Full Circle

Late on April 6th, 2009 - my birthday - my father passed away.

On the surface, this would seem like a shitty thing to have happen, but in the context of my life, it actually makes perfect sense.

I was born on April 6, 1973; my brother Danny, April 6 1961; my father-in law Gurmit, April 6, 1943; my brother-in law Raj, April 6, 1973. Between our two immediate families, Nrinder and I have four people that share the same birthday. So if you can accept the impossibility of that, then my father dying on my birthday has some kind of cosmic circularity to it. The man who helped bring me to life transitioned into his new life on the anniversary of my birth. What a gift.

The days leading up to my birthday were hard ones. By the time I got to Napanee, where he lived, on Thursday, Dad was pretty far gone. He hadn't eaten in close to a week, he'd lost a substantial amount of weight, and he was barely able to get up, much less walk anywhere. I knew that he wanted to die at home, away from doctors and hospitals, so I cancelled all my plans for the next four days - including my birthday party - so I could help him do that. Dad's wife, bless her soul, was having a hard time keeping up with him. Nrinder and I knew that by being present we could extend the time he had at home and possibly help him achieve his wish.

But he was a stubborn bugger - a trait that comes directly from being the youngest male in a family of farmers. He's been independent since he was able to walk, working since he was strong enough to shovel earth, aerate wine or stomp on grapes - as if he was going to let anyone 'help' him. Since he retired at age 55, he'd been the picture of health: lean, strong, able, sharp, and tireless. But the cancer  - and particularly all the goddam treatments - did a number on him. When it was clear the chemo wasn't working, my father made a very conscious decision to go. But in spite of his wishes, his body soldiered on. Life, it seems, is a difficult thing to loose, even when you want to.

So for four days I helped keep him comfortable, keep him company. I cried a lot those days, knowing that there wouldn't be more of them and feeling bad that he had to go in such a miserable way. "You don't ever want to go through this," he whispered to me. And he's right. With the cancer spread to his stomach, liver, lungs and kidneys, 'living' had become reduced to lying in bed, too weak too move, to parched to talk, too dehydrated to cry.

I didn't have anything burning to tell him, I just took his hands and felt their heaviness and warmth, noticing for the first time how elegant his hands were. I'd always imagined them as a bit stubby, but up close his fingers were long and his skin soft. Hands that once picked me up by my ears, to my squeals of delight, were still strong and gentle, even after all the sickness.

By Sunday it was clear to us that we couldn't keep him at home anymore. He'd already tried to get up a couple of times on his own, and fallen, and the stress of this had gotten to be too much. We explained to him that we thought he'd be better served in a hospital, with round-the-clock nurse care and better facilities, and once we were sure he understood, he agreed to go. 

As we waited for the paramedics, I took a few moments alone to tell him that I loved him, that I appreciated him, that I forgave him and that I would treasure his memory, and that I was sorry he had to go this way.

After four days of being inside, surrounded by death and sadness, I stood with Nrinder on the front steps of his house and witnessed the first signs of spring. As the paramedics carried my father out of the house, the sun shone warm and brilliant, the finches and blackbirds filled the air with beautiful songs as two doves cuddled in their tree. 

For all the fear of hospitals and doctors, the people at the Lennox and Addington hospital in Napanee treated him like extended family. They forced no more pills on him, hooked him up to no more machines, and moved him as precious little as they had to. They knew they were giving him a comfortable place to go, and treated him with all the respect and care that he could have ever got at home. In fact, the home care nurses were wonderful too - caring, sensitive and quick to respond. It gave me a whole new appreciation for our health care system and how wonderful and precious - and privileged - it is to have so many resources so close at hand and totally independent of an insurance plan. For all the ninety-something visits to doctors and specialists that my father had and all the hundreds of visits to home by nurses, all the equipment that was installed in the house and leant out to make things easier, none of it cost an extra dime. 

The folks at the hospital let us use an emergency room, privately, as they waited to bring him into a room in the ward upstairs. It's there that I said my goodbye. It was Sunday, and my birthday was the following day. I decided to go home because I wanted to be with my mother on my birthday and I didn't think there was anything more that I could to do to make him comfortable. I had planned to come back on Tuesday if necessary, but I knew this time that I wouldn't see him again. 

