The Thing About Time.
I like Pinterest. It’s not much of a secret. There’s something so relaxing about looking at beautiful stuff and curating bits and pieces into collections. It’s a major time suck, sure, but so are lots of things.
Every now and then, this quote comes up that’s attributed to Buddha, set either in vintage typewriter font or with a serene picture in the back. It’s not actually a Buddha quote, but it’s distilled from his teachings from some big time Buddhist guy. It doesn’t really matter who said it. It’s a good quote.
“The Trouble is, You Think You Have Time.”
This isn’t a post about how I have ten weeks before my life changes immensely with the birth of my son (for inquiring minds, my pregnancy is going very well), though it probably could have been just as easily.
Instead, it’s a story about an abundance of time.
My last living grandparent, my grandmother, died on August 18th, sometime around 7am in a nursing home in Brampton. I’d received a call from my aunt notifying me that it was probably coming the night before when she was trying to get ahold of my dad to let him him know the end was near, and that she’d decided to stop eating.
The option was there to feed her via IV, but at ninety-ish, it was fairly universally decided that if she wanted to go, it was up to her. And go she did.
My relationship with Gania was/is complicated. I prefer not to take much accountability for this, though it does take two people to have a relationship, and I backed away from ours, hands up in surrender, besides a casual ask about her well-being, when I was eighteen or nineteen.
Before that, I struggled with our relationship. I’m not sure if she did.
Unlike some of my cousins, I do have some positive memories of her. I remember the blond woman with the piercing eyes at my birthday parties when I was very young. I don’t recall any affection between us, but I presume there must have been some; her name is my second middle one on my birth certificate. She also gave me a Cabbage Patch doll when they were impossible to find in the eighties and my first dog when I was three. The dog, a bichon not unlike Sushi, was an important part of my life until she died at the ripe age of fifteen.
It’s not entirely clear when or why she decided to remove herself from my family’s life. It was around the time I was six though, when my family set off on our boat for a year and she moved back to Ontario. I’ve heard mumblings about how she didn’t approve of the trip, and how she thought my father was being reckless by taking us. There’s some story about a missed mother’s day visit that circulated for a while. I’m old enough now to know that these reasons are fairly superficial, but at the time, when contrasted with my beloved Granny Sue, who was incredibly involved in our lives, her lack of presence or involvement stuck out like a sore thumb, and as a kid, no matter what you’re told, it’s hard to understand.
I’m also old enough now to know that her life wasn’t easy, not by any means. When I was young, I used to ask my dad about her a lot, in the hopes of perhaps understanding why she wasn’t interested in being in our lives. She grew up in a soddy in Manitoba, the child of Ukrainian immigrants and ran away from home at a young age when her father married a woman she didn’t like. From there, she ended up here, in Toronto. At some point when she was young, she married a Greek man and had two sons. After that, she married my grandfather and had four more in very quick succession. The kids from the first marriage ended up in social services, and one died in a gas station explosion at a young age. My dad remembers her face being plastered across the front page of a Toronto paper at the time, grief splashed across her pretty features.
After the death of her son, she divorced my grandfather, who kept the kids, though they seemed to see her often enough. She went from a big house in Rosedale, an affluent part of the city, to a slummy area south of there (which is now not so slummy at all), where she did everything she could to earn a buck, from breeding dogs and birds to running rooming houses to vagrants and alcoholics. She was quite successful. At some point, the kids moved back in with her for a while, which left my dad with a lot of baggage that has affected him his entire life. She wasn’t what anyone would describe as an atypical mother, and in a time when mental illness wasn’t commonly diagnosed, she survived what could have been any number of psychotic conditions, but what was likely bipolarism.
More kids were had, both of which ended up in the system. One was adopted and wanted nothing more to do with any of us. One ended up in what had to have been Toronto’s worst foster houses. He’s been living with HIV/AIDS for about 20 years.
I often wonder how she would have told her story, but she had no interest in sharing it.
As a young kid, I tried to salvage the relationship. I remember an awkward phone call to my uncle’s house where she was living at the time when I called her for some information for a family tree project (I was probably in grade six), and got hung up on. In grade eight, she locked herself in her room when we came to visit her in Mississauga and refused to see us. I remember writing her letters.
Since then, I’ve thought about trying again. I watched my dad put forth a bit of effort by the way of sending Christmas gifts and getting nothing in return. I thought about it a lot, particularly after we moved here, but despite being within spitting distance of the nursing home she was in, again and again, I decided not to. Even though I knew I’d likely be better able to ration with her rejection as an adult, I held back, wary of putting myself out there again. I let time pass, knowing full well that someday I’d get a call and it would be too late to try again. I decided that would have to be okay.
It’s hard not to take rejection personally, particularly from someone that’s supposed to be a part of your life. It helps that I got to know my Ontario cousins, and found out that, despite what I imagined as a kid, they also had next to no relationship with her either. She wasn’t interested in seeing anyone, once she went into the nursing home, and anyone that dared challenge that got an earful and a fresh dose of rejection each time.
When someone like Gania dies, there’s still sadness there. Grief. It’s just a different kind, full of unanswered questions and uncertainty. There’s also hope. Hope that whatever happens next is easier for her than life was. There’s also some relief, knowing that our relationship is no longer one I have to fret about or consider.
I’m sure we had things in common, but it’s nicer not knowing what those are because it means I’m not left comparing myself to her. Maybe they’re good traits. I’ll wear her name on my hospital bracelet when I give birth in November, shoved between Granny Sue’s and my last name, now absent from most of my ID except my birth certificate, which seems like too much hassle to change.
I’ll remember the one lesson she left us with in death.
We all have choices to make, and some of them aren’t easy.
