Wondering about things we wish we’d asked
The deaths of loved ones almost always stir questions about their lives, their inner lives, their private hopes and sorrows, questions we didn’t realize we wished answers to until it was too late to ask.
If those who’ve lost parents and grandparents have any advice, it would probably be not to miss the chance to mine the memories of elders while you can.
For certain generations, if you don’t ask you’re never told. Even if you do ask, especially children of old soldiers, survivors of great traumas, you may get no more than a faraway gaze and silence.
Dare we ask how parents met, courted, grew together or apart, how they scrimped through early struggles, why they were so stinting or lavish with praise? Among the many curses of COVID-19 is how it snatched people, especially seniors, away, put them suddenly out of reach, inaccessible.
Afterwards, families were left to do what most of us must, recall moments, trade insights, guess at aspects of relationships, laugh at quirks of behaviour, construct biographies, try to fill in gaps.
We draw inferences from details we know, deeds that were done. We repeat oft-told tales that highlight character, illustrate values.
As was deftly done by the American writer Calvin Trillin to open “Messages From My Father”: “The man was stubborn. Take the coffee incident.”
Or take Robert Fellows, who died of COVID-19 at 87 in Toronto and whose obituary noted that he’d arrived in Canada from England in 1954 on the RMS Scythia with $54 in his pocket.
Most immigrants of his generation never forgot those two significant aspects of their lives — the vessel that conveyed them to a new land and how little money, maybe a few weeks’ room and board, backed their wager. How many times must Fellows have told the story for his family to know that amount and ship name so well and know how important it was to him?
Think, too, of Charles Lupton, of Hagersville, who died in April at 82. He liked golf, casinos, fishing and water-skiing at his cottage in retirement and — as he called it — “tinkering.”
Tinkering is a wonderful word. It is a certain kind of man who does so. It is a loving family that casts the apparently aimless absorption of men trying to figure out how the world and everything in it works in that light.
Sometimes a fetching spirit can be guessed at through simple pleasures and small acts.
Doris Tofflemire of Ajax died in April at 92. She liked sports, “Judge Judy” and Matthew McConaughey.
In the nursing home where she lived, she enjoyed art and signed all her masterpieces “Da Vinci.”
No life is completely knowable or explicable. And the duties of the demanding present distract us from the business of investigating how we become the people we are.
The answers to a lot of contemporary problems might be a renewed respect for age and elders.
As Leonard Cohen sang, “Ring the bells that still can ring.”