Hope your weekend was wonderful.
Well, i can't say it was wonderful per se, but it certainly had its wonderful moments. i keep planning to come on and write a little mini trip report (to get in practice of course
) but i never seem to find the energy. There's so much background information that you need to really appreciate the trip and what it means to me (i also didn't take very many pictures
)
Here's part of the backstory to our trip:
In 1991 my dad married Deb, my stepmom. She was so wonderful. i was a very lonely kid and she was like this angel that someone sent me to keep me company. She was kind and sweet and gentle, she was an amazing cook and a wonderful baker, and she could listen like no one i've known before or since. She could listen in a way that you could tell there was nothing else on her mind except for you and she was totally with you, 100%. She was a fantastic cheerleader, always encouraging and nudging me into the unknown.
However, Deb was sick. She had epilepsy, and suffered petit-mal seizures, sometimes a dozen a day, or more. She was fragile. Luckily she was small, because more than once i caught her in my arms as she started to fall, when she would have a seizure in mid-step.
In the spring of 2005, having just called off my wedding to my former fiancé, i moved back home from Victoria, BC. It was the week before the May long weekend (Victoria Day in Canada, Memorial Day in America, though maybe they weren't the same weekend that year). i saw my dad and Deb a couple of days after i came home, and then we went our separate ways for the weekend. i went to Toronto with my best friend, to stay at her apartment and catch up. Dad and Deb went to the cottage, to be bitten half to death by blackflies.
That same week, my stepdad's mother, 90 years old, went into the hospital. It looked grim. While in Toronto i was expecting at any time for my mother to phone and call me home.
i wasn't expecting what happened.
Early in the morning on the Wednesday after the long weekend, the phone rang, and i answered it. Yes, my stepdad's mother had passed away. But the news was worse. Dad was away on a business trip - a short one. Deb had had a seizure while standing at the top (or somewhere near) the flight of stairs leading down to the family room. The family room whose ugly brown carpet concealed a floor made of concrete. She had fallen, and hemorraghed, and died.
Shock set in. i hung up with my mother and immediately called my father. i remember the way my voice cracked as i said "Daddy?" i remember the sound of his heart breaking as he whispered "Princess" in a voice i never want to hear again.
i don't remember much else of that day. i remember my best friend's arms around me as she and her then boyfriend (now her husband) made plans. Of course they couldn't put me on the bus. She would bring me home, and stay with me until the funerals were over. He would take care of everything there.
It's a four hour drive home from Toronto, and i don't remember any of it. The memories i do have of that week feel like i'm looking at them through a curtain - veiled, hazy, but there's no way i want to pull the curtain to see more clearly. It was enough to live through it once.
We spent the week in the funeral home - the sister to the one i now work in, a little way across town. Mumma in the green room, Deb in the brown room. Back and forth my brother and best friend and i traipsed a hundred times in two days. Back and forth between my father and aunt in the brown room, my mum and stepdad and sister in the green room.
Dad decided that since Deb's family was all in Montreal, he would have her body brought there and have the actual funeral there, and the burial. But there was a problem: i couldn't go.
Jess, my baby sister, whom you've guessed by now i'll do anything for, had her grade 8 class graduation trip scheduled for the day of Deb's funeral, and i had promised to chaperone. The teacher and my sister were counting on me, and i made the decision to stay, and not go with my dad and brother to Montreal for the funeral. It was a terrible decision to have to make, but i knew that my sister, having just lost her grandmother, needed me.
And so i didn't go to Montreal. i didn't get to attend her funeral, see her grave, or see her family - my stepsister, Lisa, who gave birth to her daughter just two days after Deb passed away; Deb's sister, Kim; Deb's best friend, Lorraine.
And that's why i decided to go with my dad when he went to Montreal last weekend. i wanted to see my sister, whom i hadn't seen in over 9 years, and meet her three children, none of whom i'd seen except in pictures. And i wanted to visit her grave, see the stone i'd helped to choose, check out the view she had and bring her some flowers. She loved flowers.
So, as it turns out, that's a pretty large part of the story behind the trip. i'll try to get myself together to write some more later.
We nearly started our pt's at the same time. Too funny!
a lot. !
