. Specifically we were discussing all of Calista's photography equipment.
Over the last year Calista had accumulated a substantial amount of pretty expensive equipment. I do not have a faint clue what most of the toys do; even her new camera, the Canon 7D is pretty much a mystery to me (and I bought the darn thing for her just in March; she barely got the packing dust off the camera before she died). Another man might store the equipment away as some sort of museum piece keepsake, but that would be such a bloody waste. That equipment could help spring-board the career of some young photographer to fulfil some of the potential that we all lost when Calista died. Boomer and I discussed potential beneficiaries of the equipment and I have a pretty good idea how I should handle this, but I will sit on the idea for the time being until emotions are not so raw. Boomer referred to the dispersal of the equipment as "paying the debt forward"; perhaps he is right, but I see it as trying to dig some treasure out of the bottom of a very deep, partially filled out-house pit. Finding good in all of this will be a real challenge.
I even had this idea that I would eventually publish this Blog as a book. On the other hand, I have found the bravery to read some of my early entries here; they were pretty raw really, the spelling and diction are deplorable, and I am not sure if they really are reading material. I would be nice to generate some income (though profitable publishing is so rare that it is practically an oxymoron) and use that income to fund both the scholarship and the photo contest. Furthermore, I would need to find some conclusion or sense of closure to the story; books that end with "and everyone just continued on living this way for the rest of their life" are just not all that enjoyable. And that leads me to the conclusion for today.
I believe everyone, my family, my friends and perhaps even myself, expects there to be some sense of "conclusion" here. Well, guess what? As I said at the beginning today, this is real life and there is no end to this black tunnel. Roni and I are not going to "get better" or "get past this"; we will just get far better at covering up so those around us do not feel permanently uncomfortable. We will learn to smile when it is appropriate to smile, laugh when everyone else laughs, and act like we feel just like everyone else. We won't, we can't. Its just not going to happen. There is a great gaping wound in our souls that is not going to heal. Only other member's of the Club of the Damned can explain this and we can only do it within the club; people who have not lost children cannot possibly understand. Furthermore, I pray that none of you "non-members" out there ever learn the secret rites of membership because the fee is a higher price than anyone should pay.
Monday, 2 July 2012
Six Weeks, Four Days: Omens
I had to apologise to my wife last night. I realised that my zealous atheist rants of the last few weeks have been more than a little hypocritical. Certainly, I still have a grudge against whomever or whatever God you may want to quote to me, but deep down I still have a little mystical faith left in my heart: faith there is some meaning to all of this and that I have some chance of seeing Calista again. My rantings at how meaningless life is was hurting my wife terribly; she needs to believe that she will see her little girl again in such a bad way that denial of the existence of an afterlife is nothing short of cruel. Of course, the corrolary of the existence of a God and an afterlife is that our God, the God that took my little girl, is a cruel and unjust God unworthy of our worship. Vengence may rest only in the Lord's hands, but contempt is all mine.
I can understand now why people who have lost loved ones tend to turn to mysticism and the occult. The store-front offices of the mediums, sooth-sayers and palmists are filled with bereaved spouses, children and parents looking for some contact, some last words from their dearly departed. There is nothing I would not do to hear my Calista one more time, perhaps find out what really happened that fateful morning and maybe find out where the growing list of "lost" personal items may be. Of course, just one contact would never be enough for either Roni or I, so that would explain why the quacks of the occult have so many repeat customers. PT Barnum once said that a sucker is born every minute; not all of the suckers are new born babies; some are newly bereaved family.
Harry Houdini spent most of his professional life debunking spiritualism and, if you believe his family, planned on dedicating his afterlife to his quest as well. Houdini told his wife that if there was any truth to heaven, hell and the afterlife that he, the greatest escape artist of all time, would find a way to escape and come back. Houdini's wife died many years after the great magician was gone (he died quite young from a ruptured appendix) and she went to her grave without the slightest sign that Harry had found his way home. My Calista was not a famous escape artist and had no belief in the after-life either, so I am not waiting expectantly for any calls-home from the nether world.
On the other hand, I am seeing mystical omens around every corner. The things I am imagining or wondering about are just so scattered that I have to question my sanity.
I have been reviewing everything I did with or said to Calista over the last few months of her life, looking critically for things that I might have missed that could have saved her. I realised that our relationship had matured quite a bit over the last two years of her life; I had stopped treating her like my child and had started to treat her like my adult daughter. The comfortable cats-play teasing and taunting that we had between us while she was growing up was gone and had been replaced with a far more mature friendship between two people that genuinelly respect each other. When Calista was at work in the clinic, I had treated her like an employee who was expected to perform well and was rewarded when she exceeded my demands. Out in public she was now my adult companion rather than my youthful charge, while at home she had become my IT and entertainment advisor ( she told me how Facebook, Google Chrome and Twitter worked...and picked all the good movies). I remember that I had been consciously preparing her for the inevitable day when I would not be around anymore to help her when she needed a father. I know I was making sure I had left as few loose ends as possible for her should I die suddenly (I guess my trip to the ICU in December was hanging over my head). I wanted to make sure that there was nothing left unsaid if tomorrow never came. I just never considered that our positions would be reversed. When I started wrapping things up, did I see something that made me think that an end was coming? Did my conscious brain miss something my unconscious brain picked up? Perhaps my self-centered concern for my own health issues allowed me to overlook something in her that I should have seen. That is something I will think about for the rest of my life.
