What love endures
Widower continues pilgrimage to be with his wife of 62 years
Every Sunday, Mike Patafie visits his wife, Jocelyn, in her quiet, polished surroundings.
He takes the black Buick, parks it under the overhang near the door, and patters across the long corridors, looking for the movable steps that will guide the quiet ascension.
And there she is, in the corner by the big window, third one up, cradled by yellow sunflowers and the gaze of Mary and Jesus. He bows his head near the black granite, without needing to read the words: Patafie, Jocelyn, Dec. 26, 1936, Aug. 26, 2012.
They were married for 62 years. “I thought it would be forever.” He’s come every Sunday since she died, to the mausoleum at Capital Memorial Gardens on Prince of Wales Drive, nearly 300 in all, nearly a year of Sundays. “I couldn’t put her in the ground,” he says, of the final resting place. “I loved every piece of her.”
Sometimes he wonders why he keeps doing this.
He’s not alone, though. He used to see a man walking to the cemetery every Sunday, coming and going, until one day he stopped and picked him up. Now he and Jim are their own widowers’ weekly, with Mike doing the driving from a McDonald’s parking lot.
Patafie is a short, powerful man who looks nothing like 87 years old, probably thanks to a rigorous workout regime. Legend has it he did 80 pushups on his 80th birthday. He grew up on Preston Street, one of 10 children, not far from the Prescott Tavern, in what was then “the village.”
He never finished high school, instead became a stationary engineer for the feds, maybe where he picked up a salty tongue and a powerful candour.
They were married their entire adult lives and had four children, so there was much to talk about — but two parts were most alive this particular Sunday: the early days, the final nights.
She lived on Elm Street, he said, and her maiden name was Ostrom. She was a student at the High School of Commerce, he was at Ottawa Tech, and they spied one another on the way to school. She was a brunette, all of 115 pounds, well-mannered and stylish, very particular about how she looked, which is to say lovely. “Gorgeous,” is his word.
“I don’t know if it was destiny or what, but that was the kind of girl I wanted.” We are whispering in the mausoleum as snow falls outside. “She just put a shine on me.” They would trip through Hog ’s Back or hang at restaurants along Preston. After a respectable length of courtship, they were married just before Christmas at St. Anthony’s Church and found two rooms in Britannia, not even out of their teens.
Patafie says he was selling newspapers by day and playing poker at night. Jocelyn told him he had to find a real job. So he studied, took his engineer’s exam in Toronto, made a life.
They had a house on Montreal Road, took trips to the Florida Keys, cottaged in Quebec, went to church, took trips to the casino.
He spoke of the tenderness between couples, things no one else knows. She would wash his hair, even cut his nails. He misses lying on the couch, with his head on her knees.
Then she got sick, myeloma. “Jocelyn never complained. She’d always tell people ‘Oh, I’m coming along.’”
The last five or six days were bad, says Mike. As she slipped in and out, he was at her side, trying to lift her spirits.
“She would ask me ‘ What are you gonna do when I’m gone?’ I’d tell her I’m not going to do nothing because you’re not going anywhere. You’re staying with me. You’re coming home tomorrow.”
It’s just the two of us, whispering in this giant vault of a space, as if the dead would awaken at a raised voice. And, for a moment, he almost begins to cry.
“I just lied like a son-of-a-bitch. I had to.” She did not come home.
So now he carries on alone, unable to fully articulate this sense of loss, the heart-candle that never burns out. There won’t be another marriage. There won’t be another Jocelyn. Though he prays a good deal, he doubts, too — doubts the existence of a benevolent God who let her suffer so.
“I am lonely. I am goddamned lonesome,” he says, jamming his hands in his pockets.
“The sad part, when I go home, when I encounter something, I can’t tell her all this. You want to tell someone. You understand? That’s the worst part of it all.”
And then Jim has reappeared and it is time to go, back into the Buick, back to the empty house, for seven more days away from her, away from the quiet, hard home of polish and whispers.