Before leaving, I asked for a few moments alone. I took his hand and told him again that I loved him and I thanked him for being the man that he was. I told him that I would see him again. And his final words to me, whispered through his sore, parched mouth, were, "you will."

And I did. 

Driving home that night, Nrinder and I saw the most beautiful sunset, orange and purple rays streaking across bands of clouds and flocks of Canadian geese, returning from the south. And I felt a great peace come over me. Though letting go is a sad business, spring is always around the corner.

The following evening - my birthday - I went to visit my mother. After chatting with her for a little bit, I went upstairs to use the washroom. While taking a pee, I distinctly heard a child's voice say my name. I looked behind me and of course found no child, but I took note of the experience because I'm not one for hearing things. Moments later, while sitting on the couch with my mother, I got the call that my father had passed in the company of his wife and her sister-in-law. It happened a five minutes ago.

After seventy-four years of life, and three long years fighting cancer, my father decided to let go of his dying body on April 6th - Danny, Gurmit, Raj and my birthdays. And now, appropriately, his birthday too.

Love beyond sentimentality

The back is bright white, like some fine, unfired porcelain, and it makes a dense, glassy sound as I run my fingers along its ultra smooth surface. The front is a dull, off-pink colour chosen from the muted palette of 70's kids paints. Like some fossil from another time, a child's handprint is embalmed in the plaster, sunk into the middle of the six inch pie plate that molded it. On the back, 'David' is printed in pencil by some unknown adult, but the date is my father's scrawl: 16-06/79. I was six years old.

My father brought it up from his basement last week, his cheeks already sullen, his clothes baggy, his speech slurred from the morphine. "I want you to have this," he said matter-of-factly. 

It's a reminder that we lived together once, before the marriage broke up, before he left – before things got complicated.

We lived close to my elementary school, St. Anthony's. I could walk there in about a minute and would come home for lunch daily, tearing across neighbours' lawns and leaping off the small hill next door; peanut butter and banana sandwich with a side of the Flintstones on channel nine.

When school was done, I would play for a bit, anxiously awaiting the return of my father from work. In those days he managed the LCBO store at the top of our street. Whenever I heard the car pull up, I would run to one of my two hiding spots, between the back of the front door, or inside the closet, and then scare the piss out of him as he entered the house. I got him every time.

When he left home he didn't take much with him, grabbing his tools, wine-making gear and a couple of antiques he'd refinished: a pull-down desk, and a tea cart, both relics from the school teacher my parents bought their first house from. He wants me to have them now.

They're beautful old pieces, but the desk – the desk is evil. Whenever I got a fever as a kid, I would hallucinate. The oval patterns on my curtains became eyes. I'd see a mouth opening and closing in the air, or feel like I was in the booth of a vast court, being judged by some presence sitting at the top of an incredibly high tower. I felt small and vulnerable, perfect prey for the hungry desk in the next room. The desk with the animal feet, waiting patiently for a moment when my parents were asleep and it could waddle over to my room. Its mouth, the folding desktop, snapping up and down, swallowing me whole until my mother would burst in and pull me out. 

The tea cart I found less menacing. I would insist on pushing it around when we had visitors, making as many trips back to the kitchen as my mother would tolerate.

This past weekend my father also gave me his ring, the one he's had since before time. His mother gave it to him as a gift, the day he left Madeira Island. It's a chunky thing with gold art deco styling and a giant red, rectangular ruby in the middle. My six-year old hand might have fit two fingers in it, but today it is snug. She gave it to him as a reminder of her love. And he gives it to me as a reminder of where he came from, and as a hint that he won't be here for much longer.

The hand it once fit is old now, spotted with age and discolored by jaundice, swollen with fluids from a number of medical complications. His organs are struggling as his body eats itself for food. 

I cried on the car ride back this time, not knowing if it's the last time I'll see him. Not sure if there's anything I need to say or want him to know. I've always been a bit quiet around him, but I don't think there's a lot left to say. I'm happy just to be there as much as possible, watching him while he naps, getting him a glass of water, accepting the trickle of gifts as he takes inventory of his things and finds new lives for them. 

A desk; a cart; a ring; a plate: worthless things without the memories that give them purpose, give them meaning. 