At Christmas Calista gave her mother a "tryptic series" of photographs. As the name implies, the pictures form a sequence that tell a simple story. In this case, the photographs are a stark, black on black study of an hourglass with light violet sands of time slowly running down the glass. The first picture shows the glass half full, the second almost empty, while the third shows "time is up". The obvious message our daughter gave my wife for Christmas was that "Time Is Running Out". Her friends tell us that Calista just really liked the visual of the tryptic and did not attach any importance to the sequence. In retrospect one has to wonder if she did not unconsciously see some momentous change coming. Calista never got to see the pictures framed; their custom ordered frames arrived the Monday following her death.
The portraits that Jesse did of Calista are breathtaking and beautiful. Consider for a moment how fortunate Roni and I are to have not just one, but a series of professionally done portraits of our daughter as she was a few short weeks before her death? How many parents are left with nothing but cloudy memories and poor quality high-school year-book photos when their child suddenly dies? Roni and I have at least ten top quality photos of Calista, some of them beautiful candid photos of her just goofing around being a worry-free young adult. One of the pictures, the best of the lot probably, shows Calista in a grassy field, half turned toward the camera, smiliing in the sunlight, her head cocked slightly to the right and her hair cascading down onto her shoulders. Depending on my mood, I see her either turning toward me in greeting or just saying goodbye as she turns away. Which is it I wonder? Is she saying goodbye? Were the portraits just some miracle of serindipity where fortune and tragedy collided, or did my girl see the coming storm and prepare?
How many of us have our affairs in order to the extent that our family could just pick-up where we left off and finish our life for us? I personally know that my desk is buried under half completed case files and unfinished management issues. If I died tomorrow the unGodly mess that would face Roni and my staff would be impossible to fathom. It would be a disaster. On the other hand, Calista left us with all the heavy lifting already done. The only outstanding work left to complete her collegiate certificate were projects she had not been assigned yet: a couple of business course assignments and one big landscape field trip scheduled ten days after her death. Even her all-important portfolio was practically completed; it took us about an afternoon with the help of her friends to assemble the portfolio into a presentable file. The marks for the portfolio were returned this last Friday; in a class of 12, four failed outright and the highest mark awarded was in the mid-seventies. Calista came in at a very respectable 71%; not bad for a person that had been dead for 6 weeks, don't you think? I can only imagine how she would have done if she had been alive to apply her detail oriented perfectionist hand to the task.
Throughout her life, Calista never seemed to have a sense of fleeting time. Her school assignements were often completed very late the night before their due date and often were far less than polished. It really was only this last two years that Calista was taking complete control of her life and becoming the ultra-focussed task master that she was at the time of her death. I guess I have to wonder if she sensed that time was of the essence. Tempus fugit and Carpe diem: did she sum it up with her tattoo "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live"? Why, after a lifetime of procrastination, did Calista embrace such a rigid organisational and work ethic in the last year of her life? I love her all the more for it, but did she sense something coming?
Then, of course, there is the tattoo. "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live". How fitting that something said to an grieving orphaned boy in my daughter's favourite book has become a mantra that both Roni and I have to embrace if we are to move on from this tragedy. If we two cannot stop dreaming for a day that will never come we will remain just treading water in the deep end of this dark and sour-smelling pool that has become our life. Right now we take no joy in anything and those quiet moments left for introspection that most adults anticipate, we only cry harder as we consider what might have been. Why did our Calista have that one small quote that has come to mean so much to us tattooed on her arm less than a year before leaving us? Did she want to leave us with some light to guide us, or was it just another coincidence?
As I said, there are omens everwhere for members in the Club of the Damned.
I have started dreaming about Calista just these last few days. She has not spoken to me or given me any worthwhile advice. My dreams are running to my standard nightmare: I need to be somewhere in a few short moments and everyone is pretty much either telling me to hurry up or impeding my efforts in every way possible. I guess this is a pretty common nightmare: it is recalled by the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland as he runs because he is late for a very important date (the mad hatter's tea-party I can only assume). In my dreams these last two nights Calista is just a silent partner to her much more vocal mother telling me to hurry up. Alice in Wonderland was Calista' second favourite book after the Harry Potter series. She had two copies of it over her bed, had purchased and watched Tim Burton's version numerous times, had themed one of her major photographic projects around Alice in Wonderland, and had even started a new large tattoo of Alice herself on her left shoulder. How fitting is it that a girl who was running out of time was entranced by a story that centers much of its tale around how fleeting time really is? The tattoo will never be completed now; it was her original creation and Van will never use that template again. Time ran out.
I awoke yesterday morning with a smile on my face; I had remembered a Calista story in those few peaceful moments I have each morning before I remember that she is dead and gone. When Calista was about four she and I got into a habit of going out on short excursions around Regina just because I liked showing my daughter off to the world (and also giving her mother a short break from motherhood).
