Lloyd - On National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

My writing group gathered today and wrote from prompts that were to help us think about Indigenous folk on this National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. One prompt I had offered was “The First Time I Ever Met an Indian.” I chose to phrase it that way because we are all on the old side, and when we were young that is the word we used for First Nations people, so it might trigger memories. This is what I wrote. 

I'm not sure what was the first time I ever met an Indian, but I think probably my first native friend was Lloyd Gladstone. He was certainly the first gay Indian I met, and although I was not yet out of the closet as a bisexual woman, I was very grateful for that attribute in him. 

Lloyd was a lovely man. Soft-spoken, soft, self-deprecating smile, kind and gentle. Also very smart. I was 14 when I met him, and he was somewhere around twenty (with a much older man as his boyfriend). I ran away at 13 and had returned to very different circumstances than the ones I left. I had much more freedom, and I stayed over at my boyfriend's house in the West End frequently, a recently condemned house with mushrooms growing on the walls in the kitchen from the leakage down from the toilet. We were a band of hippies, only one of us working, until Lloyd appeared. I was madly in love with the beautiful Peter, his long flowing hair and his wide knowledge of literature and civilisation, his deep intelligence and terribly broken self, his habit of getting addicted to heroin. 

Lloyd told me one day that I was smarter than Peter, that I could have a better life, could value myself more deeply than I had ever guessed I might.

Many years later when a friend of mine was in rehab I visited him and to my astonishment, there was Lloyd, his mentor. Lloyd himself had suffered greatly in his youth and struggled with alcohol addiction all his life. At the time, he was several years clean and working for Together We Can. It was such a joy to reconnect with him and to see him doing so well.

I was talking with Lloyd in a park one day a few years later, when he had taken back to drink, and a First Nations woman came over to speak with him. She was much younger than him and was reverent in her approach, seeing him not just as gay and hurt and wonderful Lloyd, but a well respected and deeply loved elder.

The last time I saw Lloyd, he was living in the Downtown Eastside above the Ovaltine café. He wasn't drinking at the time, but he was wretchedly poor and his health was not good. He wasn't receiving enough money every month to feed himself, and he was ill and fragile. I bought him lunch, a bit worried about offering because I didn't want to offend him. He allowed me to give that to him, and I was very grateful. We ate at the Ovaltine and talked a long time. He could only eat half of his sandwich, and wrapped up the other half to take home. 

Lloyd was an anchor in my life, one of the very few people who had known me over so many periods of my sleeping and awakening. He never stopped being a gentle and brilliant and beautiful man and although I don't like ending on a down note, I say shame on us, shame on us for putting so little value on that man's life, on any one's life, that when they are hurt or ill and can't support themselves, we give them so little that all we are doing is letting them slowly die. Not our fault. We supported him. Where was his family? Why didn’t he work? 

For shame. For shame.

I love you, Lloyd. You are my well respected and deeply loved elder. Rest in peace.

“Fruits and Nuts” - A Poem About Vic's Death

 

My brother died almost three years ago. He was in his fifties, but he was the youngest in our family when I was growing up, so I can't help thinking of him still as my baby brother. In this season that year, I was visiting him, the first time I was able to after Covid began and the last time I ever saw him. Sadness has been coming up a lot.

I read Hugh O’Donnell's prose poem "Fruits and Nuts" this morning and the last paragraph gave me a breath of insight that made me think a little differently about my grief. Probably just for the moment. This is what came of it.

Fruits and Nuts

 

"We love the flowering stage…

But how quickly we lose interest as their petals fade"

Hugh O'Donnell

 

Or maybe look at it this way

my little brother

 

Your death not incomprehensible

not anomalous

not outrage

not shock

 

But fulfillment

bud into flower

flower stretching open    soliciting

a beetle's caress

petals falling away

and the slow unseen swelling of the fruit

 

You are the fruit which nourishes 

even as you loose your hold and drop

 

I yearn for every age of you

and every age you never reached

I yearn for the fresh return of you

renewal of you

unharmed unblemished

free to live in confidence and joy

 

You are the fruit that rests among the grasses

your sweet scent inhaled from afar

from your seeds new trees are born

from your memory new tenderness and truth

Image: A black and white picture of two little white boys. The one on the left is Guy. He has his arm around his younger brother's neck. That little one is Vic.

