‘There will be joy back in this house’
Two weeks ago, Howie Emerson was driving to work when he received a call from the police. It was about his wife, the mother of their three children, who was expecting a fourth. The call set in motion a life-shattering experience of tears, pain, and ultima
SUNDAY MORNING, the day before the visitation, Howie sat alone on his back deck drinking coffee.
The air was warm, as though it was the middle of summer, even as the leaves turned.
He allowed tears to come before the kids were up.
Later that day, Sept. 17, with family and friends in the backyard, he started writing on his laptop.
He had ambitions to write the obituary a couple of days earlier in the hospital, but there was no way.
And now? It had to be done. So much had to be done. What to write? His wife. Their child. He emailed it to his dad, and Anna’s dad, for suggestions. Anna: A devoted mother, a loving wife … Charlie: A beautiful flash of light … The next day he held it together at the funeral home, even with the open casket. But then he saw Anna in the slide show presentation, a close-up.
It was her eyes. God, she had these beautiful, unique, green-blue eyes.
It hit him hard, as one image dissolved to the next, seasons and smiles and laughter, their family story looping from the present back to the beginning.
“SO ARE WE DATING?” Howie Emerson asked.
“Yeah, I guess we are,” Anna Gillmor said.
This was 14 years ago. They met through a group of friends that went mountain biking on weekends and then out for dinner.
Except over the summer others stopped attending, and Howie and Anna found themselves, once again, across a table from one another, apparently dating.
He was 37 and she was 28. She was humble and reserved; he was a talker.
He was into pop culture, she couldn’t be bothered with it; he had mixed musical tastes, she liked heavy metal. She loved her home and garden shows on TV, he liked comedy. They weren’t a match but they fit. They lived in Toronto but were married near where Anna grew up in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, where her father had been mayor.
She came from a Catholic family and had four sisters and two brothers. It was a big wedding on the bay; Howie’s only sibling, his sister Cheri, and her husband Don, sang.
The song Howie and Anna chose for their first dance foreshadowed, in a way, their destination.
It was “Forty-Five Years,” a wistful maritime-flavoured folk number, written by Stan Rogers, who was from Hamilton. (The singer died young, along with 22 others, in a fire
on a passenger jet in 1983.) “After twenty-three years you think I could find a way to let you know somehow/ That I wanna see your smiling face forty-five years from now.”
When they looked for a home, outside Toronto, they chose Hamilton, a house on Gage Park, and started a family.
Grace came first, and then James, and then Kate.
Each time Anna was pregnant they waited to be surprised whether it was a boy or girl.
Anna took the kids to St. John the Baptist church near their home every Sunday. Howie, who was not religious and had more questions than answers about faith, did not make it a habit.
Last year, she tried to convince him they should have a fourth child.
What he wanted to do was take Anna on a dream trip, just the two of them: Paris or Hawaii, perhaps. He drew up a cheesy little travel gift booklet for her.
They could afford it, he works for a Burlington company as a software consultant, Anna was a mechanical engineer for the mining industry, with her office in Mississauga.
But she didn’t want to leave the kids. She was a practical woman, tough to buy for.
One day last February they woke the kids up at 5 a.m., sat them on the couch, and sprung the news: We’re going to Disney World today!
“My parents were big on surprises like that, too,” says Howie. “It was a beautiful moment.”
It was soon after they returned from the trip that Anna got her wish, discovering that she was pregnant with the fourth child.
“She was surprised, I was surprised,” he says.
Anna had a feeling it was a boy so they didn’t even discuss girls names. They liked the name Charles Henry. She was 39 and he was 48. “I said honey, I’m an old guy, I’m going to have kids in the house when I’m 65.”
He has a dry sense of humour and they joked about it, the age difference, how one day he’d retire, and then a few years down the road die, and she could move on with some young guy.
ON TUESDAY, SEPT. 12, at seven months pregnant, Anna had swelling in her leg.
She was told to elevate and ice the leg, and she did that evening.
Wednesday morning the leg was still swollen, and she booked a doctor’s appointment that day.
Howie had to go to work. At about 7 a.m. he told Anna he loved her, kissed her, and headed toward Buffalo to visit a client.
About 40 minutes later a call showed up on his Bluetooth in the car. It was Anna’s phone. “Hey honey,” he said. The voice on the other end was male. A police officer. He told Howie he had to come home, now: Anna had a medical emergency.
On the way back, Howie thought: whatever this is, Anna is in great hands, she will get through this, but we might be having the baby today. And that’s OK, too. Premature, two months early, but with all the medical resources in Hamilton, including McMaster, where their three kids were born, it’s going to be tough but it will work out.
He saw police cruisers parked at his house, and inside, neighbours helping with Grace, 9, who had called 911, James, 6, and Katie, 4. Anna was not there.
His eyes settled on James, who is diabetic: Had he taken his insulin yet?
His phone rang. It was a doctor at St. Joe’s hospital.
