The Manner of his Passing

After a lovely Thanksgiving weekend at Shekinah Retreat Centre which was special to Bill, he delivered me to the Saskatoon airport. Our time together was becoming more and more precious as we felt our age and mortality - probably normal for people in their 70's. It was getting harder and harder to part. When I waved at him after passing through security, I wondered how much longer I would be able to say goodbye at an airport. This was not how I thought it would end.

I was in the North in Kugaaruk (Pelly Bay) for work when I called a neighbour to check on Bill because I hadn’t heard from him for 36 hours. The neighbour told me "it looked as though Bill just went to sleep and forgot to wake up”. The nurses helped me organize to leave immediately.

One of the advantages to traveling for two days to get home was that by the time I had reached home on Friday, Oct 16th, I knew what I needed and wanted to do to mourn. Within six hours of reaching home (his body was in a cooler but we couldn’t wait indefinitely - it was likely that he died during the Monday 12th night) - we met with the funeral director. As he started to roll out the sales pitch for his pamphlets, we were able to inform him that we wanted to fulfill Bill's wishes of a green burial. In fact, Bill wanted to be placed in the compost pile so we did have to make a compromise! I wanted to prepare his body - the thought of any one else handling his body upset me - it turned out that the girls wanted to share as well. We also sewed a shroud and tested a means of lowering. (For those who seem concerned, his modesty was preserved; the undertaker and I put him into his bathing suit). We washed his body and cleaned his fingernails to Mavis Staples’ music and sewed the shroud to our own singing.

On Sunday, my family came and they plus four special friends sat in worship on Sunday morning - those that had never been to a Meeting for Worship caught on real fast. We followed the hearse to the little country cemetery where there was a viewing of his face for those who so wished. Bill’s body was lowered into the consecrated grave as a group effort and to the beat of a drum played by a Dene friend who also provided sweet grass for a fold in the front of his shroud. Three eagles circled us at the farm and followed to the burial. My brother-in-law brought compost to add, that followed by the closing of the grave as a six-shovel participatory act.

And then on Monday, the 19th - we quipped that you could come to vote, attend the memorial service and then get your flu shot - Bill would like that it was efficient!

One of the funeral attendees blurted out, "That's the best funeral service I've ever been to" and then put his hands across
his mouth, clearly embarrassed. We thought that it honoured Bill as much as we could in our sorrow - some weepy, some uplifting with great music.

The church was decorated with Bill's garden produce - tomatoes in baskets, pumpkins, squash, calendula, a sheaf of grass. (I filled the back of the truck with stuff - Erin (Beth's partner) and a friend, Shayna, mostly set up the tasteful tableau). Elizabeth had chosen a playlist of his favourite music for the settling as people came into the church. All great choices but mostly not the usual funereal music. (Available for sharing).

From Saskatoon - Frank, Sharon, Jessica, Isaac, and Ahren Klaassen-Wright - led the singing of the songs: Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Galway Bay, I will fly Away, Amazing Grace. The audience really did participate as did we - that Unitarian church, I’m confident, had never had its roof lifted like it was on the 19th. Quaker Friends came from Saskatoon and Regina, also participating were Elizabeth’s music friends, the girls' high school friends from the community, my former patients, friends and co-workers.

The celebrant (from the funeral home) led the service and wove Bill’s eulogy around the music, the poems, and the Bible verses. Ntara read the Hafiz poem, "Love is a Funeral Pyre", Sharon Wright read the scriptures (Bill and she had shared a very special time at Western Half Yearly). His girls, Shauna, Ntara and Elizabeth, went to the front and said/read “Baba Bishmaya” - the Lord’s prayer in Assyrian which was followed by the same prayer in English by everyone. Bill must have been leaning over the celebrant because she chose two of his favourite e. e. cummings poems. 

All in all, it was a pretty ordinary service done in a remarkable way for the fascinating guy that was my partner, friend and lover. 

There will be a special celebration of his life at the farm on July 31st, 2016 starting at 2:00 pm. Hopefully we will be able to host friends, family and Quakers from far away. 

Love, dale

READINGS

Love is the Funeral Pyre

Love is

The funeral pyre

Where I have laid my living body.

All the false notions of myself

That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash

As I neared God.

What has risen

From the tangled web of thought and sinew

Now shines with jubilation

Through the eyes of angels

And screams from the guts of

Infinite existence

Itself. 

Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay

 Its body.

- Hafiz

Psalm 121: 1-8

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whereon cometh my help.

2.  My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

3.  He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.

4.  Behold, he that keepeth Isreal shall neither slumber nor sleep.

5.  The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

6.  The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

7.  They Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.

8.  The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

Habakkuk 2:3

For still the vision awaits its appointed time;
it hastens to the end – it will not lie.

If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay

Isaiah 40:31 

“…they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

Memorial Music Lyrics (in order of service):

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

I was standing by the window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw the hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away

Chorus

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by?
There's a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky

Lord, I told that undertaker
“Undertaker, please drive slow

For this lady you are carrying
Lord, I hate to see her go”

Chorus

I followed close behind her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in the grave

Chorus

Went back home, Lord, my home was lonesome
‘Cause my mother, she was gone
All my brothers, sisters cryin’
What a home, so sad and alone

Chorus

One by one the seats were emptied,

One by one, they went away

Now the family, they are parted.

Will they meet again someday?

Chorus

Galway Bay

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland,
then maybe at the closing of your day,
you can sit and watch the moon rise over Claddagh,
and see the sun go down on Galway Bay.

For the breezes blowing cross the sea from Ireland,
Are perfumed by the heather as they blow,
And the women in the uplands digging praties,
Speak a language that the strangers do not know.

Yet the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways,
And they scorned us just for being what we are,
But they might as well go chasing after moon beams,
or light a penny candle from a star.

And if there's going be a life here after,
And somehow I'm sure there's going to be,
I will ask my God to let me make my Heaven,
In that dear land across the Irish sea.

I will ask my God to let me make my Heaven,
In that dear land across the Irish sea.
In that dear land across the Irish sea.

I'll Fly Away

Some bright morning when this life is o’er
I'll fly away
To that home on God’s celestial shore
I'll fly away

Chorus
I'll fly away, Oh Lordy,
I'll fly away (in the morning)
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,
I'll fly away

When the shadows of this life have grown,
I'll fly away
Like a bird that prison walls have flown
I'll fly away

Chorus

Just a few more weary days and then
I'll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I'll fly away

Chorus

Oh how glad and happy when we meet
I'll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I'll fly away

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed

The Lord has promised good to me
His word my hope secures
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come
'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.

When we've been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we've first begun

Tick Talk

Wood Ticks

How introduce ticks to visitors without creating mortal fear? Everything our visitors knew, or thought they knew, about ticks was really terrible – rocky mountain spotted disease, lyme disease, they crawl under your skin and get to your liver, unusual and special techniques are required to remove them or you can’t even remove them and the bites get infected.

Neither rocky mountain spotted disease or lyme disease is carried by Saskatchewan ticks – yet. Climate change may alter the spectrum of types of ticks and disease that they carry.

Eliminate such bizarre stories as migrating under the skin, heads breaking off under the skin and serious infections. The head of a tick is actually quite difficult to remove. In the thousands of ticks that we’ve removed in our house, the head has never been left behind. Sometimes a small scab could be mistaken for a head.

The tick latches onto skin and injects a slightly anaesthetic blood thinner. It then proceeds to suck blood through two small puncture wounds in the skin, its abdomen swelling with the blood. If it is not noticed, it can swell to the size of a bloated raisin. It looks utterly gross.

Most ticks are found on people before they become attached. In tick season it is recommended to have a nightly “tick check” in front of a mirror or with a friend. Ticks seem to survey the territory before settling on a site so usually picking it tick off is all that is needed. If it is attached to skin, the most effective method is to simply use thumb and forefinger like a pincer and pull it off – usually with a small quick jerk. It is extremely rare for the head to break off but when you run water and/or antiseptic over the bite, you can look closely at it*. This method works even with bloated ticks.

Bites rarely get infected. The itchiness of the bite might cause scratching and introduce germs so cover it or use calamine or benadryl on it so that you avoid scratching. Depending upon the sensitivity a person has to the tick blood thinner (the stuff injected by the tick), the swelling can be quite extensive. If there are red streaks extending from the bite, you have a fever or the swelling continues to spread beyond a few centimetres, see a trusted health care worker.

