Pics: Part Two

   Going through old photo albums has been an ongoing process lately. I had an initial burst of energy around this when we were headed west to scatter my Dad's ashes. There were pics I wanted to be able to share with people along the way so I took more than a cursory glance at the albums before we left.
   We have been back for awhile now and I have been walking past the pile of stuff, photo albums included, which ended up at our place after my Dad's apartment was emptied out. In an effort to organize and make some sense of all this I have been sorting and paying much more attention to things than I've previously had time to do.


L-R, Aunt Eileen and my Mum in the "Devil's Cauldron" pond

   It has been an enlightening process. I am sad that I never had the opportunity to sit down with my Dad before he died and go through them. Many of the old photos related directly to some of the stories he used to tell me about the olden days and it would have been wonderful to have sat down with him and actually looked at some of the things he'd only been telling me stories about. At the same time, I would have been able to ask him some of my remaining unanswered questions.

   I wrote about this in an earlier blog but one of his favourite stories to tell me was the one about the Banff Springs Hotel and the famous golf course there. He was particularly fond of the fourth hole, the "Devil's Cauldron", as it is known. He would always describe it in great detail, even to his description of the fellow in the boat, the "Maid of the Missed", who patrolled the huge pond in front of the green, returning missed shots to their owners (for a price). I was only able to imagine what this hole looked like though. Then, just recently, after we got back from out west, I happened to be looking through one of his old albums and realized there were pictures of my Dad, Grandad and somebody else playing golf. One of the pics was a far away shot of the Banff Springs hotel and I then was able to figure out that the pics were actually of the Devil's Cauldron! I then was able to find pictures of my mum and my Aunt Eileen wading in the pond in front of the green. My best guess was that these were taken in the mid- to late forties.
   An album of my mum's was kind of a combination photo/scrapbook album and contained many pictures of her  when she was a law clerk for the RCAF during the war. Many of the photos were of her and the other clerks and their friends hanging out. Several of them pre-dated my Dad and were of her and the occasional boyfriend. This, of course, was very enlightening, imagining my Mum with romantic attachments which didn't include, at the time, my Dad!
   What I found in the scrapbook section was even more revealing. I found many poems in my Mum's handwriting, poems about love lost and the War. Hard to say whether they were poems of her own or simply poems she'd found somewhere and wanted to remember. What I do know is that I have always had a fascination with poetry and I'm thinking it might have been hereditary...
   Probably the most interesting thing I found in the scrapbook section was a an RCAF itinerary she'd been given with very precise instructions as to accompanying the remains of a compatriot by train from Winnipeg to Kelowna, B.C. There were instructions as to assisting the family with the death of their loved one, funeral home arrangements and the like.
   I was totally unaware that my mum had done anything like this but not surprised. When I did the math, however, I realized that this had been a responsibility she'd been given when she was about twenty! I couldn't even imagine the weight of this kind of a task when I was twenty or even the age I am now. I do know, though, that those were war years and things simply were different, you did what you had to do and this was all part of the battle. Finding this bit of documentation meant so much to me.


Andy Bathgate and family members

   One of my mum's best friends back in the forties and fifties was a girl named Verah Bathgate. They had been in the RCAF together and the album was full of pictures of the two of them. One of the pictures included amongst these was a picture of Verah's brother, Andy, their mum and, I think, a couple of Andy's nieces. What really caught my attention was that Andy was one of the top NHL players of his day and always one of my favourites. Until yesterday, I didn't even know this picture existed.
   I found pictures of my mum and her family vacationing in the mountains, in front of the Chateau Lake Louise and, of course, the prerequisite pic in front of Lake Louise itself. These were places Doralyn and I had just returned from and it was poignant knowing that we had just been only paces away from paths my relatives had trod almost seventy years ago.

Aunt Eileen at Banff Springs Hotel

   Flipping through old photo albums is like watching through a time machine. You see young people growing older as each page turns. I saw pictures of my mum as a toddler, as a teenager, a nurse, a new mother, a sparkling wife, a loved neighbour. I also saw a picture of her only about a month before she passed.
   I watched my Dad go through all the different phases of his life as well. I saw him as a very young boy, with his brother and sister and Mum and Dad, on beaches and in boats, as a sailor in the Navy, as a championship-winning football player, as the insurance man, as a widower and then again as a brand-new husband. I saw him transform into a father, a grandfather and then a great-grandfather.


