The day after our final child —our oldest son—moved out last November, we went on a short road trip to IKEA and a cemetery. I hoped to replace an accidentally broken glass canister but then I spotted a green floral William-Morris-like coverlet and I remembered something I’d read that flipped the idea of the empty nest, suggesting when the kids did move out, it was an opportunity for refeathering the nest. So the bedspread came to the checkout with us.
I wanted to visit the cemetery because one of my ancestors was buried there. My mother had long said that when I reached A Certain Age, I too would develop an interest in genealogy. It turned out she was both right and wrong. In me—a novelist—the interest has turned quite specific and it has turned to this ancestor who died prematurely exactly a hundred years ago, and his father whose profound grief shaped generations of my family. I read Carl Jung who said his work was to do the work left undone by his ancestors. That is how it feels as I write a novel based on their lives.
In the book I’m writing, I play with the facts but not with the truth. But the day after our own oldest son moved out, I wanted to visit this cemetery.
Three days post-partum with that son, as my milk came in, I cried and said a line I would later bequeath to a character in another novel: someday he’s going to grow up and leave us. At the very start, that grief, that homesickness, was baked in. It took more than a quarter-century for the day to come—an unseasonably warm November day with thin sunlight and strong winds—but it had come.
Those strong winds found us on the top of a hilly cemetery, with a harbour visible on one side of us and a bay on the other. I knew the bay well: when I was a child, my family was evacuated to this city after a dangerous train derailment in our own city, the largest peacetime evacuation in North America before Hurricane Katrina. The anxiety of this evacuation was compounded by the fact that my mother was fully pregnant with my brother, and that a few years before, my healthy sister had been stillborn after complications during delivery. We walked that bay the November we were evacuated, while my mother made regular visits to the hospital to check in. My brother would be safely delivered a day or two after we returned home.
My mother had once visited this grave with her father. She recalled a gravestone of a small lamb and lettering worn down over the years. The Internet told us the section of the cemetery in which he was buried. And so under the strong winds and thin sunlight, my husband and I searched every lamb, looking for the one that had gone astray. We looked again, including parting branches of a bush that had grown around one such grave. I realized I wasn’t leaving until we found it. My husband fortunately broadened his search to grave markers that weren’t lambs, calling me over when he found the grave: a marble cube with an open book on top, and the words ‘Beloved Son’ inscribed below his name. My husband slipped away, then, to the car, allowing me time alone. I took pictures and took in the facts of the grave, the location and the views, but it wasn’t like visiting the grave of someone I’ve loved, and my book and my work isn’t about the son but the father. In my book, the son is a kind of cipher. As I’ve written it the story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of Isaac keeps coming to mind. Because how does a parent let his beloved son go into the will of God? Because it is not a lamb provided instead when Abraham’s hand is stayed, but a ram.
So my son is going off into the world, having forgotten to be vaccinated against diseases endemic to the place he would be visiting, not polio but other diseases that shouldn’t but could end up with a grave marker and a grieving parent.
There’s an old proverb that a parent gives a child two things: roots and wings. I read that before I had kids and I believed it to be deeply true. I still believe it. I believe we have given that to our own kids. I also believe it’s what I was instinctively reaching for myself that windy day: the pilgrimage to the cemetery and the visit to IKEA. The walking and bending and feeling the wind provided a knowing in my body of where my people came from and were rooted, and the trip to IKEA, the refeathering the nest, was not as frivolous as it might seem. It was the wings. It was the ram in the thicket. It was the looking forward with hope to a future beyond one where children lived at home, to one where flowers climbed across our bed at night and perhaps even into our dreams of new life blossoming in November.
Susan Fish
Waterloo, Ontario
Author of Renaissance (Paraclete Press, 2023)
Turn of Events; Turn of a Life
When I was in elementary school I wanted to be a cabinet maker so, after grade 8, I went to a technical school in Toronto. Our teacher had about fifteen students and he couldn’t give each one of us a great deal of attention. He had to split his time between each student, so learning the trade in school was slow.