My hand dwarfs the imprint I left, but my father returns it to me now not because it was mine, or even because it was made by me.  Despite its age, the plate with my six-year old hand print looks new, like it was kept in a vault. There is no dust, no dirt and hardly a chip. For thirty years he treasured it, kept it safe. And more than any sentimentality its return conjures up, its condition shows me something else, so simple and so powerful. 

He loves me. 

Healing the heart is an afterthought.

I'm having de ja vu.

When I was 11, the same year my dad left my mother and me, my brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was twenty-three at the time. Although he made a good go of it, the cancer caught up with him, spreading to his liver. The final few months were terrible. His muscles wasted away along with his patience and joy of life. His belly swelled up like those of the kids you see on TV - he literally starved to death. My brother Danny, who for my whole life was a large, loved-filled, creative and nurturing man, transformed into a living skeleton in front of my eyes. We shared a wall between our bedrooms and I remember coming to hate the sound of his knocking. No longer loving and gracious, I watched chemotherapy suck the life and joy out of him, and morphine render him irritable and spacey. In my final words to him, I made a confession: I *did* eat the extra piece of cake that he suspected me of. But he was already gone. Comatose. Brain dead. 

It took me quite a while to work through that experience. I was thirteen at the time and I turned the next five years of my life into a hazy binge of drugs and alcohol. By the time I was eighteen I had partied so hard that friends and family alike were worried about my health and future. 

Then I found the drama program in my high school, and like some kind of unintentional group therapy, I found an outlet for all my pain. I started writing and performing in earnest, and spent a good deal of my time playing guitar and writing on my little Mac SE, which my dad helped me buy.

I'm at my dad's house now, 22 years after my brother died, and I'm watching someone else that I love waste away. I wrote in this blog earlier about how he had cancer in his prostate and how our trip to Portugal together was timed so that we could do that together before he got any worse, god forbid. 

While we were in Portugal, he showed me a large, death-looking black mole on his arm. He was waiting for test results, but I knew what it was instantly. I let him believe it could be a cyst or some other benign skin thing. 

The day we got back to Canada, dad heard back from the hospital - the mole was in fact an aggressive melanoma skin cancer tumour, and its immediate removal was needed. 

Almost two years later, a dozen surgeries, radiation and chemo, the cancer has spread to my father's liver. Doctors give him a few months to live. Already he's lost a lot of weight, is weak, irritable and spacey. This, in contrast to the workhorse he normally is - happy really only when he's outside moving rocks and hammering things. Dad has always been in his element working eight hours straight in the beating sun with no sunblock. He has said repeatedly throughout that the hardest thing for him to deal with was not being 'sick', but being stationary. 

There's a lot of things going through my head these days. I wonder about all those sunblock-less hours in the hot sun and whether that had anything to do with it. I wonder about his diet, which is rich in fruits, but also in packaged foods and artificial sweetener. I wonder about all the stress he took on as a senior manager at the LCBO in the 80's. I wonder about all the wine he drank and the supposed miracle effects of the red pigment. I wonder about how someone so healthy could become so ill, so quickly.

And I especially wonder about this triple-edged sword of surgery-radiation-chemo - the standard weapons of cancer-fighting the world over: How was my father supposed to get better by having his lymph nodes (which aid the immune system) torn out, his body blasted with cancer-causing radiation and then pumped full of highly toxic chemicals? I know this system works for a lot of people, but I wonder what role your outlook plays in your ability to survive it. 

For my father, the surgery-radiation-chemo cycle may have extended his life by a few months, but it has also sapped him of the will to live. The 100 or so visits to doctors, the endless tests, the painful recoveries, side-effects, blod-clotting, and the terrible, soul-sucking effects of intense radiation and chemo treatments have left him broken and miserable. And after all that, guess what? He's still going to die.

I did try to offer some alternatives. I offered to go with him to a sweat lodge, or put him in touch with a dear friend who is a holistic nutritionist that specializes in cancer care. I offered to fly out with him to Canada's only holistic oncology centre in Vancouver. In the end though, my dad's faith in the medical system was unshakeable.  

I obviously don't have any answers here. Who knows if a different diet, lifestyle, sunblock or anything at all could have avoided the fate my father now faces. But I have to think that an approach to healing that focused on the spiritual and mental dimensions of disease - in addition to the physical - that helped him to cope, and gave him hope, even if it couldn't save his life, might have at least made his final days more bearable. 

