Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Lucette

THE DAY I SHOULD HAVE DIED

November 22, 2024

In informing me of the result of my latest thoracic echocardiogram my doctor said that I had been dodging a bullet for years, and I may continue doing so, but the odds were no longer in my favour.

I should have died almost 60 years ago as I laid on my back in a drainage ditch adjacent a country road looking up at the sky with a gentle rain caressing my face telling me not to worry. I often remember that day, and just as often wish for a different outcome and avoiding the life of someone who seldom fitted in and caused unnecessary hardship to a woman who deserved better.

The priest who was the difference between life and death said it was God saving me for the priesthood. If there is a god, I must be quite the disappointment.

FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS AND GRAVE MARKERS 

November 26, 2024

Having already paid for my grave when I purchased Lucette’s, I was a bit surprised at the cost when I went to make my funeral arrangements: more than nine thousand dollars for a simple graveside ceremony, no embalming and an actual pine box. It’s not that I could not afford it having sold the house, but I did balk, to no avail, at paying $500 for them hosing my body. I may have put on some weight but I doubt if it will take more than a few minutes. I also did not think it was necessary with a closed casket.

I should have negotiated my own funeral arrangements when I agreed to hers. That would have avoided what may have been non-negotiable extras added knowing that I would pay anything to be buried next to her. Beechwood is a national treasure operated by a non-profit foundation; if the money will go to its upkeep, who I am to complain.

To the left is a picture of me sitting in the shade a few days after Lucette's burial having planted the first of many flowers and shrubs (even a tree) before and after the installation of our tombstone.

To get Lucette a grave near a large shady tree I had to buy three graves, instead of two—one for her and one for me. This was a short time before she died.

At first she said I was wasting my money. She changed her mind when I said it meant I would visit with her on even the hottest of days and sit under the shade of her tree while we talked.

I visited with her every week except for when that idiotic Covid restriction went into effect that forced Beechwood to close the cemetery to visitors.

While waiting to install a proper tombstone, Beechwood gave me to following plaque to mark Lucette's resting place.

Her grave last summer:

Her tombstone in winter fronted by a small plastic XMAS tree that used to decorate her apartment at Christmas time when we dated.

MISSING HER MORE THAN EVER

November 27, 2024

Eulogy 

EYES WIDE OPEN

November 28, 2024

In September, after having a late supper in front of the television, I got up and felt a stabbing pain in my chest with every beat of my heart. This is it thought, and let myself fall back on the couch, stretched out my legs, crossed my arms over my chest and tried to maintain what I hoped would be a lasting serene facial expression, not unlike Lucette’s death mask, and said to myself “let it rip!”

No such luck. Once back on the couch, the pain went away to be replaced by a dull sensation. After about half an hour with nothing new to report, I got up, put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, brushed my teeth and went to bed.

I don’t understand the attraction of dying a natural death surrounded by family. Unlike a medically assisted death, like that of my Lucette where they first put you into a deep sleep before the lethal injections are administered about five minutes later, it’s usually not a pretty sight.

That expression of being in a deep, pleasant and undisturbed sleep never left Lucette’s face except for her eyes flashing open just before her passing was confirmed by the attending physician. He said that this happens sometimes, after making a futile attempt to close her eyes. He then made a call and handed me the phone. It was the coroner offering her condolences and asking if I was satisfied with how my wife’s assisted death had been carried out.

After I handed it back, he left with his nurse leaving me alone with my partner of 38 years on the bed, propped up by pillows, staring into the distance as if mesmerized by some spectacle. It felt so real that the first words out of my mouth were “are you okay?”

We had said our last goodbye minutes earlier; therefore, there was nothing left to say, or to do but call to have her body removed. Just before they arrived, I tried one last time to close her eyes. She had a favourite scarf with which I covered them when a knock on the door announced the arrival of the people from Beechwood cemetery.

I hope to die nursing a tall glass of well-aged single malt scotch, and not while watching a porno, but in the company of a real woman—hope springs eternal—with whom I will have had dinner before inviting her to my place to test if sex and alcohol will do for me what assisted death did for my Lucette, die happy.

HER RENAISSANCE MAN

December 26, 2024

One of the nicest things Lucette said to me, when she did not need to say anything, was after I published the first edition of what would grow into a layman’s guide to the Koran that would encompass the entire book (a picture of the first edition on the left) when she told me I was her Renaissance Man.

I asked her what she meant by that. She said that when I lost my job with the government I learned how to prepare and submit legal arguments and appealed my dismissal to the Federal Court and then the Supreme Court of Canada.

After that setback, I learned a new computer language and built the Boreal Shell, and now I was taking on the Koran. She said that, like men of the Renaissance, I did not limit my interest to just one thing and she admired that in me.

Her unheralded Renaissance Man, I might add, for which my loving champion blamed the media.

*****

Only In Canada

I would greet her most mornings with a kiss and a cup of coffee before checking my emails. This Canada Day morning was to be like most mornings, except that we would again have something to be thankful for in living in a country that could be so much more. Eye surgery, necessary due to Sjogren syndrome, had actually improved her vision. No muss, no fuss, no cost; thank you, Tommy Douglas. If only that was enough.

The kiss and coffee were often followed by the same one-word question: “Anything?” This morning’s “anything” was regarding an article I had sent to the local papers about the national security implications and cost to the taxpayer of the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Baird, who has never been forthright with Canadians about his lifestyle choices, partying with friends over the Christmas holidays at the Canadian High Commission in London.

“No,” I replied.