Perhaps our favourite field trip was to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, found in the down-town core just off Wascana Park. While most of the kids seemed to gravitate to the large dinosaur fossils, Calista always headed for the dioramas of Native Canadian Life which filled half the bottom floor of the museum. She seemed intrigued by the life-like depictions of traditional native life from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and could spend hours pointing and chatting in baby speak to me about the displays. One day, while my back was turned for a moment, she decided to crawl into one of the exhibits; I guess she wanted to see what a dog-sled was like to ride in. She managed to set off the motion sensor alarms and all of a sudden we have horns going off throughout the museum. I did not have an idea what the heck was up, but she obviously knew exactly what had happened, since by the time I had turned to check on her whereabouts she had departed the exhibit and was running like a cut-cat down the museum hallway, past the security guards sprinting to respond to the alarm, laughing her fool head off all the way. By the time I caught up with her and scooped her into my arms, I was red faced and embarrassed (by this time I knew what the alarms meant) and she was just laughing to the point of tears. It was impossible to be angry with her because she obviously thought it was hilarious (especially how red-faced daddy was), but we departed the museum like Lot leaving Sodom: we did not look back and we did not return to the museum for a very long while (hoping that the guards would forgive the trangression over time).
I keep on on hoping that this nightmare is just another example of Calista running away from me, soon to be scooped back into my arms laughing her fool head off at my inconvenience. Just let it be a dream.
I can understand now why people who have lost loved ones tend to turn to mysticism and the occult. The store-front offices of the mediums, sooth-sayers and palmists are filled with bereaved spouses, children and parents looking for some contact, some last words from their dearly departed. There is nothing I would not do to hear my Calista one more time, perhaps find out what really happened that fateful morning and maybe find out where the growing list of "lost" personal items may be. Of course, just one contact would never be enough for either Roni or I, so that would explain why the quacks of the occult have so many repeat customers. PT Barnum once said that a sucker is born every minute; not all of the suckers are new born babies; some are newly bereaved family.
Harry Houdini spent most of his professional life debunking spiritualism and, if you believe his family, planned on dedicating his afterlife to his quest as well. Houdini told his wife that if there was any truth to heaven, hell and the afterlife that he, the greatest escape artist of all time, would find a way to escape and come back. Houdini's wife died many years after the great magician was gone (he died quite young from a ruptured appendix) and she went to her grave without the slightest sign that Harry had found his way home. My Calista was not a famous escape artist and had no belief in the after-life either, so I am not waiting expectantly for any calls-home from the nether world.
On the other hand, I am seeing mystical omens around every corner. The things I am imagining or wondering about are just so scattered that I have to question my sanity.
I have been reviewing everything I did with or said to Calista over the last few months of her life, looking critically for things that I might have missed that could have saved her. I realised that our relationship had matured quite a bit over the last two years of her life; I had stopped treating her like my child and had started to treat her like my adult daughter. The comfortable cats-play teasing and taunting that we had between us while she was growing up was gone and had been replaced with a far more mature friendship between two people that genuinelly respect each other. When Calista was at work in the clinic, I had treated her like an employee who was expected to perform well and was rewarded when she exceeded my demands. Out in public she was now my adult companion rather than my youthful charge, while at home she had become my IT and entertainment advisor ( she told me how Facebook, Google Chrome and Twitter worked...and picked all the good movies). I remember that I had been consciously preparing her for the inevitable day when I would not be around anymore to help her when she needed a father. I know I was making sure I had left as few loose ends as possible for her should I die suddenly (I guess my trip to the ICU in December was hanging over my head). I wanted to make sure that there was nothing left unsaid if tomorrow never came. I just never considered that our positions would be reversed. When I started wrapping things up, did I see something that made me think that an end was coming? Did my conscious brain miss something my unconscious brain picked up? Perhaps my self-centered concern for my own health issues allowed me to overlook something in her that I should have seen. That is something I will think about for the rest of my life.
At Christmas Calista gave her mother a "tryptic series" of photographs. As the name implies, the pictures form a sequence that tell a simple story. In this case, the photographs are a stark, black on black study of an hourglass with light violet sands of time slowly running down the glass. The first picture shows the glass half full, the second almost empty, while the third shows "time is up". The obvious message our daughter gave my wife for Christmas was that "Time Is Running Out". Her friends tell us that Calista just really liked the visual of the tryptic and did not attach any importance to the sequence. In retrospect one has to wonder if she did not unconsciously see some momentous change coming. Calista never got to see the pictures framed; their custom ordered frames arrived the Monday following her death.
The portraits that Jesse did of Calista are breathtaking and beautiful. Consider for a moment how fortunate Roni and I are to have not just one, but a series of professionally done portraits of our daughter as she was a few short weeks before her death? How many parents are left with nothing but cloudy memories and poor quality high-school year-book photos when their child suddenly dies? Roni and I have at least ten top quality photos of Calista, some of them beautiful candid photos of her just goofing around being a worry-free young adult. One of the pictures, the best of the lot probably, shows Calista in a grassy field, half turned toward the camera, smiliing in the sunlight, her head cocked slightly to the right and her hair cascading down onto her shoulders. Depending on my mood, I see her either turning toward me in greeting or just saying goodbye as she turns away. Which is it I wonder? Is she saying goodbye? Were the portraits just some miracle of serindipity where fortune and tragedy collided, or did my girl see the coming storm and prepare?
