Cat Skinner Club

Don’t Leave Before Your Bags Are Packed

cubafamilyphoto

Yesterday I completed one of those tasks that makes me feel like a real, live grown up. I wrote a will, and a living will. On Saturday I put the final signatures on my life insurance policy. Later today, I will draft my wishes for my memorial service and instructions about what to do with my remains. No, I’m not dying. At least no more than any of us are.

I think I have a unique perspective on life and death. I mean, I suppose we all do, but mine has been shaped by a lot of exposure to the subject matter in relation to the few years I’ve been around. I’ve held hands with death in several different contexts; surprise tragedy, surprise medical events, miscarriage (mine), still birth (dear friends), and the most common in my world, cancer. Fucking cancer.

After reflecting for a considerable amount of time on the subject, I conclude that surprise death is the worst. This is my personal conclusion, of course. When I was in my twenties, and barely comfortable in my own skin, I witnessed a dear aunt who was a personal hero waste away with cancer. Aggressive cancer that took her just over a year after her diagnosis. Watching how her body morphed from voluptuous and vibrant to a skeletal shell rocked me to my foundation. I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen.

Then, months later another of my mother’s sisters died very suddenly of a brain aneurysm. She was vivacious, loving, fun, active, and literally a month away from her retirement. There was no time to wrap up loose ends, make amends, say goodbye, or even get to savour the freedom and relaxation she had worked her entire life to finally enjoy. Watching how shattered her nearest and dearest were by the sudden cruelty of fate was almost scarier than watching illness waste a body away.

A sprinkling of years after that, I experienced a very early term miscarriage with a pregnancy I hadn’t planned. None of my life circumstances were ideal for bringing a child into the world. In fact, I was so cynical and afraid of myself, I had vowed that I was unfit to ever have children of my own. Losing this life, or these cells, or this soul that had become planted inside me barely felt like cause to grieve, and yet I did. Down to the very ends of my roots. As a result of this miscarriage, I knew absolutely that I wanted children, and I prayed fervently that my body would allow me to make at least one child. This event was a game-changer.

Fast forward over a decade. I am a fully immersed mother to my daughters, I’m in a stable relationship with my best friends, I have been blessed with a biological son of my own, and at this point in my life, our dear friends lose their baby in their seventh month of pregnancy. We are making presents, Sarah is planning a maternity photo shoot, our girlfriends are giggling over the scandalous baby shower cake we are going to create. Then the bottom falls out. I am utterly devastated, and can say that these two incredible people are the strongest that I know. In the background of this terrifying event, my fairy godmother is dying of lung cancer. Our little Aemon died in August. My fairy godmother would die in November. I can’t sleep anymore without waking in the middle of the night, terrified that something will rip me away from my children. This continues to this day.

My godmother, Carmen Chouinard, finally let go of this mortal coil in a truly beautiful hospice (Dorothy Ley) in late November. I had spent the night there with Sarah, and Carmen’s 23-year-old daughter Alex, who is beyond incredible. We were all standing by, convinced by the stage of Carmen’s illness and by all of her caregivers that she would pass at any moment. Carmen was notoriously stubborn, and didn’t seem to think that was the case. She couldn’t speak or move, and her body had wasted away. Her breathing was laboured, she wasn’t eating or drinking, but yet she hung on. I still don’t know what she was waiting for. I never will. She finally took her last breath after nearly all of us had all left her room. Maybe she was waiting for a smaller audience, or for her daughter to take some time to take care of herself. When I returned to the hospice, about an hour after Carmen had passed, I once again witnessed the amazing reality of an illness-ravaged body at peace. I’m not very religious anymore, but I feel certain that something leaves our body when we take our last breath. Something greater than what science can explain. I have felt this on a level that neurology can’t quantify.

Have you been close to death? I don’t mean you, in your body, though perhaps if you’ve had a near death experience, you will understand what I mean.  I mean a brush with death close enough that you cannot go a single day without thinking somewhere in the back of your mind that you might be next. Or your lover. Or your child. Our mortality has now become the single most terrifying and motivating reality in my life. My awareness of the fragility of this meat-sack I occupy has finely honed the world I am shaping for my family. I did not choose the life I live because of some sexual proclivity, or because I can clearly identify a specific sexual orientation. I chose this life because I love these people. I love the way they see me, and I love how their love challenges me to be my best self.

To assume we aren’t taking legal precautions to protect each other and our children is folly. I’m smarter, and I love better than that. As you embark on your life’s adventures, make sure all of your bags are packed. It’s morbid, perhaps, but it’s also smart and responsible and a beautiful gesture of love and care.

And it’s really kind of foolproof online: http://www.legalwills.ca 

Time Away

cheerfulsnow

November is over. I’m very happy about that because it’s my least favourite month, and this year November was particularly dark. In fact, autumn in general has been coloured with so much loss and sorrow this year that I’m beginning to wonder if there is something about the shifting seasons that compels death not only in nature, but also in us inhabitants of mother earth.