If the idea of picking a tick up between thumb and forefinger turns your stomach, you might like to try something more complicated. Eyebrow tweezers are awkward but can be used. Applications of vaseline, oil, vinegar, salt, or rubbing alcohol might be put onto the tick and after a period of waiting (five or ten minutes), with a tissue between your fingers and the tick, it is dislodged more readily. Don’t use cigarettes or matches or anything that might injure the victim.

Prevention involves pulling socks high over the bottoms of pant legs, cuffs on shirts and head gear that protects the hair and neck (a good place for hejab) would be useful. Insecticidal spray is not 100% effective. Of course, staying indoors prevents tick accumulation almost entirely – but it makes for a boring life. Prevention is helpful in tick season but still don’t forego the “tick check”. Ticks are annoying but rarely life-threatening.

*Since I have never been required to remove anything left behind, my advice would be to either use a sterile needle to pick it out as you would a sliver or leave it in place, disinfect and cover – the body will usually make a pustule around organic material and then you squeeze it out.

Risk-takers

I have always been a risk-taker. I climbed the tallest trees and crawled out onto the ends of branches so that I could make the tree sway. At 63, I rode bareback and raced with my 14 year old friend across a farmer’s field. In all fairness, we - our family and many others - grew up with risks – as a ten-year-old I was sent to look after my siblings at the creek, we rode on tractor fenders and in combine hoppers, we played unsupervised for hours climbing into lofts, walking on rafters and jumping into grain bins.

Today, I wonder about extreme sports and risk-taking.  How much right does one have to engage in extreme sports? – like base-gliding, mountain-climbing, back-country skiing, running rapids - some of you wouldn’t think of these as extreme sports but hear me out. Is it ethical? Moral? What of the social responsibility of the rest of us? Are we required to bale the participants out when they are lost or seriously injured?

These types of sports not only depend upon a host of suppliers – food, equipment, maybe support teams – but also for the individual, time-consuming practice and often expensive equipment. It means that most of the people engaged in these sports are monied and that a lot of resources are devoted to their sport or, as some say, obsession. Often the honours go to the individual.

The human race metamorphized, developed over some 100,000 years. During that time, people used extreme skills merely to survive. For some, maybe even many today, their survival depends upon their skills.

Are extreme sports the result of a bored dis-connected human race? So far from involvement with the natural activities of daily living that Nature is merely an adversary against which to pit technological gadgets.

What would people have done in eons past? The kinds of back-country white water trips that we have taken on rivers would simply be travel between places, sometimes looking for game or fruit, and the occasional lone or paired vision questers.

Is it ethical or moral to commandeer such a range of resources for the selfish experience of one person? Does the lost back-country skier get hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on him while the woman missing on a city street gets nothing? Is his value greater because he is male or because he is heroically pushing his limits? Worse, is his Everest conquering experience there for all of us to experience vicariously while no one wishes to share the experience of Syrians in refugee camps.

I'm only asking the question, a question about values.

About myself? I now consider consequences – at the time of the horse race, I briefly considered, in mid-gallop, the possibility that I might fall off the horse. I couldn't indulge in fear because I needed to focus on the business of staying on the horse’s back. I dredged up fifty-year old skills and we made it, a mile of stubble later, laughing and breathing as loudly as the horses, to the edge of the field.  By common unspoken consent, we never raced bareback again for that distance.

What is My Culture?

What is my culture? I envy First Nations that the trip to their history and culture, albeit shredded by mooniyaw (that’s white people) and colonial policies, is still very short. Certainly culture adapts to changing times; but what happens when culture isn’t adapting, it is being imposed upon?

If I must go back to the roots of my culture, I would be time-traveling more than a thousand years. The Dewars (spelt joo-ers) were “Keepers of the Healing Stones” for the Clan McNab. Even at that time women were valued members of households (not as pictured by Western movies which always place the male in absolute dominance – witness movies about the Iroquois). For Celtic women to reclaim their place as partners in society is not feminism – it is cultural.

I think that it is wrong to adopt First Nations spiritual practices as if they are ours. Was sweet grass known to my ancestors? Was sage used for cleansing? Even as their drum circles move our hearts, they are not our drum circles. We can join them but we should not appropriate them. What did the Celts use for purification, for drums? How far into the mists of history do we need to time-travel to find the power of our spiritual journeys? 

