Swing Low (25 page)

And the years passed. I functioned more or less automatically, reciting Bible verses to my reflection as I shaved, hoping to be inspired, reading the biographies and autobiographies of various individuals, hoping to learn about life, being alone, happy at the cottage, writing notes to myself, filling my family file, walking, walking, walking, taking care of my yard and my flowerbeds, ingesting pills, practising my typing, seeing my psychiatrist, attending library meetings, attending church, attending to Mother, and teaching school. One by one Elvira’s brothers, and a sister, died. Not one of them had made it much past the age of sixty. I missed my brothers-in-law intensely. Their good humour and lust for life, like Elvira’s, had amused and sustained me. Lean not unto thine own understanding but trust in the Lord with all your heart and He shall direct your paths, I reminded myself countless times a day.

Have just been visited by Reg and Diana. She tells me that I will have to make up my mind about how I want to live — spend my time in bed or face life. I want to ask if there are any other choices, but I smile, nod, wait, stare out the window, will the world, including them, to leave. Brother tells me he has hired a man to take care of my flowers. That
explains it. Would like to say, Hire a psychiatrist to take care of your brother, but don’t. Muster up the words to thank him. Would like to see my flowers one more time, very much so.

N
ovember
30, 1993
. My heart stopped functioning properly and gave the idea to my brain.

My last day of teaching, brought on by a heart attack while hanging up Christmas decorations in the hallway at Elmdale School. I suppose I should have known it would happen there. As I descended from my stepladder, doubled over in pain and hung with garlands, Gary, the principal, happened by and asked me if I needed help. I just might, I said, hoping not to alarm the young man, I just might. He brought me here, of course, and the doctors prescribed two aspirins. Not a heart attack, they said, we’re certain of it. That evening Elvira asked why, if it wasn’t a heart attack, I was in so much pain and receiving large doses of morphine. The doctor upgraded my condition to a mild heart attack and said I’d be home in two or three days.

But several days later, I went into heart failure. I was
rushed by ambulance to the intensive care unit of the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, where they told my family I had little chance of surviving, and where I was immediately intubated, unable to breathe at all on my own. And we think, added the doctor, that he may have sustained some damage to the brain. How is that? asked the family. Loss of oxygen, said the doctor simply. We would have liked to have seen him put on a respirator sooner.

I remember lying naked in the ICU (I had a high fever and they were trying to keep me cool), hooked up to tubes and wires and IVs, unable to speak because of the hose in my throat and unable to move at all, and listening to the beautiful high voices of the Elmdale school choir singing Christmas carols. The radio station in Steinbach had taped them singing especially for me. They said, this is for Mel Toews, if he can hear us, from the students of Elmdale School who miss him very much, who want him to get well and come back to school, and who wish him a very Merry Christmas.

There was a cantankerous man recovering in the area next to mine whom the nurses jokingly called Sunshine. He was a homeless man who refused to tell anybody his name and was brought in by the police after he collapsed in the street. He frequently pulled out the tubes they had attached to him and the nurses were continuously reprimanding him and telling him he might die if he didn’t lie still and keep his tubes in. Do you want to die, Sunshine? they’d ask as they re-tubed him each time. Do you want to die? Go to hell,
he’d say. You know you’ll die if you do it again, they’d say. Good! he’d answer. I’ll see you there! When the nurses had set up the radio right next to my head and turned the volume up high so I’d hear my kids singing, Sunshine hollered, Christ, turn that damn radio off! The nurses quieted him down, saying, That’s okay, Sunshine, it’s for Mel. I couldn’t actually see Sunshine in my position on the bed but I lifted my hand slightly and waved. Go to hell, he said. But I was able to hear my students above the noise he made, singing the songs we’d rehearsed so many times for the big Christmas concert, and they sounded perfect to me, like a professional choir of angels. Even Sunshine acknowledged that they weren’t half bad, but said they made him feel he’d already died and gone to heaven.

Eventually Sunshine left. For where, I have no idea. Reg had brought Mother all the way in from Steinbach to visit me in the hospital, and I did something I had never dreamt I’d have the courage to do. I refused to see her. I told Elvira I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to see the look on her face when she saw me hooked up to all the machines and wires and to know how disappointed she would be. Now Mel’s heart fails on top of everything else! Is there no end? That sort of thing. I just couldn’t do it. Elvira informed Mother that I wasn’t up to having visitors, and Mother, grin fastened to her face, sat in the waiting room until Reg showed up to take her back home. My one and only act of defiance shocked Elvira and she said she was proud of me, even though the only thing I was of me was sick. Elvira and the girls took me home on Christmas Eve. They wrapped a green woollen scarf around my neck and ears and helped me out to the car, one
daughter on each side of me and Elvira waiting behind the wheel with the engine running. I hadn’t made a full recovery but nobody told me that then. Why ruin Christmas?