You’ll have noticed that it’s been ages since I’ve written. I apologize if the posts you may have looked forward to haven’t been there, but I needed to withdraw and turn myself inside out a little bit. Since late August I’ve witnessed a remarkable amount of sorrow, loss, and grief and rather than sit before a computer screen, I’ve been compelled to spend more time with my children and my partners. I’ve just started to really miss writing here, and so my heart seems to be telling me that it’s time to return to writing.

Our dear friends lost their baby at seven months pregnant. I suppose I was foolish to think that such a shocking, staggering loss could never touch my inner circle. We have no such control over these things, do we? My heart was utterly broken by this, and these brave parents have been nothing but inspiring in the way they are moving through this life-changing event.

Those of you with pets will know that saying goodbye to a companion animal can be just as difficult as losing a human who you love and care for. My dear friends lost their sweet and noble dog, who had been their small creature to care for and nurture for years and years – I feel like this wonderful dog has been in their family all the time I’ve known them. They gave her such a wonderful life, and they adored her so completely.

My dear aunt Carmen, my fairy godmother, the cool, hip aunt that I idolized in my youth reached the end of her journey through cancer. She is my third aunt to die from this stupid disease and my mother’s fourth sibling to die from cancer. She too was incredibly brave, and positive, and like the dear friends mentioned above she was somehow able to find some light in such a dark turn of fate. My daughters and my Sarah and I sang at her exquisite memorial, at her request, and my heart found so much solace in the beauty of harmonizing with my beloved girls, and witnessing how their cherubic voices touched so many strangers. To live my life in the hopes of being remembered so passionately and beautifully by my friends and colleagues is now my goal.

Fate grips us and tears things apart just as much as it fills us and gives us such abundance. If these difficult lessons in feeling real gratitude and savouring each blessed moment weren’t enough, the universe sent some cruel irony my way in the form of the news of a somewhat distant colleague from the performing world. She chose to end her own life quite suddenly only a week ago.

The idea of suicide was one that filled me with scorn and contempt not long ago. It was hard to find compassion after watching so many people suffer because lives were ended/ing too soon. My older, more humble self shudders to imagine a day-to-day reality so painful that one must snuff out their own light to escape the bleakness of their lives.

It’s so fragile. We are so fragile.

All I can think to do in this landscape of so much love and so much light and so much loss is to gingerly make my way through each day. My sage therapist urges me to create the memories I want to have when I look back on my life, and I’m trying so hard to do this every day.

Please dear friends, take a moment, right now and breathe. Feel what it is to have the chance to draw breath, to move through space, to think and feel and hunger and love. Think of the challenges and hardships you face, and think of how many blessings you have to balance that.

This year, consider what you are giving rather than getting. We’re changing things up this year and trying to help the children value time and experience more than toys. Our plan is to spend Christmas on a beach somewhere, healing our hearts and indulging in the company of our little darlings. I hope you too can find meaningful ways to spend the season….

The Lady Comes Knocking

The Amazing Dashiell

This week has been wrapped in the familiar haze of a place I’d hoped to avoid for a few more years. A dear friend of my love’s is losing his father to cancer (I always, always want to capitalize that word) in New York, and tonight we embark on a midnight road trip, Thelma and Louise style to lend our love, keep his apartment warm, and probably stock his freezer.

These painful stories are not my own, but they are so much the same in their telling. Someone strong and vital, a real force in this world, much loved and admired, taken down slowly by wasting illness while his loved ones stand by feeling entirely helpless and exquisitely mortal.

His daughter was married in his hospital room before he was moved home to hospice care. They weren’t sure he would make it, and wanted to act quickly so he could share the moment. Martha Stewart writes about this here. I can’t imagine anything in the world more bittersweet – such important moments happening simultaneously. My heart is aching for people I don’t even know.

Because I do know. I know what the gentle fingers of death feel like when She is near. Not disease. Disease is cruel, and angry, and unfair. Death is the gentle release at the end of it all, and when She is close, I can now feel Her and remember Her, like an ancient Mother, folding us gently into Her darkness. The hardest part is witnessing our loved ones, and ourselves opening our arms to this visitor that we’ve been taught to fear since childhood – whispering her name to the winds to speed her imminent arrival along.

I’m packing for tonight’s long drive to the Big Apple. I’m making lists, and crossing things off, all while sitting my best friend’s nine-month-old boy Dashiell. He’s incredibly sweet in his disposition, like he knows my heart needs to be reminded of the overwhelming beauty of life. He is hope, and possibility and happiness in a solid man-baby chunk of dazzling smiles and delighted chortles. He naps eats and entertains like clockwork, and he is the most precious reminder of why we must all use every day like a precious gift before the Lady comes knocking. My own girls are far away,warming the heart and soul of their visiting grandmother and I am aching for them right now.  I take comfort in the knowledge that they are probably inspiring the same feelings of gratitude in her huge heart right now.

The road trip flies by, the hours seem like minutes with my beautiful company and the comforting warmth of deep, fueling love at the other end. We are all for each other in this world we have carved out, and if one of us hurts, we all hurt.

New York City is the dazzling, outrageous boyfriend I left behind so long ago, and it fills me with joy to see him again. I stroll through the streets, delighted by everything I see, open and drinking it all in. I’m savoring every moment for those who no longer taste this feast