Back to Vernon

After waking at 6:50am and arriving at the dock at 8:20, I caught the nine o’ clock ferry to Vancouver.  Now, I’m lined up with fellow passengers like a bird on a wire at one of the many workstations.  I had plenty of time before the 9:00am ferry to get a cup of coffee to drink in the car as I ate my breakfast, a fig bar that I had bought yesterday at Ottavio’s in Oak Bay.  I had thought it would be like a granola bar, although it did look a bit dark.  It turned out to be just a densely packed mass of figs.  Fortunately, Barbara and Terry had given me a snack bag for the road as I bid them adieu before leaving this morning.  In it was a HUGE hermetically sealed and very typical bag of Korean crunchy snacks, which went well with the figs and made a hearty breakfast.  Also in the bag was a chocolate/hazelnut bar, to remind me of our wonderful morning chats and cups of hazelnut coffee, which I will miss.

I will miss mom too.  In spite of the fact that we have epic arguments and different priorities in life, we did have some good times these past weeks and came to appreciate each other a bit more, I think.  She’s still feeling very sad and often depressed.  Her most frequent refrain is, “What’s it all about?”  She’s tired and her PHN is not giving her any breaks.  I can’t get a handle on the kind of pain she’s enduring and sometimes lose my temper when I see how cavalier her attitude to drugs is, but that’s all part of her nature.  She’s either way up or deep down.  Like the Grand Old Duke of York’s men, when she is up, she is up.  She wants to do everything and have all the fun there is to have.  When she is down, she is down.  I’ve never known anyone with a bleaker outlook than hers in those times.  And when she is only half way up, she is at her best.  I, of course, am either perfect or perfectly ignorant of my own faults.  Bill and I have worked well together to try to help her, so we’ll see what happens.

I still hope to see my friends in Vernon and do a little skiing and snowshoeing before going to Mexico.  It’s going to be a busy two weeks in March because if all goes well, I fly to Leon on the fourteenth.

My last walk along Willow's Beach for this visit

Mom, inspired by a picture of Jay after his morning workout, assumes a 'fighting trim' pose.

A grey day on the Coastal Renaissance, but I did feel reborn as I breathed in the sea air on my short walk around the 'sun deck'.

Life's neither a bed of roses nor a bowl of cherries, but at least there are clusters of crocuses to look at in February in Victoria

Experiment

This is an experiment in writing my blog on an iPhone using only one thumb. I'm using the phone Jay gave me last Christmas. It had the name 'Jay the Thumb' written on the back, and I continue to use the same technique.
The weather has been glorious in Victoria, but mom's progress is slow. When I arrive at her place in the morning and see her sitting up, well dressed and ready to do whatever we have planned, I think she is such a bright little fighter, but after her noon nap and my walk along the ocean, I approach Shannon Oaks with trepidation, the dark side lurks. On Monday I found her wearing her heavy coat,slumped, shivering by the phone, having called the doctor. Fortunately he hadn't been able to see her until Friday because she was suffering from neuralgia and wanted help to die. He wouldn't have been able to do that, nor will he be able to do anything about her nerve pain when she does see him Friday, but by then she may be more prepared to carry on with it as she has done for the past 11 years. I add my voice to the campaign in favor of immunization, " GET THE SHINGLES SHOT!"

I have lots of down time in a day which I either spend walking and reading or waste drinking coffee. I did get some Spanish stuff from the Oak Bay library on Sunday, which I'm casting an idle eye over. I still hold out hope that I will make it to Mexico. I'm going to have to get tough myself and just leave next week. Mom will do her best when she has to, or is that self-justification?

Mom gets out

Tomorrow mom will get out of the hospital.  It will be Friday, February 13, 2015.  I’ve never worried much about that day and date combination, black cats crossing my path and mirrors breaking, but I’m a bit dubious at the moment.  She’s certainly cured of all infection and too agile to spend time in the physiotherapy ward, but she’s still tired, breathless at times, suffering from the pain of PHN and subject to her usual mood swings, amplified by grieving.  All of this bodes ill for a successful launch back into life at Shannon Oaks.  Oh well, it’s going to happen.  I prepared her clothes tonight, and Bill went to visit her.  Tomorrow we will pick her up around 10:00am.  The plan is to have dinner together in her place tomorrow.  Bill will spend the night with her there and then leave Saturday morning.  I will carry on here, probably until the end of the month.  I hope to leave then to return to Vernon and prepare to go to Mexico.  Bill will answer the call, if there is one, while I’m away and then we’ll see what happens next.

Bill and I have worked well together, trying to settle all the business matters for mom.  She will find something to worry about no matter what we do, but at least we will be able to tell her to be calm, confident in the knowledge that we may not have everything in final shape but we are well on the way and have done what can be done for the moment.  In this connection, Barbara made a big contribution.  We were about to drive to Duncan because we had been told that there was no Service BC office in Victoria, and there isn’t. But we were too wound up to question the idiocy of every Victoria resident with such business to conduct driving all the way to Duncan, she wasn’t.  She searched the various offices on line, separately.  Service Canada handles CPP in Victoria from a wonderfully central location at the corner of Johnson and Douglas Streets, for example.  We did everything without leaving town.   

Bill is constitutionally incapable of letting situations drag into the mundane, so we have had some good times and got to appreciate each other more (at least I have him) during this period of family crisis.  We have had some fun.  One day we took a break and drove to Port Alberni, a rather long drive.  We went for a walk in nearby Cathedral Grove.  The rain forest was so wet that the paths were impassable at points.  They are made of well-trampled crushed rock, and consequently, the water stays on top, so we often walked on the porous sides of the trails.  Some parts were completely impassable.  But we enjoyed ourselves just because we were outside and away from it all.  We have also had some good pub lunches.  He has introduced me to Grimbergen beer, a Belgian beer that is dark in color but light in flavor, and to excellent cob salads.  The best was at the Beach House Restaurant on Cordova Bay Road in Victoria.  It had crunchy romaine lettuce tossed in a light dressing, ripe avocado, tomato, grilled chicken strips, two rashers of perfectly crisp maple bacon and many chunks of blue cheese.