How many of us have our affairs in order to the extent that our family could just pick-up where we left off and finish our life for us? I personally know that my desk is buried under half completed case files and unfinished management issues. If I died tomorrow the unGodly mess that would face Roni and my staff would be impossible to fathom. It would be a disaster. On the other hand, Calista left us with all the heavy lifting already done. The only outstanding work left to complete her collegiate certificate were projects she had not been assigned yet: a couple of business course assignments and one big landscape field trip scheduled ten days after her death. Even her all-important portfolio was practically completed; it took us about an afternoon with the help of her friends to assemble the portfolio into a presentable file. The marks for the portfolio were returned this last Friday; in a class of 12, four failed outright and the highest mark awarded was in the mid-seventies. Calista came in at a very respectable 71%; not bad for a person that had been dead for 6 weeks, don't you think? I can only imagine how she would have done if she had been alive to apply her detail oriented perfectionist hand to the task.
Throughout her life, Calista never seemed to have a sense of fleeting time. Her school assignements were often completed very late the night before their due date and often were far less than polished. It really was only this last two years that Calista was taking complete control of her life and becoming the ultra-focussed task master that she was at the time of her death. I guess I have to wonder if she sensed that time was of the essence. Tempus fugit and Carpe diem: did she sum it up with her tattoo "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live"? Why, after a lifetime of procrastination, did Calista embrace such a rigid organisational and work ethic in the last year of her life? I love her all the more for it, but did she sense something coming?
Then, of course, there is the tattoo. "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live". How fitting that something said to an grieving orphaned boy in my daughter's favourite book has become a mantra that both Roni and I have to embrace if we are to move on from this tragedy. If we two cannot stop dreaming for a day that will never come we will remain just treading water in the deep end of this dark and sour-smelling pool that has become our life. Right now we take no joy in anything and those quiet moments left for introspection that most adults anticipate, we only cry harder as we consider what might have been. Why did our Calista have that one small quote that has come to mean so much to us tattooed on her arm less than a year before leaving us? Did she want to leave us with some light to guide us, or was it just another coincidence?
As I said, there are omens everwhere for members in the Club of the Damned.
I have started dreaming about Calista just these last few days. She has not spoken to me or given me any worthwhile advice. My dreams are running to my standard nightmare: I need to be somewhere in a few short moments and everyone is pretty much either telling me to hurry up or impeding my efforts in every way possible. I guess this is a pretty common nightmare: it is recalled by the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland as he runs because he is late for a very important date (the mad hatter's tea-party I can only assume). In my dreams these last two nights Calista is just a silent partner to her much more vocal mother telling me to hurry up. Alice in Wonderland was Calista' second favourite book after the Harry Potter series. She had two copies of it over her bed, had purchased and watched Tim Burton's version numerous times, had themed one of her major photographic projects around Alice in Wonderland, and had even started a new large tattoo of Alice herself on her left shoulder. How fitting is it that a girl who was running out of time was entranced by a story that centers much of its tale around how fleeting time really is? The tattoo will never be completed now; it was her original creation and Van will never use that template again. Time ran out.
I awoke yesterday morning with a smile on my face; I had remembered a Calista story in those few peaceful moments I have each morning before I remember that she is dead and gone. When Calista was about four she and I got into a habit of going out on short excursions around Regina just because I liked showing my daughter off to the world (and also giving her mother a short break from motherhood).
Perhaps our favourite field trip was to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, found in the down-town core just off Wascana Park. While most of the kids seemed to gravitate to the large dinosaur fossils, Calista always headed for the dioramas of Native Canadian Life which filled half the bottom floor of the museum. She seemed intrigued by the life-like depictions of traditional native life from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and could spend hours pointing and chatting in baby speak to me about the displays. One day, while my back was turned for a moment, she decided to crawl into one of the exhibits; I guess she wanted to see what a dog-sled was like to ride in. She managed to set off the motion sensor alarms and all of a sudden we have horns going off throughout the museum. I did not have an idea what the heck was up, but she obviously knew exactly what had happened, since by the time I had turned to check on her whereabouts she had departed the exhibit and was running like a cut-cat down the museum hallway, past the security guards sprinting to respond to the alarm, laughing her fool head off all the way. By the time I caught up with her and scooped her into my arms, I was red faced and embarrassed (by this time I knew what the alarms meant) and she was just laughing to the point of tears. It was impossible to be angry with her because she obviously thought it was hilarious (especially how red-faced daddy was), but we departed the museum like Lot leaving Sodom: we did not look back and we did not return to the museum for a very long while (hoping that the guards would forgive the trangression over time).