“Maybe you should just give up,” she said. “You will never get their attention; it’s pointless.”

“If I don’t get their attention then I have failed. In everything I have tried to do, I have failed.”

I expected the usual encouraging words, “No, you have not. You should be proud of what you have accomplished,” and so on and so forth, but not this morning. She paused for a few seconds.

“Only in Canada,” she said, “could someone uncover a bunch of thieves and the thieves get to keep the millions they stole, and their jobs, and you lose yours.”

“In any other country,” she said, “when you fought, on your own, because we could not afford a lawyer to try to get your job back, and the Supreme Court granted you a hearing, someone would have noticed."

“In any other country,” she said, “anyone who spent ten years of his life writing what may be one of the best, if not the best book on the Koran, the [mainstream] media would have at least mentioned it.”

The people who demanded an end to my career, and the diplomats who had signed off on my firing—including Ambassador Chrétien who reluctantly set the process in motion after meeting with his boss, Deputy Minister and future Liberal Minister, Marcel Massé—were not your run-of-the-mill petty thieves. And they had, not counting the CBC, influential friends in the media such as former colleague and then editor of the Ottawa Citizen, Keith Spicer.

As to the media not believing that a layperson could write a definitive book on the Koran, I too would have found that hard to believe. I agree with her, however, that the media had a responsibility to at least investigate the possibility, considering the importance of the Book.

Oxford University Press did go as far as promising to submit it to a “jury” until they found I did not have a PhD. In a subsequent email they apologized, but, lo and behold, they had just discovered that an Oxford scholar was completing a manuscript along the same lines as my Layman’s Guide, therefore Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice was no longer in the running. Another publisher actually sent me a contract to sign, but there was a catch:

Reads well, but shops would be very reluctant to stock something on this subject that isn't by a scholar or authority of some kind or other. If you could get some endorsements.

I assumed he meant endorsement from a Muslim authority. That proved impossible. As Tarek Fatah, one of the founders in 2001 of the Muslim Canadian Congress warned me, for a Muslim to endorse a book on the Koran, of all books, by a layperson and a non-believer was “a death sentence.”

*****

What a wonderful wife and partner she was for more than 38 years. How I wanted to spend Christmas Eve was not to dishonour her memory but to remember an important part of our time together, the times we were intimate, which were just as important in keeping me believing in myself—and what for me is mental stability—than what you may consider undeserved praise.

IF NOT GOD, WHO DO YOU CALL UPON AT TIMES LIKE THESE?

March 8, 2024

There is seldom a night these days that, before I fall asleep, I don’t call on Lucette to come and get me like she used to do almost every Friday around supper time when I returned by train from Montréal.

THE BROKEN CONDOM

(Abbreviated from Love, Sex and Islam, Boreal Books)

The year was 1993. It was early in the first year of two consulting contracts that would keep me in Montréal five days a week for the next five years or so when, after more than 10 years of marriage, I had my first one-night stand. It was a one-night affair that would prove to my wife that I still loved her and loved her very much.

1993 was also the year the Montréal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup. No Canadian team has won it since. I was at one of Montréal‘s landmark bars on Crescent Street when the Canadiens hoisted the trophy symbolic of hockey supremacy. The crowd at Winnies not only erupted in cheers, but it was hugs all around. The last person I hugged, or hugged again, was a thirty-something female lawyer with whom I had gotten acquainted while watching the game.

When it was time to leave the celebrating around the corner on St. Catherine Street, Montréal’s main commercial east-west thoroughfare, had gotten out hand with looting and an overturned police car on fire. We decided to retreat to my apartment at the Chateau Royale, the only apartment hotel on Crescent Street.

She had condoms, but not very good ones, as it would turn out. Something didn’t feel right, but it felt good and she didn’t seem to mind so we continued doing what we were doing. When it was all over I noticed that the condom was rolled up like a wrinkled cellophane wrapper at the base of a drooping culprit.

The AIDS scare was at its zenith and I had just had unprotected sex, for all intents and purposes, with a stranger. It was only the second time since our wedding night that I had intimate relations with a woman other than my wife. The first indiscretion was not a one-night stand, and it left my Lucette doubting that I still loved her. A busted condom would set her mind at ease.

Needless to say, I felt a bit sheepish when she met me at the Ottawa train station that Friday around supper time. As usual, she had prepared everything for a most romantic dinner; a prelude to a special night, and often a special weekend to make up for the five days I had been away.

I was not hungry. She asked what was wrong. I told her about the condom incident and that sex was out of the question for at least ten days (from what I understood at the time was the earliest the AIDS virus could be detected) if she still wanted have sex with me.

She rose from her chair, stood next to mine and asked me to move it a little. She then sat on my lap, put her arms around my neck and kissed me. It was a lovely and totally unexpected gesture which left me wondering.

“You must really love me,” she said, “to admit having sex with another woman to protect me.”

I didn’t know what to say.

She got up and took my hand. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “We can use those leftover condoms in your night table from when Margaret used to visit you at your old place.”

....

During our time together she proved her love in tangible ways that made those other things that lovers do to express their affection for their partner pale in comparison. One of those profound, undeserved expressions of how she felt about me occurred on the Sunday following that Friday admission of infidelity.

We were in bed. I would again be leaving on an early train to Montréal the next morning. I had already put on a condom when she reached down, and instead of doing what I thought she was going to do, she pulled it off.

“I don’t think you have AIDS,” she said, “and even if you did, and I got it, it wouldn’t matter as long as we are together.”