“He told me that I needed to get to the hospital now,” he says. “That Anna was vital signs absent in the ambulance, she’s had an emergency caesarean section, she’s in surgery in the E.R.”
Howie rode in a police cruiser, the officer hit the flashers — “God bless her” — navigating heavy traffic, bouncing over curbs, racing to the hospital, even as they sat quietly. He thought about Anna. And the baby.
There was a team of, had to be about 20, in the operating room; Anna on the table, having just delivered the baby, who had been moved.
“There’s the husband,” someone said quietly.
Howie left the room to let them do their thing to help Anna. He talked to a doctor, who he was told was an expert in blood clots.
A short time later, they told him Anna’s blood pressure had stabilized. The plan was to move her to the ICU.
What he wanted to do was take Anna on a dream trip, just the two of them: Paris or Hawaii, perhaps.
One day last February they woke the kids up at 5 a.m., sat them on the couch, and sprung the news: We’re going to Disney World today!
And then another doctor joined him.
“Would you like to go see your son?” he said. His son. Anna was right, it was a boy. Charles Henry; Charlie.
He saw another team, in pediatrics, working on the baby.
He got in close and took a picture. Charlie’s eyes were open.
He phoned home. He spoke with Grace, the oldest.
“Is mom going to be OK?” she asked.
He tried to sound hopeful but not make promises.
Then he heard that Anna had gone into cardiac arrest again.
They were throwing everything they could at saving her, a doctor told him.
Howie went outside and lit a cigarette standing on the sidewalk.
“Off hospital grounds,” he says. “Like a good Canadian, following the rules.”
A doctor and nurse walked toward him.
He is pretty good at reading people. He looked for a glimpse, something optimistic, an expression, body language, anything. Nothing. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” Howie said. “Yes, she is.” He went inside. He said goodbye to her, crying hard.
She died from a pulmonary embolism, which is the sudden blockage of an artery in the lung due to a blood clot. Pregnant women are at higher risk of clotting.
They offered him more time with Anna. But he was thinking: Anna is gone. And I have a newborn in the other room, and three kids at home to care for.
“You just go about your life until something happens,” he says. And it was still happening. Charlie was stable, but he had been without oxygen for a brief but critical time when Anna was VSA. The baby was up against it.
Howie got a ride home. He told Grace and James that their mother had died. They cried their eyes out. Mercifully, Katie, the youngest, was at the park. He told her later.
Grace wanted to return with him to the hospital to see Anna. Grace was brave. Her mom’s eyes were closed, she looked peaceful. She held her hand and kissed her forehead.
Arrangements were made for Anna’s tissues and organs to be donated. And her family made plans to come from out east, and Howie’s family, too, including his sister Cheri, who lives in Tavistock, near Stratford.
Charlie was transferred to McMaster Children’s Hospital that same night, Wednesday. Family visited with him, but when everyone went to leave, Cheri said she was staying.
She had already made up her mind that she would be with Charlie as long as it took. Newborns have their mother with them. She would fill the role. Howie thanked her. He couldn’t be with Charlie because of the other kids. He needed her.
Cheri stayed with the baby that night until nurses gave her a room to sleep in.
The next morning, she was stroking his foot, when a nurse suggested she gently apply hand pressure to his chest. It is called a hand hug, newborns like it; it feels closer to being in the womb.
Charlie looked just like James, she thought. He was perfect.
She sang to him and told every family story she knew. Cheri doesn’t believe in miracles. Even still she held out hope something might happen, that when he was taken off the ventilator he would take a deep breath.
In the end she was present for nearly his entire life. She knew that would never leave her, that experience. It was a privilege.
Howie called Anna’s priest, Father Laszlo, and asked if he would baptize Charlie.
On Friday family filled a hospital room, each took turns holding the baby, even as he was connected to a ventilator.
Father Laszlo pulled out eyedroppers of water and oil, and marked him with the sign of the cross.
The oxygen loss had been too much. Howie had a long conversation with staff at Mac. Great people, all of them; they actually care, he could feel it.
Prolonging Charlie’s life would only mean more pain. He had to make the decision to remove him from life support.
In a quiet room, with the wires gone, Howie watched his sister hold Charlie, with Grace in her lap — Grace, who brought a toy giraffe and rubber duck for her baby brother, and who held his hand to the end.
That night, at the house, Howie walked into Grace’s room to tuck her in.
Amazing kid, he thought. Strong. Maybe too strong. Nine going on 25. It worried him. He noticed a single tear in her eye. The burial was four days later on Tuesday, Sept. 19 at Gate of Heaven cemetery on Old York Road.
During the funeral mass, Father Laszlo spoke of how, when tragedy strikes, we are sometimes mad at God, we fight with Him. But that’s OK, he said, because God can take it.
Howie nodded. That stuck with him.
He didn’t lose or find religion. Faith? He’s pretty sure there’s something more to all this, just what, he doesn’t know.