Poem: In My Grandmother’s Trunk I Found

Wrote a poem today.

I'm taking an online class for writing parts of our lives into story -- finding the stories in our lives. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, yet I am surprised, the prompts and discussion, and the writing itself, are invoking waves of emotion, unexpressed but unsuppressed, so my demeanour no doubt has sorrow in it.

The background to this is that sleep has been REALLY bad this week, and I’m stressed over my very complicated housing subsidy re-application. Combine that with the unexpected vulnerability in class, and you get this poem.

The prompt was "In my Grandmother’s Trunk I Found."

I like it when a poem offers itself so willingly like this. It just tumbled out, each line prompting the next, an entirely inner-audio experience. I hear the prompt, I hear the response, I write the response, I hear the response to that.

In my Grandmother’s Trunk I Found

a small and suffering sound

and when that sound awoke

I began to choke

and when that sound unfurled

it gave to me the world

and when the world I saw

it held my old gran-ma

It reminds me of an Irish poem I knew as a kid. My poem is nowhere near as magical, but the shifts are similarly odd and when I first reread mine I could feel the tempo of this Irish verse romping with the words. Here is the poem, recited to me by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem many years ago.

The Man of Double Deed

There was a man of double deed
Who sowed his garden full of seed,
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to fall,
Like birds it was upon a wall,
When the birds began to fly,
'Twas like a shipwreck in the sky.
When the sky began to crack,
'Twas like a stick upon my back.
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a pen knife in my heart.
And when my heart began to bleed,
Then I was dead, and dead indeed.

Image: of my granma, standing against snow and bushes, a white woman in a tight winter cap, short leather jacket, gloves, and bomber pants, with knee high boots. She stands with hand on a bent thigh and is a thousand times cooler than ever since. See adjoining pictures for comparison. (Two young ladies — Marie-Louise before she was Granma and her best friend, Bernadette) in baggie dresses and hats. Granma’s is a bit big and a bit floppy.) Final image is headshot of granma in her 90s.

of birds in flight: "Birds flying at sun set" by Kingaustin07, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

Joy in the Fog

I want to say something about finding joy in the midst of fairly heavy chronic fatigue.

I am rewriting the book of my life. I haven't been able to work regularly for most of my life, but I have filled the gap by learning and developing some of my interests and passions and honing my skill as a writer.

This has fed me well. But I find now that taking on even small projects is very stressful because of how long it takes me to do anything, due to fatigue, brain fog (and its many children), etc.

I’m turning 67 this year. I’ve decided I don’t want to spend the last perhaps twenty years of my life struggling from project to project and feeling like I can’t take time away for other things (and people) until I finish, so I am shifting my focus onto things that give me an immediate boost, a wee spark of joy. Such as taking up singing again.

I don’t have a teacher or a choir or anything so energy and commitment demanding. I use online videos for practicing when I am able and reclaiming my voice, and I am taking some of my old repertoire off of the shelf and relearning them. As many of the songs are in Irish, this gives me a chance to relearn a little of that, but in a gentle way.

I will soon be taking a six week online course that focusses on the inspiring, sacred songs of Hildegarde of Bingen, but which is intended for a deep awakening of our voice.

I feel very happy about all of this, after nearly losing my ability to sing at all. I am not expecting miracles from the practicing or the class. This isn’t about goals, or anything that might be achieved or happen later. This is about enjoying the moments while I sing.

I may not recover — I’ve been trying all my life — but damn it, I will have joy.

Image of goofy, older white woman posing in front of gorgeous, unlit lights in Dundalk, Ireland’s market square, hours before they were lit in celebration of Brigit. Many of the lights show images of St. Brigit’s face or symbols associated with her.

