mortality

If he had lived, my father would have been 83 today. If he had been alive, and if the last couple of years of his life is any guide, I would have been sneaking him out of the nursing home and over to an Irish pub that was a favourite hiding place for him. He and I would have hoisted a respectable number of pints of the sacred black Irish nectar, and then, in the wee hours of the morning, I would have found some way to get him past the gatekeepers of his 'residence' and safely back to bed. They would have given the two of us some stern glances, I'm sure, but behind our backs they'd be smiling. Who wouldn't? Even as the cancer ate his body, he was a jolly, magic fellow with an endless appetite for fun and mischief, a deep heart of goodness, and an ability to whip a room full of ailing seniors into a laughing, dancing frenzy with a cock of his head, a wry joke, and a ridiculously unbalanced little two-step jig. Like his invented foreign languages -- the quasi-Russian lyrical poetry and the nonsensical German barks, his dance steps were original and beyond imitation. He's gone now, and I won't visit those last days again. Not today, anyway.

Losing people. It's one of those things I suppose we have to get used to, but I'm not there yet. I've lost two childhood friends in the last six months. The first one hit hard. He was my first close friend. High strung, of intimidating intelligence and wit, he battled depression for much of his life and when he felt he could no longer take his young family along with him on the struggle, he unmoored himself from them and set them all free. I've got much more to say about this fellow -- he's a part of me in more ways than he could ever have known -- but I'm not ready to talk yet. The wound is too fresh.

This latest casualty, similar in some ways, yet so different. His mental demons were stronger -- they kept him away from any semblance of a real life. He spent the last half of his living on the streets of Toronto, begging cigarettes, hurling abuse at passersby.

In a couple of days I'm going to Toronto to try to flog a book idea. While I'm trying to reach for a dream, the sidewalks will be littered with the chalk outlines of my childhood chums. If that won't help me to see how this is all just illusion, then there's no hope for me at all.