So, I'm here doing what I can, which for the most part is just being present. I've seen this all before. And unlike with my brother, my dad's knocking isn't making me angry, I don't need drugs and alcohol to cope, and it's not going to take me years of pain or drama classes to work through it. My father and I mended our relationship years ago. I don't have a last confession to make this time. Just a little lament that what we call 'health care' so frequently misses where the real healing needs to happen: in the heart.

When push comes to shove, what would YOU do?

You're just sitting on the streetcar, passively people watching, phasing in and out of daydreams, and next thing you know, two woman are bashing each other's faces in, right on top of you.

In the moment, you don't really know what to do.

Today, without thinking, I got involved.

Rewind to a few minutes earlier, a young white girl, maybe sixteen or so, gets in a huff about how a late 30's east asian woman 'sat on her stuff', when she sat down at one of the few available seats on the crowded, rush-hour streetcar. The girl yells at her and starts pulling macho crap I've only ever heard come from young men before. 'Who said you could touch my stuff, you bitch? You wanna go right now? Me and you outside?'

Not taking any crap from a mouthy teen, the woman explained that the seats were for everybody and she couldn't keep her bag there.

Taking that as a taunt, the girl's friend (also white) jumped in to further harass the woman, chastising her and hurling out racist slurs.

The woman, now trembling with anger, told them they have no right to talk to her like that and refused to budge. Which led the first girl to physically shove her off the seat.

The next few moments are a bit of a blur as the woman got up and started punching the girl in the face, and then her friend joined in and they both started beating on the woman.

I immediately threw myself into the fray, and with the help of Janet (who I know and just happened to be in the seat behind them), managed to pull the two sides apart and appeal for calm.

They stopped fighting. My appeal for calmness, however, didn't get very far.

The driver, somehow unaware that people were screaming and fighting, kept driving.

White girl, now feeling victimized and sporting a swelling lip, ramped up her racist barrage. Myself and Janet told her off, but she kept going, emboldened by all the attention.

The woman, crying and red with anger, again asserted herself, telling the girl she needed to be taught a lesson. The girl went off on it threatening to get off the streetcar with her and beat her up. 'You better watch when you get of bitch, we're getting off at the same stop and I'm gonna fuck you up.'

I asked the woman if she was ok or needed anything. She decided to call the cops on her cell phone since the driver obviously wasn't going to do anything.

Even while the woman was on the phone, with the police, the white girl continued her tough talk, threatening her, calling her racist names. By this point, other passengers were speaking up and telling the girl to shut up. Her friend, worried about the police, took her aside and tried to calm her down.

I went up with the woman to tell the driver what was going on and that the cops were on their way.

A few passengers at the front expressed support for the woman and thanked me for challenging the girl.

The cops showed up and myself and another man about my age gave a quick statement. We were worried that the girls would lie and make it look like the woman just started wailing on them for no reason.

The streetcar left with the woman in the back seat of a cop car and the two girls getting grilled by two cops on the street.

Back at home now, the whole incident has me a bit shaken.

The two young girls will likely be charged with assault. It's not a good feeling to think that I helped incarcerate two young women, as absolutely obnoxious and racist as they were. Criminal justice isn't going to help them one bit - if anything, it will make them worse.

And as for the woman, having myself been the victim of bullying in the past, I totally understand the urge to strike back, to show that weak, insecure fool that you can't be messed with.

But I can't help but wonder if the whole fight could have been avoided if the woman had just gone up to the driver and asked him to call security from the outset. And heck, since I was sitting right beside her, and witnessed the whole vulgar escalation, why didn't *I* go up and ask the driver to call security?

The whole thing was disturbing on a number of levels. The race dynamics of two young white women bullying and taunting an east asian woman, twice their age. The woman beating on a girl half her age. The streetcar driver who did nothing and took no serious note of the major commotion. And the silence that most people kept during the whole incident.

What would you do?

Would you have challenged the girls earlier and weakened their perceived power over the woman?

Would you have offered to switch seats in order to create a buffer between them?

Would you have gone up to the driver and asked for security to intervene?

Or would you just move seats or do your best to ignore them?

In the future, I'm going to speak out sooner, and remove myself from the privilege of being a passive observer.

If anything, it might help avoid an ugly, unnecessary fight between strangers.

