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Tuesday 25 February 1986

Same as Feb 24. Went to home. It snowed all day. He looks so good in that coffin.¹

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1. I can see that I wrote this after the fact, filling in the events of Monday and Tuesday in the past tense. Thus, ’same as Feb 24′ - we went to Weymouth, we went to the funeral home, my father taught me that relatives might want to shake my hand and say ‘mes sympathie’. I forget if he taught me what, if any, my response should be. The day before, the discussion around the kitchen table, my uncle talking about how my Grandfather had a loathing for funerals three days after a death, and how this was nonetheless what was going to take place.

At the funeral home that evening, it was kind of boring, kind of strange. My dead grandfather in the open casket to my left as I sat there and watched all the old people come to pay their respects. All very solemn and weird in the way that life’s rituals are weird when you’re a kid and you don’t quite get it. Around this time there was a drive with my Mom, I sitting in the passenger seat ‘up front’ and she saying the usual, ‘you can be happy he’s in a better place’ and perhaps this was the time, because we were talking about death, that I told her that sometimes I’m so curious about Heaven I can’t wait to get there, which she found a little alarming, of course. Now I have no interest in any of it whatsoever.

A year ago, I had this diary out and my sister found it and read some of it, finding it funny. At dinner that night my mother read from it and this day’s entry in particular made her laugh: ‘he looks so good in that coffin’. What I remember is looking at the still face of my grandfather, the mystery of death, and lightly touching his face to experience it in some way. But then I felt weird, because death=germs and all that, and I had a spell as a germophobe at around this time, during the mid-80s, so afterward, at my grandmother’s, I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d touched my grandfather and felt gross, because it felt shameful, and I washed my hands more than once. What I do remember was the coolness, and that lingering feeling of uncleanliness, and how I should have a more respectful feeling for my dead grandpa than simply feeling he was now gross.

Monday 24 February 1986

Went to Weymouth¹. Everybody was sad. That night we went to the Funeral home.

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1. Weymouth NS is where my grandparents lived.

Sunday 23 February 1986

Good and bad. Pretty good at beginning and bad at end. Grandpa died today.¹

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1. Some notes:

The Buddha was born in 2777 (according to my standardized chronology) and was 12 years old when Confucius was born in 2789. Confucius, it is said, ‘enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.’ (Wikipedia). This would have been in the 2790s. The Buddha left home to go on his journey of Enlightenment in 2806 at age 29, two years after Confucius began studying in 2804, as it is said, ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning’. The Buddha attained Enlightenment in 2812 at age 35, and Confucius tells us that in the year 2819 he took his stand. The Buddha died in 2857 at 80 and two years later, Confucius writes, ‘At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.’ Two years after that, in 2861 he died at age 72. Or perhaps he died at 71, before reaching his birthday that year.

Two-thousand four hundred and sixty five years later, in 5326, (otherwise known as 1986) my grandfather died at age 71, a man whose name is unknown to history, another blip in that great span of time between those ancients and ourselves. He is memory to me now, more legend than human to my cousins born after him, one of whom will be twenty this year. My grandfather was born to a lumberjack and housewife a few weeks into the events we now call World War I. At 31, (my present age) he saw my father for the first time, a baby born two weeks after Easter and two weeks before Hitler would shoot himself in a Berlin basement. Thirty years after that, I would be born, and now I’m at the age when I should be (according to this pattern) producing the fellow whose child will remember me twenty years after my death. If I were to die at my grandfather’s age, that would put this grandchild’s memory in the year 2066. But this pattern appears to be broken, since there’s no chance I’ll be having children anytime soon, and perhaps this also means I have more than 40 years left to live.

My father was in Moncton, my mother called him to tell him the news. I’d been playing with my Lego boat, my sister near me. She recieved the phone call and sat on the couch in the living room, and when she hung up told us that he’d passed away. My sister, crouching to my right, sprang up and ran to my mother and begain sobbing. I had a quiet and stunned reaction, yet joined the hug happening on the couch. The phone call to my father, away in some motel, and so to this day I don’t know how he reacted to the news his father had died. It’s also something I don’t feel it’s any of my business to find out.

It was a bit of surprise, since the week previous he’d been on the mend. The previous Thursday, when I went to the doctor’s regarding my pencil-wound, my mother and he had talked about how he’d been getting better, because the doctor was in fact my uncle. And yet fate intervened on this weekend in February, and a lifetime of smoking and drinking had worn out a body not destined to live to the Canadian life-expectancy of the time, which was 75. That’s what I remember thinking, as I’d recently learned about those statistics - that he’d died three years short of when ‘he was supposed to’, and yet that three year measure would only have been acurate had he made it to his next birthday that September. Had he made it to that birthday, he would have met his latest Grandchild born that August, a boy, a cousin to myself, the first son of my uncle, the third of my grandfather’s sons. At the news of my cousin’s birth I was happy since the responsibility of carrying on the family line no longer rested solely with me.

Saturday 22 February 1986

Good day. Made catapult for “Missle Man”. Dad went to Moncton.

Friday 21 February 1986

Fun day! A and S came. Had snowfall fight and played with computer.¹

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1. A was my sister’s best friend, but S I don’t remember at all. Apparantly it snowed twenty years ago today, and the computer refered to was a Commodore 64, which I still have in the basement, and it still works to. I set it all up last in 2002 because I was working on a project that used it.

Thursday 20 February 1986

Good day. School strike began. Had to wait a half hour at doc’s¹.

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1. I went to the doctor’s with regard to my pencil wound. He said it was no big deal. By this time it was already dark with mark of the lead, he said it might stay that way, or something to that effect. He may of used hydrogen peroxide on it, but I don’t really remember. At age 11, a half-hour seemed like a long time.

Last month, I waited 45 minutes for my dentist appointment, watching Paul Martin give one of his pathetic campaign speeches. When I got home, I casually noticed the note I’d made on the calendar, which read ‘11.30′, and here I’d thought it’d been for 11. ‘That’s why I waited so long!’ I said to myself.

Wednesday 19 February 1986

Good and bad. Michelle jammed a pencil in my arm.¹ Just math for homework. Had fun playing with “Missile Man”.

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1. Michelle, my sister, was doing her math homework on the floor in the living room. I was bugging her and she got so angry with me she stabbed me in my left arm with her pencil. Well, she was trying to hit me and forgot she was holding a pencil, I guess we could say. It didn’t hurt so much but it was kind of shocking to see the pencil hanging from this wound, it’s lead tip embedded beneath the skin. She got into a world of trouble which I appreciated, since it was usually I who was in trouble.

To this day, I have a mark there, a little gray spot. It’s the only type of tattoo I ever received.