But he had seen it first hand, he says, the power of the church community, of the rituals, tradition. “There’s a lot of strength in that.” When the priest asked Howie if he would pick up the torch and take the kids to church each Sunday, like Anna always had, he agreed. He promised.
“Hey I’m up early anyway,” he says. “We’ll be there.”
EVERYONE GATHERED at the house, the Gillmors and Emersons, friends and neighbours, Anna’s coworkers made a big dinner, a buddy of Howie’s he met while working down in South Carolina made the trip.
It was a blur of chatter, stories and laughter, a wonderful thing, it was not sad, it was a great day, everything he hoped it would be.
Initially, broken by grief, his instinct had been to put up walls, keep everyone out. But he had a realization the night after Anna died that so many others wanted, needed, to share in the grieving for this quiet, fun, brilliant woman.
Anna’s impact was beyond him. He was the gatekeeper, he thought, it was up to him to let the others in. And then everyone was gone. The funeral was over. They all returned to their lives.
He put the kids to bed, in a symbolic sense for the first time ever by himself, in a house that was full and empty at the same time.
He has lost so much. And has so much.
“This has been a life-changing event but I’m blessed, I am, in the grand scheme of things,” he says.
He wrote in the obituary that the loss of Anna and Charlie is a lesson in focusing on “what is important in this world, and to teach us to let go of what doesn’t matter.”
The way he sees it, Anna built this foundation, their family, and he will do his best to move ahead, survive, and because of her, they will be OK. He’s devastated but that’s natural. They will grieve, but not always.
That night, that first night, before bed, he gathered the kids on the couch.
“First, we are going to be OK,” he told them. “And there will be joy back in this house. I promise.”
A few days later, he took the kids on a drive south to Simcoe, where his parents live, where he grew up.
On the way back they stopped at a friend’s farm.
All the family ever had was a cat, “a narcissistic cat named Ralph.”
It was surprise time again. The friend had a litter of puppies, half black lab with some shepherd and border collie in the mix.
The kids played with the puppies, still not realizing why they were there.
“Which one do you want?” asked Howie.
They were shocked. And all smiles.
They couldn’t decide which one to get. So they took home two, jet black, one of them with white on the paws. That one’s Star, the other is Shadow.
“What’s a bit more chaos in the house, right?” he says.
HOWIE EMERSON sits on the back deck where the heat today still feels incongruously like July, cicadas buzzing, but the illusion will soon be over.
He agrees that if it had all been a movie, Anna or Charlie would have survived.
“But that’s not what happened. That’s not the way it is.”
If Anna had not talked him into having a baby, Charlie would never have been born, or died.
He does not wish he had won the argument, not for a second.
“I— I love Charlie,” he says, present tense.
“You don’t know what life is, moving forward. You have right now, that’s all you have. The past is locked-in, and the future is unknown. He was coming and he was family, and like all the kids, when you have a baby, once he comes home it feels like he was always there. Charlie would have been like that.”
He’s got to get dinner going pretty soon. And tidy the kitchen.
He’s been smoking too much, the ashtray is full.
Got to give it up for his long term health, for the kids. “But today is not that day.” His hair is full and grey, stubble peppers his face. He is off work for a few weeks. He’s put on weight the last several months, he needs to get in shape again.
And sell his vehicle, a sporty “midlife crisis” car the kids hate because they have to squeeze into it. Fortunately Anna had the minivan.
He has to cancel renovations planned for the house to make space for Charlie, needs to call and tell them there is no fourth child.
And write thank-you notes. He’s terrible at that stuff. His mom is going to help.
He talks about the past week, and past life.
“God, I loved my wife. We had a great marriage. I’m going to miss her like hell.”
Grace is at a friend’s. James comes through the screen door, playing Minecraft as always. He briefly talks about the game and leaves. That’s James, Howie says. He talks, but on his terms.
Katie, the youngest, crawls on his lap.
Anna had talked him into a fourth child, but also the third. Truth is, Howie had been good with two.
And here she is, wearing a wispy paisley dress with a purple sash; her hair blond, wavy and long, eyes electric blue, an echo of Anna.
As the sad news kept coming, Katie shed some tears, but mostly channeling those crying around her. She’s too young to process it. She rolls along.
She is, he says, their “pillar of normalcy … Katie is just Katie. I mean, she’s four.”
Every summer their family took a trip back east, to St. Stephen, Anna’s hometown.
“We’re still going to do that, aren’t we?” Howie asks Katie. “See the aunts and uncles and cousins?”
She nods, and adds, “And go on vacation.” “Yes. Very important.” It was just a few days earlier that she was at the cemetery plot with her family.
She stood with them, everyone holding a rose, next to the casket, where, inside, Anna held Charlie in her arms, the two of them frozen in time like a picture, embracing for eternity.
On cue, everyone tossed a rose on the casket.
Not Katie. She held on to hers.
The voice on the other end was male. A police officer. He told Howie he had to come home, now: Anna had a medical emergency. Grace was brave. Her mom’s eyes were closed, she looked peaceful. She held her hand and kissed her forehead.