I keep on on hoping that this nightmare is just another example of Calista running away from me, soon to be scooped back into my arms laughing her fool head off at my inconvenience. Just let it be a dream.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Five Weeks, Six Days: No Regrets for Yesterday
Looking back on the memory of
The dance we shared 'neath the stars alone
For a moment all the world was right
How could I have known that you'd ever say goodbye
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd of had to miss the dance
Holding you I held everything
For a moment wasn't I a king
But if I'd only known how the king would fall
Hey, who's to say you know I might have chanced it all
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd of had to miss the dance
Yes, my life is better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd of had to miss the dance
[ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/g/garth-brooks-lyrics/the-dance-lyrics.html ]
Today's post is for all the people who never had children by choice; some of you might be saying to yourself that my loss is one of the reasons you chose to miss the dance. I am writing today to say I would not have missed a moment of the last twenty years. Certainly I could have missed the pain, but with the exception of that last terrible day, I regret not one moment of the last twenty years. Calista was and always will be the absolute love of my life.
Today will be about my best memories of that girl; some of them will be funny, most will be pleasant and all of them will be bitter-sweet. There are just so many things I will miss; even if I return to those things, they will forever be a pale shadow of their former shades.
Calista and I used to go out of our way to attend art shows. It was a bit of a joke for us since Roni just could not stomach one moment in a museum. We would tow her along with us, threatening to make her walk throught the gallery inch by inch, bored out of her tree, and then we would turn her loose to go shopping at the last moment. Over the years Calista and I saw "The Realists", "The Impressionists", "Realism through Surrealism" (really great show, Vancouver!), "The Dutch Masters", "Andy Warhol Retrospective" and a whole bunch of other worthwhile art elsewhere in the galleries we attended. Calista had her own opinions on "The Group of Seven" and Emily Carr, she enjoyed some but not all of the modern photographic artists and she loved Andy Warhol. I am pretty sure she enjoyed the art shows more than I did, but I was there to enjoy her enjoying herself, not necessarily for the art. I will miss the art, but I just cannot see myself returning to the galleries any more; for all the enjoyment I will get out of it I might as well just buy coffee-table books. Its too bad; I was really looking forward to seeing the major European collections with her: The Louvre, the Uffizzi, the Papal Collections and perhaps the Sistine Chapel (if we could get there sometime there was not a religious festival).
Photographic safaris were a favourite escape for both of us. I remember finding a decrepit village museum in Etzicom, Alberta that had a yard full of windmills in various states of repair. The sun was just going down, the prairie stood silent, the only sound was the light summer breezes ruffling the leaves in the surrounding cottonwood trees and the odd piping of a startled ground squirrel. We spent an hour shooting the windmills, playing with the light effects as the sun crept behind the rolling hills of the southern Alberta countryside. Typical of Calista her pictures were all composed almost perfectly and had unique lighting effects that my eyes could not pick up. She also had a whole lot of "gopher" shots as the little critters that denned under the windmills came up to inspect us. It was early summer and the most recent crop of gopher pups had not learned the survival fear of their parents. There was all sorts of opportunity to catch close-ups of baby gophers. My shots were all not quite good enough for public inspection; that was the nature of our relationship.
Sometime when she was almost 17 she finally decided to learn how to drive. On one of our trips to see her grandmother Ruth out on the isolated ranch she shared with her husband Harold in Etzicom, Calista and I had many, many hours to fill as Roni visited. We took the opportunity to get some high-way driving miles under Calista's belt. The country roads around there are usually absolutely empty, perfectly smooth and straight, so it was pretty safe driving. We would make the 15 or 20 kilometer run from Etzicom to Foremost and back, sometimes going as fast as 80 kmh if I really teased her a lot. Fast driving was never Calista's preference. She always dragged along the trusty Canon 40D, just in case a photograph opportunity popped up.
Beside the two-lane blacktop highway there was an old county graveyard filled with the dead of the local families dating from the late nineteenth century. Calista saw some intriguing composition with the old gravestones in the foreground surrounded by the tall prairie bunchgrass and the rolling hills in the back-ground, so we spent an hour or more exploring the yard. I was cold and slightly bored, so I started reading the headstones of the various groups within the fenced grasslands.
Whenever I was with my daughter, I was always looking for ways to get her thinking without making it a chore. Here I saw an opportunity to get her thinking about what she was seeing on the gravestones and if she could tell a tale from what she read. In one grouping there were two larger graves and a half-sized grave between. One of the adult graves was a twenty year old woman who had died in the early years of the last century. The child next to her, unnamed infant, died the same day. Calista saw the tale there immediately; a birthing gone terribly wrong at a time when doctors and hospitals were few and far between. The next group of graves was a little harder for her to understand: several adults from the same family of various ages all died within a few months of each other in 1919 to 1920. I explained to her about the Spanish Influenza that followed the end of World War One and how it killed more people world-wide than the war itself. Now I have no idea if this family actually died of Spanish flu, but I saw a chance to teach Calista a bit of history and I grabbed it. Of course she just smiled and nodded her head, all the while looking at the angles of the shot through her camera view finder,checking for composition. I am not sure she learnt anything that day, but I felt like a good father for a few moments.
Once we moved to Powell River, the expeditions for photography became shorter but far more focussed. Once the college had her under their sway, every trip out was a mission to get specific shots. There was one trip to the historical Townsite neighbourhood that was a pretty silent two hours; Calista was far beyond anything I could help her with and I was essentially just a chauffer and bag-holder. If she had been a golfer, I would have been the caddy. It was fun to see my little girl all growen up, completely confident in what she was doing. On the way home Calista gave into me and let me stop at Willington Beach for a short hike up the beach trail there. This had been one of my favourites since we could always count on getting some of the little squirrels that lived in the trees there to pose for the camera. The little rodents were always looking for food hand-outs in the form of peanuts. That day she was really disappointed because very few of the squirrels were out and about. I guess they sensed that we had forgotten to bring bribery.