I saw an ad in the Toronto Star. A cabinet-making company was looking for apprentices. I made an appointment to see the resource person.
The interviewer and I spent some time talking about the possibilities and expectations of the apprenticeship. Eventually, the personnel rep said, “We don’t have a job for you.” I told him that didn’t make sense to me. I said, “You have an ad indicating you have a need for apprentices and I’m offering myself, and now you say you don’t have a job for me.” He said, “That’s right.”
I asked, “Does that mean you don’t have a job for me, or for anyone?” He said, “We don’t have a job for you.” “Why do you say that?” I asked. He paused and said, “Because I think you should go back to school.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked. He replied, “Ed, there comes a time when other people see more in you than you see in yourself. I think you should go to an academic school.” He was a wisdom person in my life.
I went to talk it over with the principal at St. Michael’s College School in Toronto. I told him about my background, and that I didn’t think I could do the academic work at St. Michael’s. He said, “Ed, you will never know unless you try. We have room for you; it’s there if you want to come.”
“I’ll take it,” I replied.
At the end of that school year, I decided to look into attending the Order of Franciscan Friars Conventual’s seminary. I received notice that I was accepted.
After ordination, my Provincial Superior mentioned that I was to become a teacher. I tried to get out of that assignment but to no avail.
I went to St. Pat’s College in Ottawa and told the registrar that I had no idea of the expectations, the necessary courses, or the requirements in order to become a teacher.
The Franciscan seminary did not grant degrees. The registrar understood that and started asking me questions. I wondered where he was going with all those questions. I told him I didn’t want to be a teacher. “I’m here out of obedience,” I said.
After a while, the registrar said that he had enough information, and then said, “By the way, you are going to be studying here.”
Then he said, “This is what you are going to do. You will be majoring in English, and your focus is going to be Shakespeare. You will be majoring in history. You are going to do all that work in two years, not three. You will be graduating with a double major.”
I looked at him and said, “I don’t even want to be here. Why did you say I would do all that work in two years and not three?” He looked at me and said, “There comes a time when other people see more in you than you see in yourself.”
The registrar was another wisdom person in my life.
I graduated with a double major. Besides the two wisdom people in my life, the English major was a remarkable gift.
My parents came to Canada from Malta. When we were at home we spoke Maltese. When I went to grade one I could not speak English, so I failed grade one…and to think that I graduated with a major in English is really quite a joy and a highlight in my life.
It all came about because I listened to two wisdom people. Since then, I have been on the alert for wisdom people, and there have been others.
Friar Edward Debono, OFM Conv.
Kingston, Ontario
Treetops
The fireflies that I remember are few now.
The summers that I remember are gone now.
The people that I remember are no longer on the couch,
at the table on the porch, or in their chairs on the treehouse.
But I remember all of it and both of them.
And all of us there.
The homestead is still standing.
‘Treetops’ in wrought iron is still in the stone above the mantle.
The hearth and heart of memory still glows and glows.
The things that kept me steady still matter
Although I can’t see them.
But I remember them.
And I understand why those people matter, how they loved us matters,
and while the homestead is still standing, why I am still steady.
This house was a home, and now in its stead is a place to return and to remember.
Every time I come back,
There is a new memory.
Love is in the trees, in the rooms,
in the sunshine on the porch around the soft chairs where they sat,
where they held all of us in their arms, and now in eternal embrace.
The things that kept me steady still matter.
The homestead is still standing.
Skye Fackre Gibson
Boston, Massachusetts
I learned that all the distress I survived in 77 years was wiped clear when my need for a safe, healthy, affordable home was realized. Our provincial government believes citizens should pay a rent 1/3 of their income. I moved from $1200 to $900 rent and became able to fix my teeth and my car.
Hello, long-time Steve Bell fan Leila Ward here, born in Winnipeg 1946, began to teach elementary, then followed husband to Powell River, then West Vancouver, then divorce with a toddler to do life with. I met a gent from Monkton, Ontario and we moved to Mission Abbotsford, me teaching, he building and repairing. Second daughter inspired us to move to Cherryville, me teaching nonstop. Final move to Vernon, where I have been single since 1992. Two successful daughters, and the younger one bore me two delightful grandsons. Thrilled to have full-time air-conditioning, and to be safe indoors through smoke and heat.
As part of a very talented art group, I can put four paintings in the show; oh joy!
Leila Ward
Vernon, B.C.
Why Go Anywhere?
I’m just back in my hotel room after an afternoon bike tour of Hidden Graffiti & Urban Art with Patricio, an affable and informative guide with Biking Buenos Aires. Last week I was in Rome with a delegation of eight other Canadian members of CNWE, the Catholic Network for Women’s Equality. We were advocating for gender equity as the Roman Catholic Synod Assembly was getting underway.
My first of many visits to France was 51 years ago. International travel has been a priority for me, my spouse, and our family as we raised our two children. I was fortunate to have had a good-paying job and flexibility in my work commitments. Over the years we have enjoyed the privilege of visiting friends and family in places like London, or Dar es Salaam, or Jakarta. Occasionally I was able to combine travel with work.
Tiger Market, Argentina
These days the question arising with greater frequency and insistence for me is “Why go anywhere?”
Is it time now to make a choice to stop completely this kind of travel I’ve grown accustomed to—before I am no longer able-bodied or mentally sound enough to make these journeys?
There are reasons to stop — creeping health and especially mobility issues, decreasing energy and levels of tolerance for the inconveniences, the work, the risks, the expense and the environmental consequences, my eco-foot-sprints, large and small.
There are as many rationalizations for continuing to go — visiting friends and family while I still have some, more work, a sense of mission or adventure, a need to demonstrate and share travel expertise and knowledge, or simply to drink coffee and eat a pastry in a cafe other than the one I frequent in my own city.
Has the time come for me to make this transition? Is it possible to enjoy contentedly my own neighbourhoods and my pedestrian habits, daily rituals and routines? Perhaps. My ambivalence about making such a deliberate choice remains. Can I make this journey?
Sun Dial, Lethbridge, Alberta
Vincent Hanlon
Lethbridge, Alta.
Leaving Home & Returning Home
My husband and I, married 27 years this August, and parents to three young adults, have often jokingly said that “the kids might not be ready to leave home, but we are!”
Like many Gen Xers, our parenting philosophy and practice was rather high-intensity. In our case, this didn’t mean lots of expensive, structured activities for our children, or helicoptering at their school. What it did mean was homeschooling our children for their K-12 education. An endeavour requiring a high emotional and energetic investment into all aspects of their growth and development. To say nothing of the opportunity cost of foregoing a dual-income household to have one parent, myself, primarily responsible to oversee the kids’ education and our household management.
This might help explain why, by the time our three kids were starting their post-secondary educations, we were ready to leave home, even if they weren’t!
Joking aside, we had invested the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, in addition to my own career-building twenties and thirties, to raise and educate these children. I was tired at the end of that journey. And our kids were also ready for some distance from us having spent significantly more time with their homeschooling mom and work-at-home dad than the average North American child spends with their parents. We were all yearning for some freedom. However, for the sound economic reason of not acquiring student debt, our young adult children have lived at home with us, a three-bedroom, one-bath apartment in Montreal, for their university and college studies. Two of those kids still live at home, while their graduated and gainfully employed brother flew the coup last summer, giving all of us a little more breathing room.
Although my husband and I were just joking about leaving home (I think), I didn’t anticipate the prophetic nature of our humor.
Next spring, we will be leaving the apartment and the city our family has called home for nearly a decade. And our children will stay.
As already mentioned, the “children” are young adults. They are going to school, working, and establishing careers and relationships. Their life is here.
Why would they leave? Why would we?
The only thing, or rather the only relationship that would move me from my kids is another familial tie, the connection to my parents.
How our family of five ended up in Montreal is too long of a story for this piece. Suffice to say, we moved here with the expectation that we would live here for a season of our lives and not necessarily as a permanent landing place. My husband’s location-independent work, which was a goal for his career and our family life, has given us the freedom to live in a variety of regions and locales.
Having not rooted ourselves to a particular place, we became rooted to our family relationships. Although we haven’t lived in the same province (and sometimes not even the same country) as my parents since my husband and I “left home” early in our marriage, we have kept close ties with them through two decades across the distance.
I knew that as my parents reached old age I wanted to live in close proximity to them. In the same way that I didn’t want to institutionalize the care and education of my children, I couldn’t imagine institutionalizing the care of my elderly parents. If one day they needed someone’s help with daily life I wanted that someone to be me.
As our kids’ reached the age of majority and early adulthood, my husband and I talked about our options. Although it’s a good city for our kids’ educational and career opportunities, the two of us didn’t want to remain in Montreal indefinitely. So where might we move? And how would my desire to share in my parent’s old age fit into that picture?
Many conversations between the two of us, where we compared and contrasted the different visions of our future and our family’s future, helped us arrive at an answer. My parents have a more established community life and investment of material assets where they’ve lived for the last 16 years on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. And there’s much we appreciate about Nova Scotia. We would move there.
Years ago already, I had communicated to my parents my desire to care for them in their old age. But that need was a long way off and so too were the details.
After my husband and I came to our decision to move to Nova Scotia the specifics could take shape. A phone call was made to my parents in spring 2021 and a plan materialized, the generosity of which I had not imagined, though it is in keeping with my parents’ character.
My parents would divide their property. We would be gifted with their current home, built by my dad 13 years ago. My dad, now in his late 60s and still working as an artisan home builder, would construct a new age-in-place home for he and my mom, across the driveway from the original house. Physically hale, resourced, and eagerly anticipating their only daughter living next door after more than two decades of long distances, my parents got busy. Which is their modus operandi. Latent desires and hopes, intentions and plans were literally being built into reality.
We can’t leave the city until my in-person coursework is completed for my Masters degree program here in Montreal. Also, we didn’t want to move until our youngest was well-established in her undergraduate degree. There wasn’t a rush. Houses take effort (and money!) to build, and we wanted time for the kids to adjust to the transition of their parents leaving home. This was an “eventually” move.
Even so, building the new house proceeded apace of Dad’s other projects, which is to say, fast. And once vision starts to become reality the course is set, like boarding a train to a much-anticipated destination.
The house will be done by Christmas of this year. And sometime in spring, three years after that initial phone call, we’ll be leaving our home in Montreal to move, quite literally, to my parent’s home.
Seventy years of age this summer, my mom and dad are in great health and still working in their vocations as homemaker and house builder, respectively. I am anticipating the many years we’ll have together, God willing, before any intensive care and management needs begin. Nothing is guaranteed and sharing day-to-day life with them after so many years apart is nothing short of a gift. I can’t know what the future will bring for our children and where they will make their homes. They know they are always welcome out east!
Transitions are often periods of loss and gain, which is especially true in this move. As my husband and I leave our Montreal home we will lose sharing daily life with our children and live many miles away. Usually, it’s the kids that leave. Enacting the inverse is a nuanced grief. Conversely, we will gain the opportunity to live in a beautiful home and share daily life with my parents, an incredible gift.
As we count down the months on our move we find ourselves navigating the bittersweet terrain of leaving the generation we raised, to return to the generation that raised us. A unique transition where leaving home is returning home.
Renee Tougas
Montreal, Quebec
Renee.tougas.net
“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” (attributed to many people, including Maurice Chevalier when he was 71 years old)
On Sunday, October 8, 2023, I turned 75 years old. I’d like to think that I’ll “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas recommended. He solved the problem of growing old by dying at 39 years old.
My grandfather had a stroke and suffered partial paralysis on one side. Once, when he was complaining to his older brother, then in his late seventies, Uncle Herman said, “Stop pitying yourself; if you can’t mow the lawn by pushing with two hands, push the mower with one.” Self-pity apparently defeated the advice.
A wonderful waterfowler known to me as Dom suffered a stroke in his sixties which left his right hand pretty useless. One morning I encountered him shortly after dawn lugging a huge goose to his car parked on the farm road. I asked him how hunting was going. Dom said, “Well, I had to learn to shoot left-handed and I try to get out here before dawn and so far have shot twenty-one geese this year.”
My dad began having occasional falls in his eighties. He complained that he couldn’t trap muskrats anymore, but just had to ‘go along.’ He learned to eat awkwardly by propping one hand under the other arm. My children quipped, “Of course it’s hard for Grandpa: he was forty years old from forty to eighty.”
I’ll admit that my transition to ancient did leave me able to go hunting with a friend and his daughter last week. We shot seven ducks. But I was laid up the next day due to pain from my disintegrating neck vertebrae. I think I have things figured out: if I use my right arm sparingly I can do some work one out of two days as long as I am able to stand the pain the evening after working.
My advice is simple: “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them. . . .” (Ecclesiastes 12:1) Youth, though, is a relative thing. The fact is that I can still play piano for church services—and a little jazz—and write non-fiction (the poetry muse left me after two books). I can still cajole children into helping me with my garden and farm and can enjoy listening to the squeaking as my four cows twist and yank the leaves from the grass. I can still enjoy singing with my friends in the nursing home once a week. I still “Enjoy the wife you married as a young man!” (Proverbs 5:18, The Message).
But there isn’t anything especially noble in incapacity, impotence, weakness and memory loss. It isn’t just “the alternative” that makes life worth living but knowing that, regardless of dietary restrictions and all sorts of other limitations, I may experience youth, not absolute, but partial youth, and hope to enjoy it in the presence of God until “the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern (Ecclesiastes 12: 6).”
And so I go along
savouring my moments of youth,
while slip-sliding away,
with hesitant hope and a certain hesitancy,
expecting dust,
the dust of an old tome,
and seeing my new-old name written there.
Curt Gesch
Quick, B.C.
Moving “Church”
“A church is not a building, a church is not a steeple, a church is not a resting place, a church is a people!” (Marsh and Avery). I used to sing this tune in the United Church youth choir. Dedicated to the song and prayer of Sunday worship and ginger snap cookies afterward, my teenaged-self relished various services in several different churches. I asked questions all the way to an eventual conversion to Catholicism, a religion my parents denounced. At age sixty-two, I am now a Roman Catholic Woman Priest (with RCWP Canada). I’ve been ordained a priest for just over a year and serve a small but vibrant inclusive community: Lethbridge Inclusive Catholic Community Fellowship (LICCF.ca). Transitioning from one denomination to another and then decades later, into a state of automatic excommunication has been a surprising, painful, but freeing transition.
I married a Catholic at age nineteen, and well into my twenties I continued to search for an answer to the rather needy prayer I had sent forth as a seventeen-year-old in college–a cry for a church, somewhere to belong. That answer came in the example of a plant’s life. I received it that year, frost-bitten, from the trunk of a friend’s car, transported from my hometown in January. It healed up and grew green and waxy leaves when I attended the Catholic church with my husband in Edmonton. It was so sticky with insects when I returned from two years in Montreal (where I had stopped going to French Mass with our embarrassingly talkative English-speaking one-year-old). I left the diseased little tree outside the house we rented back in Alberta. My uncle suggested I wipe it down with sudsy water and put it back indoors where it belonged.
That year I was moved by the singing and preaching of a Redemptorist mission team led by a family friend (hence my attendance). So moved by their song and spoken word, I tried out, the following Sunday, one sad soulless Mass of white-haired heads at the small parish nearby. However, several months later we moved up to Ft. McMurray where the average age was nineteen, and I, with my two noisy, active toddlers, fit right in.
Six years later I sat down to write to my godmother to tell her I was going to become a Catholic. Except that I wasn’t convinced of my news that I would be confirmed Catholic, having been raised an anti-Catholic. I prayed for a sign. My eye was drawn to the huge healthy ‘tree’ in my living room – her gift to me when I was in college more than a decade earlier! The plant told the story of my waxing and waning faith practice and in response to my query “Is this the church?” shouted out YES! with its lush leaves and a sturdy trunk. I quickly wrote up this story and sent it along to my godmother with a shot from our instant Polaroid labeled “Do you remember this plant?”
Fast forward after thirty-some years of dedicated service to St. Martha’s parish in Lethbridge, Alberta, where I catechized and organized, accompanied choirs on piano and led the singing at daily mass, said healing prayers and facilitated Bible studies, trained as a spiritual director, organized and led a ten-year bereavement program, all while finishing a Master’s degree in Sociology and a Doctor of Ministry degree, both qualitative research projects.
Just as powerful as my potted umbrella tree “YES!” was, thirty years later were the insistent multiple signs for me to be ordained. Their message was hard to accept. It is true that I was uncomfortable with the exclusive language and the conservative theology of foreign priests imported to Canada. However, the many signs in several forms that affirmed me as a woman called to ordination were not about inclusion, but excommunication. And there were many.
There were scriptures (including the man who stretches out his withered hand to Jesus, before the hard stares of condemning elders), comments of parishioners (“I see Jesus in your eyes”; “You are very good at the altar”), and most dramatic, my shaking body when I unwittingly embraced an ordained Catholic woman in Ireland (to thank her for a music concert she gave to conference attendees). The body shakes or trembles when it identifies with or recognizes itself in another, whether that other is the indigenous land of one’s being (as one Métis land acknowledgement instructor shared), or a name (I shook one other time at a Joan of Arc movie decades ago – my middle name being Joan). And there was more. At a favorite retreat house, I bumped into articles, novels, and chapters in books (“Embertide”) all suggesting ordination. I fell headlong into poems about change (“No, I’d Never Been To This Country” by Mary Oliver), blessings from John O’Donohue’s “For A New Beginning”—’don’t look back’ and ‘learn to find ease with risk’ as well as a blessing “For the Priesthood.” Listen for Joy art cards by Melanie Weidner came up as “surrender” (a fallen leaf image) and “Yes chicken” (a Golden brown chicken with a “yes” balloon). I was invited to sing the priest’s parts in a Good Friday celebration. There was no doubt about this call, but how could I no longer love and serve within my church community?
Nothing about Anglican or Lutheran ordination resonated for me, either. I identified as Catholic and I remain so, but answering this call meant rejection. The male, patriarchal hierarchy deems my experience of Christ’s love and call to serve as priest unbelievable, a crime.
Baptism
My eventual “yes” however, freed me from unjust laws and constricting institutional rules of liturgy. We women priests are ruled by collegiality and are free to move absolutely into values of inclusivity, accountability, equality, justice and prophetic obedience (listening for direction from the Spirit and the gospels). Our movement is eucharistic and sacramental. Worship is based on the earliest house churches documented by Paul’s writings where he names Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, Apphia, Lydia, Nympha, Euodia, and Syntyche – and many unnamed women – along with later house churches of Akeptous of Megiddo, Israel (see YouTube video) and the communities of bishops like Cerula, from the San Gennaro catacombs. We have renewed the liturgy to be inclusive. Our tables (not altars) around the world are open to all for communion. Our leadership celebrates and accepts 2SLGBTQ+ folks in everything in every way. As Vatican II recommends, we watch for the “signs of the times” and lean in.
Transition for me most recently has meant moving from church architecture to our living room or the theatre gallery at the public library. We might celebrate with a guided forest walk, a labyrinth liturgy, or learning and listening alongside the water, respecting Indigenous wisdom. We sing and pray with inclusive language and sit in a circle. Everyone has a chance to speak at homily time. I wear a priestly stole and share such authority at communion time by placing this symbol on the Eucharistic table. We can laugh out loud and dance. We value stillness and sit contemplatively. Zoom liturgies bring together people from everywhere. I am not clerical, but a servant leader. This church is not a thick-walled building; this church is a flesh-and-blood people responding to Spirit. For anyone praying for a church, we welcome you. Welcome.
Teresa Elder Hanlon
Lethbridge County, Alta.
