In August 2021, my uncle was admitted to hospital in Ottawa. I dropped him off and parked his car at my place, marvelling at the absurdity of a tall leggy man driving a Nissan Micra. He had been in the hospital more than a few times and had health challenges for most of his life, so nothing seemed exceptionally unusual about his visit.
Over the course of four months, I visited with him, and he didn’t get any fresh air save for the minutes between his transfer from hospital to ambulance to hospital back in Barry’s Bay. Remembering my grandfather’s hospital transfers decades earlier, I expected that it would be hard on Ray, but he still wanted to go, to get back home. A short while after his return, Uncle Ray passed away.
You hope, before someone dies, that you will have the chance to ask them all the questions that have bubbled up and never been uncovered. You think you have time. You think, later, later. While I am sure there are some who can bridge that gap in time, and as much as I wish I was one of them, the fear of knowing or upsetting or being hurt or being seen holds me back (especially when it comes to family). Then, sometimes suddenly, that thread is cut. Who will you turn to now for answers?
In many ways I consider my uncle a part of my matrilineal line (here, I mean the line of matriarchs, not strictly my mother’s line, of which he was not). He deeply admired his mother, my grandmother. He knit and made us sweaters and even left me a pair of handmade socks. He never shied away from talking about my mum, who died when I was barely a teenager, and though it hurt for many years to hear him mention her, he only ever held a great fondness for Mary-Jane. He was loyal and loved each one of his nieces and his nephew. He was gay and no one really talked about it.
Though I was there on his final day, I still feel I let him down as I fumbled through the process. At the end, he told me, I want to be surrounded by family. It was a process I had missed learning from with the previous familial death—that of my grandmother Eleanor in 2013. That’s only one of the reasons I needed to be there.
In our last conversation, I told Ray that I remembered the pink dress he bought me and how we drove around listening to country music, and he remembered too. I said I wished we had more time and that I would write poems about him, but I don’t know if that made him happy or sad or if he was indifferent (to poetry, that is, which many people in my family are). While that poem is not in missing matrilineal, Ray has a cameo in the first long poem alongside his brothers (my other uncle and my dad), and the church he loved in Wilno is almost as prominent as when you drive past it on Highway 60.
Often we think about grief when it comes to death is often about grief, but there is also wonder—all that is left unknown, all that was never said, all that changes. It creates spaces to string with spiderweb memories, to test to see if they hold. The two long poems in this collection are about that, about communing with my mother and grandmother, and creating a link with my briefly born sister, Isabelle, through the work of Toulouse Lautrec and the family home that is now my home.
What is the middle poem? What is the body? What is the mind? All these floating scraps wrapping us tight?
Perhaps loss has bred my dysmorphic relationship with the world. Certainly, it is circumstance intimately felt. A fractured lyric, a secret language, misremembered memories and fairy tales tapped for (mis)guidance. Thirty years on. Twenty years on. Ten years. Two. How do we account for how far we’ve come? What has become? Perhaps accounting has nothing to do with it, but I keep tracing it back in this way. And my own thread? Where does the cast meet the dark surface? I cannot know, though I regularly fear it is shorter than I think.
Still, there are these poems. And there will be more. And I hope that you enjoy their strangeness, their language, their unexpected sexuality and confusion—after all, haven’t you felt it too?
