Not too Jovial

Reading Week draws to a close, with a sore throat and cough setting in between stuffed ears. Joy of joys.

The shining news is that the sky cleared tonight after the biggest one-day snowfall we've had in ten years. And there was the new(ish) moon, escorted across the evening sky by two planets: Jupiter and Venus. Jupiter is Holst's Bringer of Jollity. Jupiter may be bringing it, but I'm not receiving it. Jupiter=Jove, root of joviality, and I'm not going there, either. Venus is the goddess of love, but I'm not feeling that, any more than the joy. Still, I have to admit, with this conjunction, tonight's view was spectacular. 180 degrees away in the east, Mars made his contrary way up the night sky as well.  Last night, we waded through the unshovelled new snow, with more still coming down, to the LRT to get to an ESO choral concert, a concert that was worth the wade. Two faces of late winter, each brilliant in its own way.

In the next room, Eva and our neighbour, Dale,  talk of getting a card for Tina, whose old black lab, Allie, had to be put down earlier this week--a lumbering old sweety, Allie, but her kidneys gave out, with no hope for recovery. Dale explains that she can't even begin to imagine what comes after death. That the shmaltzy sympathy cards about meeting again do not seem to cover the territory. I recall thinking, the day I heard that Mom had finally finished "living with cancer," that at least she now knew what came next, if anything.

We did not have a funeral service for Mom.. She had some strange ideas about disappearing quietly, so her sisters had her ashes interred with her parents in a cemetery in Surrey, B.C., that would not even allow another marker on the site. It took ten years, but I finally broke down at a memorial service for a woman I hardly knew, for me to realize I had done a really bad job of grieving. Had not done it at all, actually. Mary Charlotte, the assistant rector at the neighbourhood Anglican church, arranged a private ceremony in the chapel, just her, Eva and me. We entered Mom's birth and death dates into the registry, and I began to understand the concept of "closure."

This week was also the first anniversary of Dad's death. His birthday (he would have been 90 this year) was the first February 16th I can recall for over fifty years I hadn't sent a card or letter, or made a birthday phone call. Last year, when I'd called him in England (where he had been living for much of the last ten years) beginning Feb. 16th, there was only a full answering machine responding, for several days. Then a phone call about 9:30 the evening of the 21st.

We did have an interment ceremony for him in mid-April, on a snowy wet Saturday in Union Cemetery in Calgary.  Dad's plot (which has Mom's name and dates of birth and death on the same marble plaque as Dad's, a province away from where she is actually buried) is within a short walk, and sight, of Great-grandfather Andrew Porter's plot, where Grandmother Perkins and her sisters are also interred. It was a small service, led by me (I got that news from my sister, Vicki, the evening before). So that was better closure.

And a year later, my sister and brother are still trying to get all the legal and government forms filled out (some for the third time, because one bureaucrat cannot hand the same form or certificate across the hall to another in the same department without one or the other losing track of it). His estate is not large or complicated (except for the fact one bank account is in England, so we need an English solicitor to handle the paperwork. Ever try to hire an English solicitor from Canada, over the internet?), but it still has taken a lot of messing about. I have shivers, thinking of the case in Chancery in a Dickens novel (Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in Bleak House)--a case that went on for years, until all the estate had been devoured in legal costs. There is a life after death--but it's a half-life, in legal documents, computer files and unfinished, at times seemingly unfinishable, business. The Ojibway three-or-four-day road wouldn't be even decent a start, anymore.