Very soon after that trip, Roni picked up a big bag of shelled peanuts just for Willington Beach expeditions. Those trips were kind of a bonding thing that we all enjoyed and they were made just so much more fun if the squirrels would come down into the range of Calista's view finder. That damn bag of peanuts is still sitting in my pantry unopened; she died before we ever had another chance to visit Willington Beach.
Since she has died my camera sits gathering dust in the bottom of my bedside table. I should get the film out of that camera and have the pictures from it developed; they represent the last few trips out with Calista. Inevitably I will be embarrassed at how bad the shots are and I doubt that there will be even one shot of Calista. She never would sit still for me to take her picture (undoubtedly knowing that I would botch the shot). It is getting progressively harder to get film and film processing, so that camera is likely never going to be used much anymore. I am not sure it really matters anyway; without Calista to challenge me and tease me, photography really is not interesting to me now.
One of my very favourite memories of Calista was our father-daughter trip out to the private island of one of my clients. Calista earned our passage to that island by being a wonderful, caring receptionist on her day off. Mark, the owner of a very large Irish Wolfhound with a belly ache, called one early one summer Sunday morning asking if we could see his dog immediately. I listened to his problem and I thought it was a good idea since Irish Wolfhounds with belly aches could be in a whole lot of trouble. I agreed that I would meet him at the clinic as soon as possible. It turned out that "ASAP" meant a minimum of two hours since Mark was calling from an isolated island somewhere north of Lund. Intrigued, I told him to just call when he was withing ten minutes of arriving at the clinic.
I guess Calista did not have anything else going on that afternoon, since she volunteered to come into the clinic to help out her old man. As we both aged, me going grey and her hair colour changing with every trip to the hair dresser, Calista had become progressively more protective of her dad, worrying that I would just keel over dead one day from overwork. I guess the joke is on both of us, eh? When Mark arrived with the immense "Murphy" in tow, Calista fell right into professional receptionist mode. She had taken the time to don uniform scrubs and do her hair, while I turned up for work in jeans and a T-shirt. Who was the adult here?
Mark was a nice enough guy but he certainly did not impress me as any mover and shaker of the world. He arrived at my clinic in worn jeans, a ragged golf-shirt and leather sandles that had seen better days. His dog Murphy was absolutely wonderful and it was immediately apparent how much he cared for the big goofy dog. I sensed that Mark was a no-nonsense kind of guy who would not economize on Murphy's care, so I did everything reasonable to make sure Murphy was going to be Ok. It turned out that he had eaten something that was causing some wicked diarrhea and gas and just simply treating his symptoms was enough to fix the issue.
Mark had some errands to do around town, so he left Murphy with us for the afternoon. Murphy spent most of the time with us hanging his head over Calista's shoulder as she sat at the desk. It was pretty hard to input data on the computer while simultaneously scratching his ears. Those two bonded and I guess we must have impressed Mark since he invited us down to vaccinate all his dogs out on his island just a few weeks later.
Mark sent me an e-mail to the effect that he would pick both of us up in his private float plane and fly us up to his island where we would vaccinate his dogs and have lunch with him and some other guests. I kind of pictured Mark himself dropping into Powell Lake with a beat up old float plane patched with duct-tape and bailer twine and spiriting us away to a rustic cabin on an island shared with a bunch of drop-out hippies. I was not really being judgemental here; it never occured to me that anyone in my little world would actually own an entire island.
Imagine how surprised both Calista and I were when the plane docked up at Powell Lake. It was a beautiful corporate amphibious ten-seater piloted by Mark's private pilot who greeted us with a thick Scottish brogue and a big friendly grin. He flew us north for about fifteen minutes, passing over Savory and Hernandez Islands and landed in a small inlet on an island just south-east of Cortez Island. Mark indeed did have his own private island, fully outfitted with a mansion of amazing dimensions and several well appointed outbuildings to house his staff. We spent a wonderful afternoon examining and vaccinating dogs, enjoying an amazing lunch made of food grown right there on the island and touring a virtual paradise in the middle of nowhere. Once we returned home poor Calista was just speechless; she thought that kind of wealth only occured in Hollywood movies. My joke of the day was a little tasteless; I asked her if she had checked to see if Mark had any sons about her age.
My father told me and I told her this basic truth: there is nothing wrong about marrying for money because you can always learn to love somebody, but you can never learn to love being poor. I never listened to my father and she never listened to me; exactly as is should be.
We attended grief couselling yesterday. That was traumatic. I will get into it a bit more when I have some more time to digest what was said and what we have to look foreward to. The truth be told, the only big surprise about the visit to the counselor was the vast tidal wave of emotions that hit me when we started talking about Calista's death. I thought Roni was the basket case in this marriage. Talk about a fooling myself; I have a very long, hard road ahead of me.
