Illustration by Alex Siklos
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The day before Dad died, I picked up a book about the Group of Seven for him in the hospital gift shop. I couldn’t take my eyes off one image: a pine tree bent on its side, green branches flailing in the wind like a wild dancer. Beyond it, the waves of Georgian Bay lashed out in strokes of white, blue and ochre.
“Isn’t that lovely,” said my father, as he pulled the book out of the bag. He was in hospital with late-stage lung cancer.
“Look at this one Dad,” I said, finding my favourite: “Look at the colours. You can feel them move.”
“Smashing,” he said. “Those painters captured the beauty of the North. The tragedy was when that fellow Tom Thomson’s canoe turned up empty.”
“It did?” My dad, born in Britain, knew a lot more than me about Canadian history.
Days before at home, we lay side by side on my parents’ bed. His short-term memory was shot so I asked him about the Second World War. He joined the London Scottish Regiment at age 19 and went to war laying landlines for the advancing British brigades to communicate back to headquarters.
“You learned to live with fear,” he said, recalling how he went out to fix telephone lines on Pegasus Bridge under intense shelling during the 1944 D-day invasion of Normandy. “There was a bridge over the canal and when you landed on the coast you had to get over it. Naturally, the Germans were shelling it day and night.”
One time Dad got back to his jeep and the engine was blown out. Another time one of his men was struck and died on the drive back.
“How did you fall asleep?” I asked.
“I just lay down. One thing I did learn was how to sleep anywhere. It could be on a blanket on the ground or in a trench. You just hoped it wasn’t in six inches of water.”
But in the hospital, Dad can’t sleep. Monitors squawk and an IV bloodies his arm. He won’t lay back. Up he goes, feet to floor, head in hands.
“Where are my trousers?” he asks crossly, getting caught in the pull of wires as he stands up. “I want to go home. I’ve had enough.”
“Dad, you’re sick and you can’t go home.”
I help him back into bed and hold his hands. When I was a child, they always radiated heat. He never wore gloves when shovelling snow. I’d run over from the street, take off my wool mitts, which were wet from snow play and place my hands in his. They were there to warm mine. Now his hands are cold.
Mom arrives with Dad’s hymn books. We sing the hymns he sung to me as a child.
He’s working so hard to breathe now, crackling on the inhale, grunting as his stomach pushes the air out. Sometimes he sees into me, sometimes his eyes are glassy.
I sing him the songs I sung my children.
“Skinnamarink y dinky dink
Skinnamarink y doo
I love you!”
He rallies, clapping his hands to the tempo, tapping his feet, and waving an exuberant arm like a conductor. I know he doesn’t want us to be afraid. But I’m terrified.
Dad died just before dawn.
Not long after, I began seeing and feeling his presence. Strange happenings that I interpreted as his clever farewells.
The first occurrence was for my mother – she went to lunch at a home in Toronto with many Group of Seven original paintings on the walls. I was astounded. We had all seen the book I bought but it felt like my dad wanted Mom to see the real thing.
On my first day back at the office, I learned that musicians Sharon, Lois and Bram were coming out of retirement to perform at the children’s rehabilitation hospital where I work. I almost fell off my chair. Skinnamarink, the lyrics I sang to Dad on the night he died, was their signature song. It seemed Dad wanted me to have front-row seats.
On the appointed day, I slipped into the back of the audience. You know how as a kid you believe your parents can make anything happen? That’s what their appearance felt like. I didn’t have the nerve to wait for them to sing Skinnamarink. “Touché!” I whispered to Dad on my way out.
One night I couldn’t sleep. Why didn’t I visit Dad more? Why didn’t I take him back to the publishing company he worked at? I was in a terrible state when I felt an odd sensation of heat on my stomach, like a warm hand.
I saw myself as a child flying through the air and remembered how the greens of trees and grass had blurred in my vision. Dad used to hold one of my wrists and one ankle and swing me around in circles, then deposit me in a heap of giggles.
It felt like he was sending me a message: “Don’t be sad.”
I fell into a deep sleep and never ruminated on regrets again.
Louise Kinross lives in Toronto.