My sister, Jayne, and I. You're welcome, Jayne!

   Speaking of my Dad as a new husband, there were pictures of Jean, my step-mum, when I first met her. From there, many pictures of a happy couple with friends and relatives over the years, enjoying their years together. It was possible to follow them from place to place as they moved around Canada. And they aged right before your eyes, right into grey hair and wheelchairs. And then my Dad as a widower again.
   Via saved school pictures, I watched many of my cousins grow up.
   There had been a book of family pictures which had always had a prominent position on Dad and Jean's coffee table. I found myself flipping through this and found pictures taken of myself and my ex-wife, Lori, the two of us sitting on the couch in Dad's living room. I turned a couple more pages and all of the sudden there's pictures of me and Doralyn, sitting on the same couch. And, bizarrely, I am wearing the same shirt!
   The difficulty in all this, though, is that as much as these people all seem so alive and vibrant many of them are no longer with us. I remember seeing one picture of Dad and Jean and a handful of the neighbours from Oakridge and, out of the seven or eight people pictured, only one was still alive. It is a bittersweet process, to be sure.

Dad and Jean, happy together.

   I am missing some pictures. There are pictures I am clearly able to recollect having seen as a kid that are nowhere to be found. It would be wonderful to see the pictures from when my Mum and Dad honeymooned with Marg and Ralph Green but I just can't find them. I had no chance to really talk to Dad about them, they just didn't seem important at the time. Hopefully they are floating around somewhere in one of his kids' storage cupboards or something like that and will pop up again.
   There is something wonderful about the digital picture age--it is how all of these images have appeared on these screens. The instantaneous ability to take a picture and, literally in the next three seconds, have it posted on the internet is pretty heady stuff. At the same time, you are not able to hold these pictures in your hand, you're not able to flip through pages of them, and you are not able to feel the ghosts of all who perhaps held the camera or, themselves, were the subject of the picture.
  
  
  
              

Common Ground

   My mother was Dorothy Ruth Baker. She was born Dorothy Ruth Harris, though, and I think it's likely I've seen this name actually more often than her married name. I've had the opportunity several times over the last few months to sit down and go through all the old family photograph albums and have seen writings of hers and pictures of her where she has either signed her maiden name or it has been written there for her.
   My mother passed away in 1973, from a drug overdose. She had taken several weeks worth of sleeping pills and antidepressants all at once and died in her sleep. This was not the first time she had overdosed and she had been treated for depression for several years by the time she actually passed.

My Mum

   I was twenty when my mum died and had gotten to the point where I was essentially taking care of myself. I believe my Dad and my brother Bob were also doing the same thing. It almost seemed to me at the time that her dying was the only logical conclusion to all the things that had been going on in her life up to that point.
   She was cremated and we had a memorial service for her at the church we attended. Her ashes ended up at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery here in London. I had the occasion to drive by the cemetery quite often over the intervening years and I would look at the building that housed the crematorium and I always assumed her ashes were in there somewhere.
   About eight or nine years ago, on a whim, I decided to stop in at the cemetery and find out exactly where her ashes were so that I could see their location. What I discovered was that her ashes were not in the crematorium at all, they had actually been interred in the Common Ground section of the cemetery. I was given a map to this section but was told that they could only tell me approximately where in that section her ashes had been buried. In a subsequent trip, I was told there was actually a small metal tag with a number on it denoting a more precise location in Common Ground and I was able to find this but only after much digging around through the underbrush beneath a hedge.
   This discovery opened up many questions for me and re-awakened some strong emotions at the same time. I think I had somehow compartmentalized all that had gone on with my mother in my head and tucked it away somewhere, conveniently. This new enlightenment as to the disposition of her remains brought stuff back out in the open all over again.

Mum and Dad on their wedding day.

   I had always thought of common ground as the place where all the poor people ended up, all the unidentifiable bodies and where the socially rejected people went as a last resort. And this was where I found my mother's remains.
   For whatever reason, as a family we had never really talked about my Mum's final wishes and did not discuss her final resting place. It was only in my head that I assumed I knew where this was. I do remember that, at the time, we were involved with the Memorial Society in London. The Memorial Society was, and still is, a service that offered an alternative to lavish and expensive funerals. What this meant at the time was that Dad and a family friend actually had to go down to the Memorial Society and build the container my mum's body would be cremated in. Everything about my world seemed surreal at the time and the fact that my Dad had to do this seemed only part and parcel with everything else.