The dance we shared 'neath the stars alone
For a moment all the world was right
How could I have known that you'd ever say goodbye
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd of had to miss the dance
Holding you I held everything
For a moment wasn't I a king
But if I'd only known how the king would fall
Hey, who's to say you know I might have chanced it all
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd of had to miss the dance
Yes, my life is better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd of had to miss the dance
[ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/g/garth-brooks-lyrics/the-dance-lyrics.html ]
Today's post is for all the people who never had children by choice; some of you might be saying to yourself that my loss is one of the reasons you chose to miss the dance. I am writing today to say I would not have missed a moment of the last twenty years. Certainly I could have missed the pain, but with the exception of that last terrible day, I regret not one moment of the last twenty years. Calista was and always will be the absolute love of my life.
Today will be about my best memories of that girl; some of them will be funny, most will be pleasant and all of them will be bitter-sweet. There are just so many things I will miss; even if I return to those things, they will forever be a pale shadow of their former shades.
Calista and I used to go out of our way to attend art shows. It was a bit of a joke for us since Roni just could not stomach one moment in a museum. We would tow her along with us, threatening to make her walk throught the gallery inch by inch, bored out of her tree, and then we would turn her loose to go shopping at the last moment. Over the years Calista and I saw "The Realists", "The Impressionists", "Realism through Surrealism" (really great show, Vancouver!), "The Dutch Masters", "Andy Warhol Retrospective" and a whole bunch of other worthwhile art elsewhere in the galleries we attended. Calista had her own opinions on "The Group of Seven" and Emily Carr, she enjoyed some but not all of the modern photographic artists and she loved Andy Warhol. I am pretty sure she enjoyed the art shows more than I did, but I was there to enjoy her enjoying herself, not necessarily for the art. I will miss the art, but I just cannot see myself returning to the galleries any more; for all the enjoyment I will get out of it I might as well just buy coffee-table books. Its too bad; I was really looking forward to seeing the major European collections with her: The Louvre, the Uffizzi, the Papal Collections and perhaps the Sistine Chapel (if we could get there sometime there was not a religious festival).
Photographic safaris were a favourite escape for both of us. I remember finding a decrepit village museum in Etzicom, Alberta that had a yard full of windmills in various states of repair. The sun was just going down, the prairie stood silent, the only sound was the light summer breezes ruffling the leaves in the surrounding cottonwood trees and the odd piping of a startled ground squirrel. We spent an hour shooting the windmills, playing with the light effects as the sun crept behind the rolling hills of the southern Alberta countryside. Typical of Calista her pictures were all composed almost perfectly and had unique lighting effects that my eyes could not pick up. She also had a whole lot of "gopher" shots as the little critters that denned under the windmills came up to inspect us. It was early summer and the most recent crop of gopher pups had not learned the survival fear of their parents. There was all sorts of opportunity to catch close-ups of baby gophers. My shots were all not quite good enough for public inspection; that was the nature of our relationship.
Sometime when she was almost 17 she finally decided to learn how to drive. On one of our trips to see her grandmother Ruth out on the isolated ranch she shared with her husband Harold in Etzicom, Calista and I had many, many hours to fill as Roni visited. We took the opportunity to get some high-way driving miles under Calista's belt. The country roads around there are usually absolutely empty, perfectly smooth and straight, so it was pretty safe driving. We would make the 15 or 20 kilometer run from Etzicom to Foremost and back, sometimes going as fast as 80 kmh if I really teased her a lot. Fast driving was never Calista's preference. She always dragged along the trusty Canon 40D, just in case a photograph opportunity popped up.
Beside the two-lane blacktop highway there was an old county graveyard filled with the dead of the local families dating from the late nineteenth century. Calista saw some intriguing composition with the old gravestones in the foreground surrounded by the tall prairie bunchgrass and the rolling hills in the back-ground, so we spent an hour or more exploring the yard. I was cold and slightly bored, so I started reading the headstones of the various groups within the fenced grasslands.
Whenever I was with my daughter, I was always looking for ways to get her thinking without making it a chore. Here I saw an opportunity to get her thinking about what she was seeing on the gravestones and if she could tell a tale from what she read. In one grouping there were two larger graves and a half-sized grave between. One of the adult graves was a twenty year old woman who had died in the early years of the last century. The child next to her, unnamed infant, died the same day. Calista saw the tale there immediately; a birthing gone terribly wrong at a time when doctors and hospitals were few and far between. The next group of graves was a little harder for her to understand: several adults from the same family of various ages all died within a few months of each other in 1919 to 1920. I explained to her about the Spanish Influenza that followed the end of World War One and how it killed more people world-wide than the war itself. Now I have no idea if this family actually died of Spanish flu, but I saw a chance to teach Calista a bit of history and I grabbed it. Of course she just smiled and nodded her head, all the while looking at the angles of the shot through her camera view finder,checking for composition. I am not sure she learnt anything that day, but I felt like a good father for a few moments.