Reboot

I started this blog in May 2007 as a way to share my thoughts about a trip to Portugal I was about to make with my father. I posted fairly faithfully for that trip, but then turned my blogging attempts to Facebook, rather than keeping this updated.

Following the Facebook privacy bru-ha-ha of this week, it's clear to me that posting content on Facebook is really not a great option. They have, on more than one occasion, changed their user policy in such a way that insinuated that they could, potentially, own the content that you as a user freely post to the site. They backed off, again, of course, but the ongoing threat is an important one to take note of. So I have. And I'm going to gradually stop using Facebook for posting new content. Particularly my writing endeavors.

Instead, I'm going to reboot this blog and try to update it several times a week. In it, I'll be sharing personal stories, ranting about politics and providing my own slanted analysis of ongoing local and world events. 

'Entre as ondas' is Portuguese for 'between the waves'. For me, this is that moment of stillness between undulations, where a wave is neither crawling up the shore nor retreating: a chance to stop, think, reflect and share. 

Self-defense VS self-restraint

Israel has been under guerilla rocket attacks from the Gaza strip for years, but the number and frequency increased when Hamas took power, through elections, in 2006. 

This 'security threat' is the fundamental rationale used by Israel and its defenders to justify the current military incursion into the Gaza strip. It is, they say, 'self-defense'.

But applying even the laziest amount of scrutiny to these claims makes them implausible at best, and probably more like complete nonsense.

1) Israel repeatedly states that its issue is with Hamas, and not regular Gazans. That this is a military operation, aimed at military targets, with the goal of destroying Hamas' ability to fire rockets at Israel. 

But Hamas has no army, no fighter jets, no tanks, no bases. Hamas is a political organization that has a guerilla militant wing. So, when Israel says that it is targeting 'Hamas infrastructure', what they really mean is they are targeting pretty much anything at all - including hospitals, universities, a UN school, police stations, residences - nothing has been spared. The result, not surprisingly, is soaring civilian casualties. As of today, there are 700 dead, 3,085 injured with the majority being completely unaffiliated to Hamas. High numbers of women and children to boot. The cities are in tatters, hospitals are completely overrun, medical and food supplies scarce. 

Israel is essentially waging a full-on military WAR - with the largest, most advanced, US-backed military in the middle east - against an almost totally defenseless, poor, over-crowded, malnourished, civilian population. 

2) Israel says that Hamas is using civilians as a 'shield' and that's why so many are being killed. 

The reality is that Gazans are not killing themselves with Israeli bombs and missiles - it's the Israeli Defense Forces that are doing the killing. Israel plans its attacks knowing FULL WELL that there will be heavy, heavy civilian casualties. Unless they've invented a 'terrorist-seeking' missile that can somehow distinguish a mother from an armed combatant, when a bomb drops on a house, chances are everyone inside it is going to die. This kind of blatant disregard for human life is not only cold and callous, it is a war crime. 

3) Israel insists that it wants peace with the Palestinians and looks forward to a day when they can live, side-by-side, in peace. 

But how could this possibly be? If the goal was to stop Hamas 'terrorists' by wiping out 700 mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, cousins, friends, lovers, wives, husbands, grandparents and leaders, sorry to break it to you Israel, but you're only adding fuel to the fire of hatred. What kind of lasting peace can be brokered with so much innocent blood taken so brutally?

4) Israel insists that it is defending itself legitimately and is quick to cast-off international criticism as 'anti-semitism'. 

The fact is that Israel is a state - a country. And although they are the world's only Jewish state, the Jewish religion has absolutely nothing at all to do with the running of the state of Israel or its military - thank God for that. Instead, the state of Israel uses the very real existence of anti-semitism as a shield to protect itself from scrutiny. 

It should come as no surprise to Israelis that when their government and military do terrible things in the name of security, and at the expense of hundreds of lives, that people are going to get angry and are going to criticize them for it. Taking that criticism seriously, and changing actions accordingly, is a fundamental aspect of participating in a global diplomatic community. And if Israel can't take criticism from anybody, then really, why should anybody support them?

5) Israel claims that it does not have genocidal ambitions. I believe this is true. I don't believe the state of Israel wants to systemically exterminate millions of muslims or arabs the way the Nazis systematically destroyed jews. The comparisons to Nazis and the holocaust are highly disproportionate as well as offensive. 