Common Ground in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery

   Thirty years later, as an adult, suddenly I felt as though I needed and wanted to know how all this had happened this way. One day not that long ago I had the opportunity to bring up the subject with Dad. I had been wondering for awhile as to the best way to talk to him about it, it's not the usual kind of thing that pops up naturally in a conversation. Finally, one morning after golf, I was able to interject one of those "oh, by the way" kinds of questions. We had been talking, I think, about his own funeral wishes and I asked him about my mum. I told him what I had discovered myself by going to the cemetery.
   He also was unaware that her ashes had ended up in common ground, though he was not surprised. He then went on to explain in more detail their involvement with the Memorial Society at the time and how things worked back in those days.


Where my Mum's ashes are, 7 to 8 feet left of the bench in the above photo

   More than anything, though, he said that it had always been my mother's wish that there not be anywhere or anything marking her final resting place. She had felt strongly that her physical body was of no consequence to anyone and didn't want her remains to end up being a focal point. I suppose it is a bit of a cliché, but she was happy to live on in people's hearts and memories, as much as anything else.
   To me, this sufficed as an explanation. And, knowing my mother, it made sense. At the time I discovered the whereabouts of her remains, I was all for having them dug up and either re-interred, with a marker, or scattered somewhere appropriate. A little time removed from the discovery and the recent death of my Dad, though, has given me a slightly different perspective on honouring final wishes. So I strongly suspect my Mum's ashes will stay right where they've been for almost forty years now and that's really okay with me. It is as it should be.
  

Last Words

   I have been rear-ended and t-boned while driving a couple of times in recent years. In each and every case I had a split-second to realize something nasty was about to happen. I am trying very hard to remember what the final thought or word was that was going through my mind just before impact.
   I'm pretty sure it was an obscenity of one kind or another and I'm thinking it was either a "s__t" or a "f__k". Okay, who am I kidding, it was a "f__k". Okay, who am I kidding, it was a "F__K!!!!"
   I also instinctively knew that none of these collisions were going to be of the life-threatening variety.
   Today, as I was driving along the ever-present Oxford Street, I wondered what I might utter should I ever see certain death approaching in the rear view mirror, should I be stopped (as a bad example) at a stoplight behind a Mack truck, only to have another Mack truck bearing down on me at 140 kph, no brakes, and completely out of control.
   I am very terribly afraid I would stick with the old, tried-and-true "F__K!!" How terrible a way to end a life, though, with that being your final utterance?!
   I promised myself then that I would try and train myself, if at all possible, to come up with something more appropriate, should I ever actually be faced with this situation. Something necessarily brief, yet more meaningful than "F__K!!
   This is not easy to do, and much of it is dependent on the length of time you have.
   If you have a second or less, you are pretty well looking at one word, two at the most. Unless you actually have time to say "GOOD-bye", perhaps "Bye" would do the trick. And it kind of seems appropriate. I suppose you could mention the name of a deity, like "God" or "Christ". These words, however, have taken on the modern meaning of being epithets and might be misconstrued, at the time. Perhaps you could blurt out the name of someone you love, in the hopes that this person's name is something short like "Sue" and not "Wilhelmina".

   If all else fails, maybe even just a positive word, like "Love" or "Beauty", might do the trick as a last word. "Peace" and "Hope" pop into mind, as well. What about "Sex" as a final, wonderful thought? Just try and stay away from words like "Self-fulfillment" and "Reliability", to be on the safe side.
   While "researching" this blog (by which I mean going to Google and typing in "last words"), I discovered several sites you could go to and read well-known (generally) people's last words. Many of them are in the "skull" up above. These are always fun and interesting to read but are generally deathbed oriented and perhaps thought-out beforehand. Some of them seem somewhat hallucinatory, almost as if the mind had gone somewhere and left the body behind. Obviously, these are not the kind of "last words" I have been talking about here.  If, however,  you'd like to spend any time trying to come up with something meaningful to pass on to your loved ones (or whoever happens to be there) in your final moments, then please feel free.
   For me, just in case it is true that your whole life flashes before you when you die, I don't really want to get to the end of watching all that only to have it end with a "F__K!!"