My parents are both dead. The fact is neither remarkable nor unique. However, they died within 45 days of one another last winter—uncommon enough to bring me and my family up hard against reality. On the northern tip of Vancouver Island I woke in the dark the morning after the second funeral, my body on Eastern time, my spirit numb. I made my way back to the village cemetery to say my own private farewell. Douglas firs were silhouetted against the first light of dawn. Colorful funeral flowers had frozen into whited everlastings. I wept into the hoar frost on the new sod and wondered what had become of these lives that had created me. I could not have guessed at the many ways that an answer was to come during the next year.
The first hint came from my children. They could feel my depression the first week I returned and, in addition, had their own sorting out to do. Grandma and Grandpa would never visit again. And if grandparents die, what about parents? "What about you?" they asked. My wife and I answered as clearly as we knew how, reassuring them of our evident good health. That said, confronting mortality became too awesome for them. It was time for the weekly ice-skating outing. I should have understood then, but I couldn't—not yet.
My wife knew, having already been through my experience with her own parents, but she was too wise to say. Instead, she turned my wandering attention to the work needed on our hundred-year-old house and on the garden. The renovations went ahead in good time, but her message was too well coded for me to read.
My first step in understanding came on a camping trip to see the whales on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. It was July, when the St. Lawrence estuary teems with life. I began to ruminate about the many camping holidays and fishing trips my parents took us on as children. We had had a sensational day spotting the great humpbacks and hearing the visceral sound of their blowing as they surfaced. As I prepared supper, I left the campstove to get some water from the stream. A voice that could only be my mother's made a casual, but not quite distinguishable, comment behind me. I turned to see what she was saying from her accustomed surveillance post at the frying pan. The cruel emptiness hit me again. The next evening the weather became changeable. After supper, I walked away from the campfire's light, gave my nose a satisfying blow, hiked up my baggy trousers, and searched the western sky for clues about the next day's weather. In a flash, I realized I had just recapitulated one of my father's daily rituals. It seemed so suited to me.
Later in the summer, I rediscovered my mother's satisfaction in picking wild berries. Under the shade of poplar trees, I kept my eyes and hands busy collecting the evening treat for my family. In this solitude I began to feel a part of the long tradition of foraging and gathering that had characterized my wandering family.
Autumn came. I screwed up the courage to take out a sweater of my Dad's and try it on. I discovered I was putting on something more than a sweater. My father was somehow with me in that sweater. I wore his aura. In some manner, I became my father.
A neglected memory surfaced, revealing my next step in understanding. Seventeen years ago my wife and I worked in what was then Biafra. The people in the neighboring village buried dead relatives under the floors of the family huts. They erected pink statues of their dead parents in the front yard, a reminder of the life that was. We were living in a culture that was conscious of those who have died, of those who live still, and of those yet to be born; all were part of the psychic here-and-now reality. At that time, our aggressively individuated, Western minds found it merely curious.
Now, I am no longer perplexed by this idea. My parents live on in me. I know what they are thinking. Their life force was passed on to their children. I am one of its custodians; slowly, daily, inexorably, I pass it in turn to my children.
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