I was in downtown Toronto with my girlfriend, Anna, outside a Vietnamese restaurant where we were planning to eat when Bach's fugue started playing in my pocket - my cell phone. My mum, Linda, was on the other end. I could sense the seriousness in her tone, unnatural compared to her usual, bubbly demeanor. I patiently listened as she broke the news to me that her dad, Ron, had stomach cancer and had not eaten more than a bird's dinner since I had seen him two weeks ago. Hearing herself say it, she said, drove home the reality that she really did not want to be true. She began to cry and fought to remain coherent at least until getting off the phone with me.
Upset, I immediately took the streetcar and then the subway back to my apartment. It was a great comfort to have Anna there for the first bit because she had met Ron on many recent occasions and had come to know what he had meant to me.
Anna went home and I went about figuring out how to get to Ron's farm close to Belleville. Luckily, my uncle Barry, a trucker, was at his company's yard in Markham, preparing for the trip himself.
I took the subway from the extreme west-end to the last stop on the northern line. I met him there and I rode with him in the Audi he drives when he is not at work.
We talked a little about Ron. It was unavoidable. Mainly, though, we tried to think about more abstract, impersonal subjects like the mid-term elections in the US and the state of media. Driving for hours and hours on the open road has made Barry introspective, he said. It was delightful to discuss interesting issues and viewpoints. It was a gr
eat distraction from what events we knew were about to follow as we neared Ron's farm.The car turned down the dirty back-roads twenty-minutes away from the closest city, Belleville. Barry drove down the long, farm driveway where we saw four other cars parked.
Ron had always had regular visitors but this was more cars than I had ever seen there at one time in front of his little, white house. We were greeted by Linda and her sister, Barry's wife, Gloria.
Ron's dog, Bob (what he named all the dogs he's had for the past three decades) was a large, Husky-Shepard mix. He was chained in the yard, barking excitedly and leaping toward the visitors. Inside the house in the kitchen was my dad, Ian and my cousin Kristen, whom went to school with me in Kingston but I had not seen since she moved to Halifax and I to Toronto for post-graduate.
We chatted about the mundanities of our lives and work and school while what was really on our minds was in the next room, what we could not bring ourselves to talk about.
The den was turned into a makeshift hospital room, with a stiff, adjustable hospital bed where his recliner used to be. He was on the edge of the bed in a dark blue housecoat. The nurse was by his side. He was weak from not eating or drinking. He recognized me but I could not tell if he could understand what I was saying.
It was late by the time I got in and the nurse was preparing him for bed. This man, who could lift 100-pound hay bales just months earlier needed help disrobing. Beneath the robe, his skin was pale and hung off his atrophied body. For all the time I had known him before, he was strong and well-built, but now he seemed small and diminutive. He was a sweet, poor, old man.
We all stayed up late that night in the kitchen, discussing his condition, while lied in the next room. My parents kept urging me to eat - "you look so thin; are you eating in Toronto?" "Yes, I've been eating." They had picked up a dozen Tim Horton's bagels and muffins for supper. It was as though splurging on pastries would placate everyone. Thinking of how Ron could not eat did not make me feel like eating. In a perfect world, donuts and muffins would solve all of our problems.
