Part 3 continued

You think you know how you will react to the unsettling news of a death in the family,just like you think you knew what the day would be like when it came about.But you don't know that either.I didn't.

All through life we were prepared for the fact that life ends eventually for everyone.So I thought I'd be prepared.All of my grandparents had long passed. I'd lost two of my best friends at this point too,and because they were both so young,it came as a shock.In both of those cases it was some time between the time of their passing and the time I found out. I've even known friends that had children carried away by death far too soon. During my childhood,my grandmother would write to my mother every few weeks.Those letters,which she would always read to us contained,among other things news that someone or other had died.Nearly every letter did.So we were used to the idea that people passed on.Most of those people were old people,so it would be truer to say that we were accustomed to the idea that old people died.At the time I wondered how long it would take for the town my mother called home to just all die off, because it was a town of the elderly,so it seemed.I even heard people joke about it.So I thought I was used to the idea of death.Intellectually I knew that there would come a day when both of my parents would be departed,if,of course death didn't take me first.So I thought I knew how to handle it,or at least how I would handle it,even if it were not the right way.I was wrong.

No matter how prepared I might have been,I was not prepared to function well in the days and hours following the news.In large part,that is because all of the great existential questions are there,and I'd never really thought of them that much,at least in terms of how they would effect me.Why is there evil in the world? Why does God allow good people to suffer while evil people prosper? How could God allow my mother to be killed when she was my fathers care giver,so needed?How could God have denied him the mercy of death in that same accident?Why must he suffer a few more years with all his current afflictions,then lose his life's companion as well? Where did my mothers soul go?And what of the young man who died with her? What did she really believe,and was it enough to secure her salvation? From the time the police car drove away,these questions would not let me be.There was immediate disbelief,and a longer struggle with these questions,and nothing seemed to make a lot of sense.In looking back,I realize I wasn't functioning that well,though I convinced myself I was,and convinced others as well.

For a long time I just wandered around the house.I looked out the window,at the thin layer of snow in the tall grasses out behind the house.I watched the planes come and go from the airport off to the north east.For once I was grateful that I didn't know anyone else in the house that well.No real civility was called for so I just stayed in my room lost in routine things.I would go to the refrigerator from time to time,hold the door open for a bit,but didn't eat anything,lost in thought that is impossibly hard to describe.I'm not sure even I knew what those thoughts were,and I really don't recall all these years later.I was just aware of thought,and not much else for a time.Certainly not for the whole content of that thought.A bit later I was able to sift through it all and try to impose some reason on it all,though not at all successfully.It was routine that got me through those first few days and weeks.I could respond to routine when I didn't have much response to reality.


"When death has come and taken our loved ones
It leaves a home so lonely and drear'
then do we wonder why others prosper
Living so wicked year after year."

Welcome/Happy New Year

Welcome, and Happy New Year.I am glad that you've taken a moment to read this blog, which is a relatively new undertaking.To summarize,this is a sort of coming of age story, or perhaps the story of mid life  crisis.I don't know as I've exactly decided on it's interpretation yet.In any event, I am essentially a memoirist, and this is my story, of life in Western Canada in the earliest years of the twenty-first century. Yet, because I'm actually an Atlantic Canadian living in a vast country, culturally different from place to place, it's also a story of living in exile, in my own country.I don't mean exile in the normal sense of the word, but rather in the sense that forces choices upon us for the sake of economic well being.

While Waking Up In Winter is a relatively new blog, the idea has been a long time in the making. I began writing in the early 1990's, and from that time onward, the idea of writing a memoir has always been at least in the back part of my mind.And it's not even that I consider my own life as being especially scintillating.After all, I'm just busy living it. But I've come to realize, for a number of reasons that there are others who may not agree with me.So, primarily my writing of memoir began for my family, and from my family, as a realization that some of them had lived wonderfully interesting lives, yet had chosen to say very little of it, especially in print. Hence, I'm amazed, and dismayed about what has to be said about them by a process of inference.The problem with inference is that in speculation, I might get things at least somewhat wrong. To me, that is the great intolerable: the need for others to infer my reality, or worse, the construction of an alternate reality about myself by others.So, such as they are, my blogs are my life in my words.

Waking Up In Winter is the second of two blogs that I write.The first, Only A Large Hill, came into being in summer of 2016, but again, is the product of much writing that went before it.  Only A Large Hill starts at the beginning.In fact, it starts a little before the real beginning, by setting context, explaining who I am, and why I'm writing. Then it continues onward through my early life growing up in Atlantic Canada.As of this point, I've yet to get myself through the schoolhouse door for the first time. There is much more to come in 2018 and beyond, and I hope you will come along for the ride.

I'll need to take a moment to explain to you how both blogs are structured. Firstly, the two are parts of a whole, even though writing and presenting them concurrently sometimes seems a bit awkward to me.Waking Up In Winter is much less removed in time from the events being written about, so the memory is much clearer in my mind in most cases. It picks up the thread of my story around the turn of the Twenty First Century, when I'm living far from home, confronting some of the more profound things that all humans encounter, and experiencing a rather intense identity crisis. Although it is far removed in time from Only A Large Hill, and although the setting has shifted westward by several thousand miles, it is, and was intended to be a memoir about being an Atlantic Canadian. Identity is the whole essence of it's events.In part, it's propelled, and has moved forward as a result of having been identified by others as being "From Away", something that I've had to come to terms with through this century, and a contention I take issue with in the strongest possible way. Finally, I note that Waking Up In Winter is in every way post 9/11.It came out of, and belongs to the different world that was created in the late summer of 2001.In reading and editing it, I'm struck by it's grittiness, and loss of innocence, something that would not be justified by subject matter alone.

In closing, then, let me invite you to read and to share my world.In 2018, it's my goal to up my readership considerably, and to publish both of my memoirs every few days.I would also invite you, if you are one of the few people to whom I send out blog entries as they are published, to actually visit and follow my blogs, and to make comments as part of the record of those blogs. It's fine and good sending them out on Facebook, but I would really prefer that you were all more active participants. Also, if you are, or know of someone who is writing a memoir about living in Atlantic Canada, I would like to carry your blog on one or both of my own, and have you carry my blog as well.

So welcome.Come along and read, get to know me.Happy New Year.I'm looking forward to writing more for you as the year goes on.