Once we moved to Powell River, the expeditions for photography became shorter but far more focussed. Once the college had her under their sway, every trip out was a mission to get specific shots. There was one trip to the historical Townsite neighbourhood that was a pretty silent two hours; Calista was far beyond anything I could help her with and I was essentially just a chauffer and bag-holder. If she had been a golfer, I would have been the caddy. It was fun to see my little girl all growen up, completely confident in what she was doing. On the way home Calista gave into me and let me stop at Willington Beach for a short hike up the beach trail there. This had been one of my favourites since we could always count on getting some of the little squirrels that lived in the trees there to pose for the camera. The little rodents were always looking for food hand-outs in the form of peanuts. That day she was really disappointed because very few of the squirrels were out and about. I guess they sensed that we had forgotten to bring bribery.
Very soon after that trip, Roni picked up a big bag of shelled peanuts just for Willington Beach expeditions. Those trips were kind of a bonding thing that we all enjoyed and they were made just so much more fun if the squirrels would come down into the range of Calista's view finder. That damn bag of peanuts is still sitting in my pantry unopened; she died before we ever had another chance to visit Willington Beach.
Since she has died my camera sits gathering dust in the bottom of my bedside table. I should get the film out of that camera and have the pictures from it developed; they represent the last few trips out with Calista. Inevitably I will be embarrassed at how bad the shots are and I doubt that there will be even one shot of Calista. She never would sit still for me to take her picture (undoubtedly knowing that I would botch the shot). It is getting progressively harder to get film and film processing, so that camera is likely never going to be used much anymore. I am not sure it really matters anyway; without Calista to challenge me and tease me, photography really is not interesting to me now.
One of my very favourite memories of Calista was our father-daughter trip out to the private island of one of my clients. Calista earned our passage to that island by being a wonderful, caring receptionist on her day off. Mark, the owner of a very large Irish Wolfhound with a belly ache, called one early one summer Sunday morning asking if we could see his dog immediately. I listened to his problem and I thought it was a good idea since Irish Wolfhounds with belly aches could be in a whole lot of trouble. I agreed that I would meet him at the clinic as soon as possible. It turned out that "ASAP" meant a minimum of two hours since Mark was calling from an isolated island somewhere north of Lund. Intrigued, I told him to just call when he was withing ten minutes of arriving at the clinic.
I guess Calista did not have anything else going on that afternoon, since she volunteered to come into the clinic to help out her old man. As we both aged, me going grey and her hair colour changing with every trip to the hair dresser, Calista had become progressively more protective of her dad, worrying that I would just keel over dead one day from overwork. I guess the joke is on both of us, eh? When Mark arrived with the immense "Murphy" in tow, Calista fell right into professional receptionist mode. She had taken the time to don uniform scrubs and do her hair, while I turned up for work in jeans and a T-shirt. Who was the adult here?
Mark was a nice enough guy but he certainly did not impress me as any mover and shaker of the world. He arrived at my clinic in worn jeans, a ragged golf-shirt and leather sandles that had seen better days. His dog Murphy was absolutely wonderful and it was immediately apparent how much he cared for the big goofy dog. I sensed that Mark was a no-nonsense kind of guy who would not economize on Murphy's care, so I did everything reasonable to make sure Murphy was going to be Ok. It turned out that he had eaten something that was causing some wicked diarrhea and gas and just simply treating his symptoms was enough to fix the issue.
Mark had some errands to do around town, so he left Murphy with us for the afternoon. Murphy spent most of the time with us hanging his head over Calista's shoulder as she sat at the desk. It was pretty hard to input data on the computer while simultaneously scratching his ears. Those two bonded and I guess we must have impressed Mark since he invited us down to vaccinate all his dogs out on his island just a few weeks later.
Mark sent me an e-mail to the effect that he would pick both of us up in his private float plane and fly us up to his island where we would vaccinate his dogs and have lunch with him and some other guests. I kind of pictured Mark himself dropping into Powell Lake with a beat up old float plane patched with duct-tape and bailer twine and spiriting us away to a rustic cabin on an island shared with a bunch of drop-out hippies. I was not really being judgemental here; it never occured to me that anyone in my little world would actually own an entire island.
Imagine how surprised both Calista and I were when the plane docked up at Powell Lake. It was a beautiful corporate amphibious ten-seater piloted by Mark's private pilot who greeted us with a thick Scottish brogue and a big friendly grin. He flew us north for about fifteen minutes, passing over Savory and Hernandez Islands and landed in a small inlet on an island just south-east of Cortez Island. Mark indeed did have his own private island, fully outfitted with a mansion of amazing dimensions and several well appointed outbuildings to house his staff. We spent a wonderful afternoon examining and vaccinating dogs, enjoying an amazing lunch made of food grown right there on the island and touring a virtual paradise in the middle of nowhere. Once we returned home poor Calista was just speechless; she thought that kind of wealth only occured in Hollywood movies. My joke of the day was a little tasteless; I asked her if she had checked to see if Mark had any sons about her age.
My father told me and I told her this basic truth: there is nothing wrong about marrying for money because you can always learn to love somebody, but you can never learn to love being poor. I never listened to my father and she never listened to me; exactly as is should be.
We attended grief couselling yesterday. That was traumatic. I will get into it a bit more when I have some more time to digest what was said and what we have to look foreward to. The truth be told, the only big surprise about the visit to the counselor was the vast tidal wave of emotions that hit me when we started talking about Calista's death. I thought Roni was the basket case in this marriage. Talk about a fooling myself; I have a very long, hard road ahead of me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)