immanence

One of the most frustrating things about losing a family member during this pandemic has been the mandatory self-quarantine — the one that’s been imposed on me for crossing a national border to get here (to the Toronto area where my father was living up until a few days ago), and on my sister who is Covid-positive and who lived with and took care of my father over his final week of life, and on everyone else, who should be doing their best to stay away from us. When you lose a father and then cannot even see your siblings, let alone spend time with them to tell stories and comfort each other, the loss leaves an unusual hole to be filled by other means.

I have been filling it by writing about it. And by visiting a place where I can extend myself into the world a little, and to breathe into that extended space — which I can’t do with other people at a time of quarantine.

While I am technically self-quarantining in the room where I am staying, I have quietly extended the boundaries of that self-quarantine to include the wooded ravine of the Credit River, which is a short drive away. It is one of several remarkable ravines that carve up the swath of land sloping down toward Lake Ontario from the eastern end of the Oak Ridges Moraine, now filled mostly by the Greater Toronto metropolitan area, the largest conurbation on this continent north of New York City. Toronto may be a great city, as cities go, but the vast land surrounding it is mostly suburban sprawl, and these ravines puncture that sprawl to make possible some modicum of more-than-human life — some breathing room in an otherwise intensely Anthropocene kind of place.

Growing up, we used to spend chunks of our summers at a shared extended-family cottage in a Ukrainian “summer village” called Poltava, in the Caledon Hills some 20 miles north of here as the crow flies. The memories of swimming in the Credit River, which snaked its way alongside the community, of floating on air mattresses downstream toward the nearby village of Terra Cotta, and of exploring the expansive woods alongside it, are among my best memories of growing up. They first tuned me into the fact that humans aren’t alone here in this world.

My father passed downstream last Friday morning, back to the big water we all come from and to which we’ll return. I arrived two days earlier, but could not visit him. I watched him being wheeled out by emergency medics, his eyes closed, his breathing calmed with oxygen brought to his nose. About an hour later, as he lay in a hospital bed, he listened to my sister, over the phone, recite the names of all his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. (He had feared dying alone in a hospital, and this was the best we could do.) She then said an “Our Father” and a “Hail Mary,” he took his last couple of breaths with the phone still at his ear, and his pulse stopped beating.

Video-calling my son afterwards, I told him that his Dziadzio has not left us because he still lives through us. Our elders — parents, grandparents, and other mentors — remain with us for as long as we are who we are. When we say “I,” what do we mean? Each of us is a set of conversations between the impulses and inspirations that come from three places: those are there with us from the beginning, mysterious and inchoate as they are (if you choose to believe in them); those that have formed and nurtured us through the guidance and inspiration of parents, siblings, teachers, mentors, friends, heroes, and even competitors; and those that we discover through our own efforts along the way. There is no “me” separate from any of them; there is only the one that gets forged at the dynamic, and sometimes tension-ridden, intersections between them. The guidance and inspiration of the second group — and of parents in particular, when parenting is “successful” — lives through us and always will.

“Inspiration” is a word worth taking literally here: those who have “in-spired” us have “breathed into” us (Lat. in-spirare). So we breathe them out through our actions, our thoughts, and our lives. We work through their dilemmas and challenges as we confront our own circumstances. They seed the ground that grows us, and (to mix metaphors) remain among the stars and constellations of the night sky that orients us.

What of my father breathes most in me is his deep curiosity and desire to know and understand the universe. One of my special moments with him was a night-time walk at that same Poltava when he and a dear friend of his conversed in wonder about the Apollo astronauts who were, at that moment, walking on the moon, and my seven-year-old self could only listen in awe as I glanced upward at the dazzling night sky.

He was an Apollonian, no doubt. His desire for knowledge led him to return to the source of his own sustenance: after he raised four kids and retired from trying to make a living through selling insurance and later real estate, he opted for a different kind of insurance and real estate — one rooted in his understanding of the great beyond. He completed the theological studies he had always wanted to finish and became a Ukrainian-Catholic priest. (That branch of Catholicism allows for married clergy.) That defined him for the rest of his life.

Over his final year of life, my father would obsessively recount the vivid dream he had, forty days after my mother’s passing (they lived together for 67 years), of arriving with her at some entry gate to a beautiful, large building and being told, when he provided his “documents” to the angelic figure staffing the gate, that she can go in, but he still has to wait. “You’re all good, nothing is missing; just not time yet.” That gave him hope. That he was ready for death is an understatement. But Covid-19 is not what he had in mind.

What breathes in me most from my mother is her love of beauty, of music, and of the fellowship and joy that it brings. Mixed with my father’s thirst for knowledge, even certainty, what came from the combination was the sort of creature that I am. Everything else — including all the differences between us (parents and children) that take on such larger-than-life dimensions when we are growing up — is circumstance. So it is with all of us.

Circumstance is important, of course. It is made of the world that we interact with, and my world was very different from theirs, so different in fact that they sometime seemed incommensurable. But what we bring to our own embrace with the world is very much imbued with what they (our parents, elders, mentors) brought to us.

I’ve written an obituary of my father based in part on interviews I carried out with him in recent years. It can be read here.

He didn’t used to speak as much about his past, but in his last years he was very forthcoming, and quite emotional once he got going. If he sometimes seemed more distant to me, when I was growing up, I realize now (with the perspective of being a parent myself) that it was only because he worked so damn hard. They all did, my parents’ generation: from the moment they landed on these shores from their war-ravaged pasts, they worked so hard — to bring their kids a future that was better than theirs, and at the same time to bring their past back to life, as if it could walk and talk just like it did in the past that they themselves could never live out back home, in the “old country.” A past dreamed back to life in the DP camps of middle Europe.

It was all uphill, but they had something they brought with them, that they knew they wanted to keep. It kept them going.

In the end, he was worn out, and torn out, at age 95, by a bloody virus.

Thanks to everyone for your condolences and well wishes, shared on Facebook and everywhere else. So many of you to share this moment with. Thank you.

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Afterword: I have not mentioned the other Covid story that could be told here, which is that facing our elders in senior communities across North America, and indeed around the world. I’ll post more about that as I wrap my head around it.