I’d like to forget the last three and a half years of my life, and, at this rate, I probably will. After a long and often fruitless search for help, Elvira finally found a specialist who gave me devastating news. He told me that I had suffered and would continue to suffer from small strokes and that I would very likely come to a point where I had no regrets and no hopes. No memory of the past and no plans for the future. What does one say? Elvira and I went for a long drive through the countryside after that particular appointment. She tried not to cry, tried to look at the bright side of things, held on to my wrists like the old days. We can travel now, Mel, we’ll have fun. But I didn’t say a word. Needless to say, my teaching days were over. In the beginning, for the first few months, I tried to imagine a life without teaching. My memory was bad and I easily became fearful and confused, but I tried to exercise regularly and to carry on with the work I’d been doing outside of the classroom, which included my never-ending research on important Canadians and my book on the prime ministers. I asked myself continuously how this could have happened. I was doing what I do, I thought, I was teaching school, hanging up Christmas decorations, how could this have happened?

Elvira and the girls and the grandchildren did their best to cheer me up, to keep me busy, to keep me out of bed, but gradually, and inexorably, I succumbed to the deepest, darkest depression I’d ever experienced in my life. I was nothing if not a teacher, and there was no other explanation.

Mother’s drinking finally stopped the day she died, age eighty-nine, in this hospital shortly after my “retirement.” When Elvira tiptoed into my bedroom to give me the news, I pretended to be asleep. Mother’s gone, Mel, she whispered. And I remember thinking: Then I have nothing else left to prove, have I?

If a depressed man can grieve, then I suppose I did. I grieved for what might have been. I felt guilty for not having had the courage or the love necessary to forgive her. Somehow, I thought, that might have made a difference, but of course everything was too late now. That my wife and my daughters and their partners and various children were still very much alive, and that they loved me, and that they were becoming more desperate and worried about me with every day that passed, was a fleeting, abstract notion, compared to my all-consuming obsession with what I had lost in my life and what I had failed to accomplish by waiting too long. There was never any doubt in my mind that it had been my sole responsibility to build a relationship with my mother, and that I had failed to do it.

In the beginning of this three-and-a-half-year period, Elvira managed to persuade me to travel with her to Arizona, to one of these gated communities in the desert where white, middle-class, retired folks go to get away from the cold winter. Naturally, this was not Elvira’s idea of an adventure, but she knew it was a compromise she might pull off. It was a very safe, very conventional, very familiar place, but away from home at least. Her sister and brother-in-law went there often and so did a few other couples we knew. I agreed to it. As always, when away from home, I managed
to function normally and even enjoy the odd moment here and there. While Elvira swam, played Scrabble, went on desert hikes, and took off to watch spring-training baseball games, I researched the lives of Canadians (Emily Stowe, Emily Carr, Henry Pellatt, the King of Casa Loma, and Cora Hind, to name a few) in the small library that had been set up in the common area of the “compound.” (My daughter’s word for it. I’d call it a trailer park.)

I made a few phone calls, one to Llew, my mechanic, to tell him how well the car was running, and to Elmdale School to make arrangements with Miss Hill that she would put chocolate bars on the staffroom table when she thought the time would be right, and that I’d reimburse her when I got back. I updated my diary. I visited with other compound-dwellers, I sat by the pool in the sun and attended the occasional lecture on holistic health or whatever was being offered. From time to time the activity director would arrange for a nurse to ride around on what looked like a Dickie-Dee ice cream bike from trailer to trailer offering the oldies various medical tests and advice. Oh my, hooted Elvira the first time she saw the nurse on the bike, it’s come to this! I read up on the Reichmanns, the Bronfmans, the Cronkites, and the Gores, and Arizona: a cavalcade of history. And I walked.

Elvira decided it would be great to have the grandchildren come and visit us during their spring break, and she immediately went about making the arrangements. We all had a wonderful time. Elvira and the kids flew about from one activity to the next and I, in my usual way, watched them from the sidelines, amused and bewildered. I particularly enjoyed sitting by the pool and watching the kids
swim. The oldies rarely swam. They stood, like storks, in waist-high water, wearing straw hats and working at crossword puzzles, while my grandchildren darted around them, underwater, like electric eels. Eventually, one of the oldies would glance meaningfully at me from under his or her boater, and I’d casually suggest to the kids that we head back to the trailer for some lunch.

The kids were hugely amused by the type of activities and games we residents participated in. My grandson suggested we throw all our medication into one big pile and, when signalled, run towards it, scramble to find our own, and run back to the starting line — the objective, of course, to do it in the least amount of time. I assured him that I’d bring it up with the activity director that very afternoon.