But there is validity to the outrage that people feel about how Israel has come to cheapen Palestinian lives. That a democratic country, formed out of the terror of World War Two, and claiming to have ambitions for peace can, in the name of 'security', act with such impunity. The Gaza situation amplifies this total disregard for life because the scale of the destruction and loss of life is so completely disproportionate to so-called instigating incidents of rocket attacks on Israeli towns, which as far as I can tell, have killed fewer than 20 people. 

Israel is not genocidal. It is paranoid, fearful, overzealous and wildly, widly out of control. And if it really does want peace and security, then perhaps its time that it learned a hard and fast lesson in self-restraint.

1) Reign in the army. The more Israel tries to fight guerilla groups like Hamas, the more those groups will grow in power. To continue pretending that the state of Israel is under any real danger from a bunch of angry, in-fighting, disorganized, undisciplined mobsters makes Israel look like a ruthless joke. 

As Israel is the real power broker in the region, has the only nuclear weapons and an army powerful and large enough to take on all of its neighbours, it is in a sense, a regional super-power and needs to reign in its wild escapade. Its army and weaponry should be used only when a real army shows up, seeking to mass-murder its citizens and lay waste to its civil infrastructure.

2) Let in the UN. If the real intention of the state of Israel is to live in peace with its neighbours, then it better start figuring out how to stop the petty fighting with militant groups and start working with the international community to help broker a mutually acceptable deal for a free and sovereign Palestinian state. They must allow the UN to take over the security of Palestinians and they must be willing to make concessions in order to move the process forward.

3) Take down the apartheid wall. Call it whatever you want, but Israel must stop the total strangulation of economic and people movement in and out of the West Bank. As long as the wall remains standing it will continue to be a poignant symbol of repression. 

4) Let the response meet the deed. If the problem is guerilla rocket attacks from inside Gaza, then Israel needs to rethink how it can bring those responsible to justice in a court system, and if it can't do that, then it needs to accept that until a lasting peace can be brokered, its border towns are going to be dangerous places. Reigning death and destruction on innocents will bring no terrorists to justice, it will only give them more fodder.

As long as Israel continues to bomb, murder, and repress Palestinians, extremist groups will have all the anger and hate they need to continue their vengeful campaigns. Israel must recognize that it can not win a war against a guerilla group and it must do everything within its immense power to show restraint and to prove that it respects the Palestinian people enough to help foster the atmosphere that will lead to a truly independent, Palestinian state. 

And when that statehood is achieved, those responsible for attacking Israeli civilians will have to pay a price for sabotaging peace and spilling innocent blood. They will do so in Palestinian courts, under Palestinian laws, set by Palestinian people. As it should be.

If Palestinians were Irish

Back in the 70's, Britain cut off all of Northern Ireland by sea and land, allowing nothing to get in and no one to get out. What followed were months of food shortages, power-outs, and deaths due to lack of even basic medical supplies. The stated intention was to strangle the resources of the terrorist IRA, who were increasing in power and winning legitimate elections through their political wing. 

Ships with humanitarian aid were sent back. Foreign aid workers were detained and humiliated by British police before being deported. 

The IRA, emboldened by the sense of outrage, launched a campaign of bombings in London and other UK cities and Northern Irish border towns. A dozen or so people were killed, mostly civilians.

Britain, outraged by the bombings, decided to wipe out the IRA for good, launching a seven day air strike on Belfast. In the process of targeting IRA 'militants', they launched rockets into the Belfast Cathedral on a sunday during prayer time, killing many and injuring dozens. They bombed most of Queen's University, destroyed every police station and several hospitals. For a week straight, Britain launched some 700 sorties, bombing every last bit of civilian infrastructure in Northern Ireland, killing 400 people including whole families, children, women, protestants and catholics alike. 

The world was outraged. Millions of Irish emigrants in North America took to the streets, labour unions held general strikes, images of the queen and the union jack were burned. It became known as Bloody December. Movies have been made, and dozens of songs written. Irish Rockers U2 put out a whole album in remembrance. 

Of course, none of that happened in Ireland in the 70's. It's happening now in Gaza. 

How will the world remember the actions of Israel this past week? And who will write the moving ballad to remember the 400 people who've already lost their lives?