Temple of Memory

 

Words, when carefully attended to, can cause important shifts in perspective. Often when grieving we feel overwhelmed by our memories, with the implication that the memories hold us in our grief. But — 

"Without memory we would be unable to be healed from past painful events.”

Sr. Phil O’Shea

In the meditation she led today, she quoted from John O’Donohue in his book, Anam Cara, on the idea of the “temple of memory.” We might reflect on the temple of memory, and further, of “no yesterday, no tomorrow, only now.”

I am well familiar with the idea of being in the present moment, rather than sacrificing our lived life to dwelling in memory or fixating on what might yet be. But I struggled a little to know how I would be in the moment while also reflecting in the temple of memory. After a few moments, the light came on.

Rather than grief spilling over every moment of life, uncontained and unanswerable, I can preserve, honour, and enter the temple of memory and visit wholly with my absent loved one there. A place of containment, a place of release, a place to love. At this stage in my grief over my brother Victor, that may be exactly what I need.

In our last (dismay!) session, last week, my bereavement counsellor said that it was okay to take a break from grief. A novel concept, with some appeal. My fear is of shutting down again, where the underground grief does damage rather than being attended to and offered healing. But the idea of a temple where I can visit Vic or simply enter to grieve, rather than being twisted by grief in every place and any moment, appeals to me. To tend my grief, to honour Vic’s memory, but to also take breaks. It sounds very good.

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until that coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

 

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance

With the invisible form of your departed…

 

 from “For Grief” by John O’Donohue

I don't actually believe that grief “heals,” that there is a last drop, a time where grief no longer is. I believe in making peace with grief, so we don’t reject it and suffer as a result. Because grief is love. And love, I want to keep.

Thinking of all of you, with your sorrows and your losses. Grateful that we all have loved.

“Loss” — sculpture by Jane Mortimer. Faceless but expressive human sitting with arms around knees and head down. Grey-blue against darker blue trees.  Malone House, Malone Road, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

A Segment from *The Cure at Troy* by Seamus Heaney

 

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols

beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney

from "The Cure at Troy"

Image: Spreading Creek Wildfire Rips Through Banff National Park, Huffington Post Canada.

School Day for Chickadee

I was in my garden today, the little one just beyond my patio, when a pair of chickadees arrived at the feeder. It's just a simple thing, a shallow frame made of wood with a screen bottom, suspended from a garden hook by wires. Inside the feeder I have a couple of jam jar lids filled with shelled and broken sunflower seeds, a tiny bowl of peanuts, and another tiny bowl of suet balls.

There was a brief fracas when they first arrived at the feeder and one flew a metre and a bit away while the other (at a guess, I would say, it's parent) fed. When the first one had had its fill it flew back into the maples and chickadee number two ventured over. First to the top of the feeder stand. Then over to the fence. Then back, closer, landing on top of the suet block cage. And repeat. Finally, when the coast seemed truly clear, it made a bold hop to the feeder with the sunflower seeds.

It landed, as I have seen it's relatives the bushtits sometimes do, upside down on the bottom of the screen. This didn't work very well so it flew back to the suet feeder, then back to the fence, then to the bottom of the screen again.

Meanwhile, the sun shone, bumblebees climbed into the mouths of waiting bellflowers, a hover-fly inspected the sedum, and a bald-faced hornet searched for something low down among the leaves. I glanced over at the hole in the fence this chickadee likely hatched out in. It had been taken over by bumblebees after the chicks had fledged and now I noticed there is an impressive funnel shaped web opening around the entrance to the cavity. It's delightful to think of the succession of creatures making use of that one small hole in so short a period of time.

At this point the more confident chickadee returned. Our unsuccessful diner appears to have paid better attention to what its associate did this time: It landed inside the feeder, spent a moment or two snatching up sunflower seeds, and returned to the trees. Immediately the young chickadee copied the action, landing on the upside of the feeder and settling down to eat.

Another skill acquired. There is so much to learn in our first year of life.

Image: "Poecile atricapillus 1513, A Black-capped Chickadee at Blanche Lake, Minnesota USA” by Tattooeddreamer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons