Descending to the Pinnacle

I was fortunate to escape my childhood without experiencing the head-on screeching collision that is the loss of a truly close friend or nuclear family member.

My Uncle Benedict did make a booze-sodden exit from this world in the late 1960s when I was a wee tot. I remember our wujek (voo-yek) as a cheery drunk, often sitting at his kitchen table playing solitaire, a glass of vodka or Crown Royal nearby. He will always hold a warm place in my childhood memories for being the one to introduce us kids to fish and chips from a local shop wrapped in newspaper and dripping in malt vinegar - a treat that I can still taste, to this day, in my mind's mouth. Sadly, it's impossible to find an authentic fish-and-chip take-out shop around here.

I also remember Wujek as the architect of one of two childhood near-death experiences of my own, that time in a cave under Niagara Falls when he playfully and more than a little irresponsibly lifted tiny four-year-old me onto a guardrail. As the Falls' icy mist tickled my face, he thought it would be a hoot to pretend to lose his grip on me; for a few terrifying seconds, I thought I was going to take a hard, watery drop from inside the waterfall into a hard, watery grave in the Niagara River.

Surprisingly, Wujek survived my mother's wrath that day for scaring us both witless, but he did not survive the corrosive effects of his alcohol habit.

I remember his viewing at the funeral home, where someone gave me a boost up to take a last look at his neatly painted face, serene in an open casket. Even at that age, I could tell he wasn't there and that I was just looking at the shell he'd lived in for fifty- or sixty-odd years.

In an odd twist, I nearly joined Wujek in the afterlife later that year when my father tried to teach me to swim in Lake Simcoe. On a visit to our aunt and uncle's lake cottage, probably the last one before she sold it, Dad dropped me into the lake, then stood patiently waiting for me to bob to the surface, expecting the laws of physics to prevail.

They did not. Apparently there are sinkers and bobbers, and I am a sinker.

I would still be at the bottom of that lake if Dad hadn't realized I wasn't ever going to float and scooped me to the surface.

These experiences were both terrifying and formative to my distrust of both heights and deep water, but I do not recall my life flashing before my eyes on either occasion. To be fair, there wasn't much to flash as I was barely in kindergarten. Nor did I see a white light in the distance backlighting the silhouette of my uncle, experience myself looking down at my body, or feel a wave of transcendent peace.

A few years later, my "Uncle" John (really a first-cousin-in-law, but that's too big a mouthful so we called him our uncle) died. In his 40s, he was much too young to go, and what cut his life short was the same as what took Uncle Benedict: a bottle. By then, I was old enough and just tall enough to peek into his casket unaided.

John's death left four without a father and made his widow the breadwinner in a time when that wasn't typical. My enduring memory of that day is of my cousin, his youngest daughter, no more than seven at the time, inconsolable in her white leopard-print fake fur coat. I remember the coat, because I had one just like it.

The deaths of my uncle and my "uncle" were tragic and too early. They taught me that addiction is an equal-opportunity thief of dreams and futures.

Dad

The loss of my uncles taught me that life can end in an instant, but it didn't teach me what death is. I learned that at 39 when my 80-year-old father died after a brief but valiant battle with lung cancer.

The usual suspect for the homicide of lung cancer - smoking - didn't kill my father. Second hand smoke may have played a small role as Dad's side of the family, other than his sister, were all heavy smokers, but I believe the Grim Reaper, Lung Cancer Edition, silently stalked my dad for nearly sixty years after finding him in a coal mine during World War II. Ironically, though Dad didn't smoke, cigarettes were currency, and he did survive the war by selling them to buy food.

I saw my dad alive for the last time in mid-September 2001, flying to see him just a day or two in the surreal days after planes grounded by 9/11 had just returned to the skies. Although weak, he was in fair spirits and had accepted his fate.

We'd had our ups and downs over the 39 years I'd known him, nearly half of those years at opposite ends of a continent with no communication at all. It was only in the last five years of his life that we had a fragile truce. He even wanted to hire me to ghostwrite a non-fiction book, a manifesto-style rant about corruption in organized religion. I'd refused, citing commitments at home; in truth, our tenuous reconciliation would have been shattered if I'd accepted his offer.

When I said goodbye, I knew it was the last time I'd see him in that body, supine in a Mississauga hospital bed.

A bottomless tumble to peace

Early one morning a few weeks later, I had a vivid dream of a multi-tentacled but invisible monster squeezing the breath out of my body as other spirits, none of them friendly, looked on. Terror froze me as I was both wide awake and certain that I would never wake up.

One by one, the other spirits left, and then the one strangling me also slipped away. Now alone, I felt my body falling, falling, falling. During that endless fall, I felt regret, loss, terror, and shock.

Then, suddenly, without ever hitting bottom, I stopped. I felt peace. Light. Rest. Gratitude. Forgiveness. Homecoming. Joy.

I came to in my own bed in California, our border collies snoring nearby. I got up. A few minutes later, my brother called and told me Dad was gone.

I flew back to Toronto and we held his funeral, just as he'd wished. No church. No funeral service. No preacher. We thought he wouldn't mind a single piper playing Amazing Grace graveside and a few words of farewell from family and friends.

As the pipes moaned, a cold rain beat perfect time. Then, as my dad's body was committed to the earth, both my brother and I felt him standing behind us, a hand on each of our shoulders.

We knew he liked our final goodbye.

As we drove away, a red fox, ears at full alert and eyes bright, winked at us through the window of the limousine, then ran into the woods, free at last.