Hope and Regret

I live in constant hope that people will eventually do the right thing, that relationships will be healed and wrongs eventually righted. Once in a while, like a knife in the gut, I am reminded how foolish my hope is. And yet I cling to it still.

A cousin of mine died yesterday. I found out while at the funeral of one of my aunts on the other side of my family.

I hadn't seen Aunt Hazel in person in at least four years, but got updates from her daughters on her deteriorating condition. She started a long decline about ten years ago, and as her daughter eulogized yesterday, she actually left us a long, long time ago; it's just that her body only followed on Tuesday.

I hadn't seen my cousin, David in quite some time, either. Our families became somewhat estranged in the mid-80s when my uncle took exception to my mom's no-booze rule at family gatherings and they stopped coming to see us. It must have been tough for Mom to put that rule in place, knowing full well what the outcome could be, but she felt the need to protect her children. Morris died from the effects of heavy smoking and drinking about 15 years ago; the last time I saw David and his wife and children in person was at that funeral.

I think of them often, though. David was an OPP officer, and in my line of work, we talk about the cops a lot. I was quite taken with his wife the few times we met. His daughter got a big scholarship a few years ago and I wrote her a letter of congratulations, explaining how her Great Grandmother had been denied the chance at an education, had told me to make the most of mine and would have been thrilled at the achievement. The letter came back because they had moved and I didn't have the new address.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I have always expected that at some point, sometime, there would be a time when we cousins would get together and talk through what happened in our respective childhoods, laugh and joke and become the friends I feel we were meant to be. It's happened with some of my other cousins and I treasure it: adult conversations away from a reunion or funeral when I have discovered my cousin is someone I would choose to hang with even if we weren't related.

But now, it's not going to happen. Detective Constable David Herrington and I will not have that serious talk, we will never laugh about the year he captured every single frog in the creek at my parent's farm. I will not get to tell him the Big Family Secret (maybe he already knew), and I likely won't get to know his brilliant daughter. It's a future I hoped for that I foolishly mourn today.

Puny New Year's Tears

Like you, I spend a lot of time reading facebook instead of Flaubert, but I got a powerful and embarrassing reminder of the power of storytelling over the Christmas holiday.

There I was on New Year's Day, nearly drowning in my own tears as I finished the last 30 pages of Miriam Toews' amazing novel, All My Puny Sorrows.

It's a comedy. About suicide. But really, it's about siblings and family and unshakable love and the ties that bind us together. It's brilliant, and swept me up with the power of its writing.

So powerful, I forgot I was not alone as I sniffled and snorted and tried not to sob out loud. I was at a cottage with nine other people, fire roaring, board games being played and hangovers being recovered from, and yet I was totally alone with the characters Toews created on the page, and I was bawling my face off at her portrayal of their grief.

That's the power of books: whether you read them on screen or on paper, there's a minute after you close a particularly powerful story, when you have to take a minute to adjust back to the 'real' world, knowing you're not really the same person you were when you started.

I am usually a voracious reader, but got away from it over the last year or so, caught up in other things, but my new year's resolution is to find more great stories and curl up with a good book most of this winter. However, I feel like I should maybe keep my ugly-cry face away from the public.