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Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
When my daughter died two years ago, a common refrain was that it was not in the natural order of things to be predeceased by a child. For some reason, that did not alleviate my burden of grief. In fact, it made it worse.
After Andrée died of leiomyosarcoma in November, 2020, I was told that I was experiencing “complex grieving,” mourning that would take years to resolve and require professional therapy.
But the most debilitating words were those which were reserved for those encounters where I heard the stinging admonition: “You will just have to get over it.”
Thankfully, life has a way of numbing us with the passage of time. We carry the same load, but we become less aware of it. This natural process makes us more grateful for things we could not process previously. And that is exactly what happened to me.
One day, I started humming something my daughter had sung in the hospice. She had broken into song, lying there on her quilt, right through the growling in her abdomen. I was in the washroom and the notes slipped under the door.
“And I’ll be in Scotland before you.” She sang it through her pain, crisp and clear. But her heart was not in it, not like the time she belted it out the night of her wedding.
She stood with the mike in her hand, at the front of the big room with the oak walls and roaring fireplace. She was every bit the small-town girl in the big city and loving it all. The Celtic band strummed away in the background, and couples in kilts danced the two-step, up and down the maple floor.
But now she was lying on her back, with tubes poking out of her nightgown. She was staring cancer in the face. She had nothing to look forward to but another long night of people hacking and coughing.
Still, she sang. The memory propped me up. You cannot show that kind of fortitude without it rubbing off on your dad. And there were other examples that started to wake up in my memory, and they all reminded me of the goodness of my daughter.
I began to recall the bedtime stories. They had no endings because she would fall asleep long before that. And the next night, she did not ask about it. She said simply: “Tell me a story, dad.”
I would sit on the floor, propped up by the bed, looking at the stove pipes. We would feel their heat and pretend that the stories flowed through them, in voices and sounds. The pipes hung by wires from the ceiling so that they would not split apart and spill their stories all over the pine floor. Each night, I would pull a new story out of the pipes and tell it as it came. All I had to do was say: “Stop!” And a new story would enter my mind.
Endings were never that important for my daughter. And I remembered that she was a forgiving and undemanding soul.
I also began to recall events from her childhood that had been erased from my memory. I could not forget the evenings when boys who would be men came to whisk her away and return her too late.
But she always came back, asking: ”Where’s Dad?” She watched my hair turn white and my skin grow thin. She would feel me hold onto her at the end, with a grip almost as strong as on that first day when she looked up into my eyes, kicked her feet in the air and claimed me for life.
The doctors in the palliative care unit could not harvest my daughter’s internal organs, because she died of Stage Four cancer. So, she gave them her eyes. Doctors surrounded them with ice cubes, so her eyes must have thought it was just another wintry day when they headed for the helicopter in a cooler.
As time passed, I began to imagine scenarios for her eyes and my gratitude grew. Perhaps they are now in Nunavut, squinting in the midnight sun. My daughter had spent a summer, with my wife and me and a high school friend at Repulse Bay on the Arctic Circle.
Maybe her eyes are searching for roaming tuktu or seal at the floe edge and may have already experienced snow blindness. They would also have to get used to the way the Inuit smile by squeezing their eyes almost shut and saying “Eeeeeeee.”
But then again, they might be on the Prairies, watching the golden oceans of wheat rolling from horizon to horizon. Or perhaps it is the leathered cowpokes hooting and hollering: “Howdy pardner and welcome to the West.”
Wherever they are in Canada, my wish for her green eyes is that they get to see big sky country and clouds that have her smile in them.
I also hope that they remember the beauty that used to rest behind them, in my daughter, now that they are the windows to another irreplaceable soul.
Life can be messy. But with time, tiny points of light appear in the darkness. These points of gratitude eventually grow into blue skies.
You may have to leave your ego behind as I did and look through someone else’s eyes to find generosity and kindness. But it is quite worthwhile.
Rod McDonald lives in Cornwall, Ont.