We’ll see what tomorrow holds.

My morning coffee friends

Dad's memorial in the dinning room at Shannon Oaks

Dad's obituary

Bill in Cathedral Grove

A man feeding crows on Dallas Road

Friday, Feb. 6, 2015

It’s Friday, February 6, 2015 and tomorrow might be the first day in well over a week that Bill and I won’t be wearing masks, gowns and gloves for a good portion of the time.  Mom is getting better and will not be considered contagious by then.  I didn’t feel well this morning, so Bill and I just did a bit of banking and tried to find Services BC.  That was not easy.  Bill thought he had found it, put the address into the Google GPS on his iPhone and navigated while I drove.  It took us to the most dismal collection of buildings I’ve ever seen in Victoria.  We had to park and ask passers by where we were only to discover that this was in fact the location of the administration offices of the entire Services BC for the province but they did not service clients.  In fact there is no such office in Victoria; you have to drive to Duncan or do it all on line or by mail.  We still have to wait for some papers we hope are in mom and dad’s safety deposit box before we can do this work anyway so we had to leave that undone.  Meanwhile we can’t get into the safety deposit box until our Power of Attorney papers are approved by the main branch of RBC, so we were left spinning our wheels.  We did what we have been doing to keep on an even keel, went for coffee in a great little local place.  Then we visited mom for a while, went back to her apartment, where Bill is living, for lunch and then I returned to Barbara and Terry’s safe house to rest.  Bill had given me some pills that fight colds, so I took one and went to bed.  I just got up and feel better. I Face-Timed Bill to find him masked for the last time and visiting mom.  She was sitting up and sounding cheery.  She was very weepy when we visited her this morning.  She seems to have survived the RSV and pneumonia but she faces a struggle ahead, learning to live without dad after 72 years of marriage.  At her lowest point she was saying they should just let her go to join him, but at other times you can see in her eyes and the intensity of her concentration to get something right the Shirley Mary Liddle who has never let anything get past her and is not yet ready to do so.  She hates cats but she is one.  Curiosity hasn’t killed her yet and at this point it’s still what keeps her alive.

Bill in an arbutus at Sooke Potholes

The ruins of a mill (I think) by the river at Sooke Potholes

Bill at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in a Seoul subway pose

Myself elf at the Royal Jubilee

Blossoms on Yates St.  Spring comes to Victoria

Dad died on January 30, 2015

Dad died at 2:00am on Friday, January 30.  He had been taken to the hospital on Sunday night because of a fall.  Mom thought he would be out in a day, but when I got home from skiing on Tuesday there were 2 phone messages for me.  One was a doctor who said that as much as she didn’t like to state it coldly over the phone, dad would not likely survive.  The other was mom who said that Bill was on his way to Victoria and I should come too.  I left Vernon at 7:30am Wednesday, thinking he might die before I saw him and glad that at least we had enjoyed a good Christmas together.  At that time we had shared a couple of looks and comments that we both understood to mean that we doubted we would be together for another.  I had not thought he would fail so quickly though. 

His final struggle was like all the others in his life, long and hard.  He did not go easily into that good night.  Mom stayed with him all Wednesday night.  When Bill and I arrived at the hospital Thursday morning, she looked good for a 93-year-old woman who had had only 4 hours of sleep.  We all stayed with him all that day.  Bill and I finally convinced mom to go home around 11:00pm.  The hospital phoned her at 2:00am to say dad had died, but she was so sound asleep that Bill didn’t wake her.  He called me at Barbara and Terry’s as we had planned.  I was so sound asleep that Barbara had to come down and wake me.  We decided to do nothing until morning.  Mom and dad are members of The Memorial Society of BC and through them to Earth’s Option Cremation and Burial Service in Victoria.  Between the two, we were able to settle everything easily.  We had all dressed up in anticipation of some need to go places and do things, but all was managed in mom’s place with the help of one man.  We felt so relieved that when Bill suggested we have a small wake, mom and I agreed.  We went to The Snug at The Oak Bay Beach Hotel.  Even mom had a glass of Grimbergen, a Belgian beer.  We had a great waitress, good food, a few real laughs and a walk on the balcony.  It was the right thing to do at the right time.

On Saturday, mom had a cold, so she stayed home.  Bill and I went for a drive to Sooke.  We walked all around the Sooke Potholes, had lunch in a good old bar, walked along Wiffen Spit and drove home to find mom in bed, very ill.  She was shaking, coughing and had called the doctor.  He arrived soon after we did and said her blood pressure was dangerously high and one lung sounded full of fluid.  We drove her right away to the emergency ward of the Royal Jubilee Hospital where she is at the moment.  She’s not in good shape, but everything possible is being done for her.  They’re not sure if she has RSV (a virus that usually hits children), which is what dad had or pneumonia or both.  She has non of the weariness with life that dad had, so I think she’ll pull through, but she looks very weak and tiny in the hospital bed and she can’t get comfortable and sleep as she should because lying down makes her PHN flare up.

I’m at her place now, and Bill is with her.  He will come here to watch the Super Bowl around 3:00pm, and I will replace him at the hospital. 

More anon

Mom walking in the garden at the Royal Jubilee Hospital.  Note the glorious heather.

The Wake at The Oak Bay Beach Hotel

Raising a glass to dad