In 2000, I did cross over, I used FN practices - largely because I didn't really have any of my own - in preparation to attend the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, I fasted, attended a sweat, placed my words before the Spirit, and then, to my surprise, I was given a prayer by a medicine man. I would be allowed to “perform” it only once. Even as he gave it to me, I knew that the WGIP was not the right place to ask people to join in the prayer – or that I was the right person to lead the assembly in the prayer. An opportunity did come soon after.

Quaker Aboriginal Affairs Committee (represented by me) was asked to present one workshop at Friends General Conference. After consultation, we chose to hold the workshop on the Draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A US Quaker, head of their First Nations committee and a local band member were present. There was one member of the group who claimed to be of FN descent – a kind of a know-it-all blond guy with a pony tail and lots of beads, ribbons, etc – who kept interrupting with trivia. By mid-morning when we had a “nutrition break”, I think that most of us were tired of his monologues.

When we re-grouped, I asked if I could say a prayer that had been given to me. I stood, the words came. The experience was so powerful – I felt that the person who had given it to me had opened the universe. I stood and addressed the four directions and their representations. Unexpectedly, the forty or so participants stood with me and turned with me. I felt connected to a thousand generations. As we sat down, everyone was silent. Not unusual in a Quaker circle but this time when the words came, they came from a changed, uplifted place.

I was given the prayer to use only once. It was frightening and awe-inspiring at the same time. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, thinking about flying – and suddenly you are flying!

This is what happens in a spiritual journey – finding that sense of awe, being in touch, however briefly with power outside of ourselves, knowing that it is there and then living so that it can become part of everyday life.

What is my spiritual culture? 

I realize that I’ve thrown my lot in with Quakers because silence is the medium by which Quakers find God, the Light, the Spirit within, Allah, or merely the transcendence that occurs when “two or three” meditate together. That is certainly ok for the journey but what of ceremony in my own life?

And what is the difference between a culture of an individual and the culture of a people? My Celtic ancestors were subdued by the Anglo-Saxons but their religion lived on for awhile underground as Pagan; by the time the Dewars were kicked off the land for the enclosures, they were no longer considered Celts.

Finding my personal spiritual culture is my journey of old age. It is the time when we should  be devoting ourselves to our next journey, that of the after-living. Perhaps our sole responsibility is to leave the world in a better condition than we found it. Finding a way to a right relationship with the spirit, with the land and with people rests with us, indivually and culturally. The mooniyaw have a long road to travel.

Remembering War

Bille Jo Gardner visited Wynyard this summer and did a little digging around history. She spoke of the Wynyard area’s Gunnery school North of Dafoe in a long letter that she wrote for the Wynyard Advance. I wrote the following for publishing the week of November 11th. It was not published and perhaps with references to local people meant that it should not have been published. I do not have the same inhibitions.

When I first saw the RCAF #5 Bombing and Gunnery school, there were buildings and a firing range still standing. At that time it looked remarkably similar to the air force training sites near Dauphin, Manitoba, one of which was within a mile of the farm upon which I spent my youth. The pilots flew their circles over the pasture and back to “touch and go”.

An ancestor of ours lost two of her sons to WWII – and her first husband to WWI. In the 1950's, our family “celebrated” Armistice Day seriously – we really believed that WWII was the end of war and that the United Nations ushered in a new era, one in which nations spoke to one another and resolved their differences. We believed that weapons would be hammered into plowshares.

The only winners had been the arms manufacturers, the wealthy, not the farmers, the women, or the children. There was comfort in believing that those sons and husbands did not die in vain - and that  they were the last Canadians to be sent to kill or be killed.

When I moved to Wynyard in 1980 as a physician, I inherited a number of WWII veterans. Some of them had stellar careers in the military and some were ordinary guys who survived. Two were suffering from PTSD – the long term version of “shell shock”.  When I asked one of these about his role during the war, he said, “they shouldn’t make us do that”; he suffered from formless nightmares. The really sad thing was that the nightmares continued even though Alzheimer’s meant he could no longer remember why he had them! The other gentleman was obsessed with various minor ailments, all of which he related to experiences during the war. I dutifully completed endless forms which we sent to Veterans’ Affairs, all to be denied. None of the people from WWII received debriefing – they were just sent home, having served their time, discarded veterans.

A friend of ours wrote about his father:  "Some of my earliest memories are of him pulling weights from pulleys attached to the ceiling in his recovery from polio. I also remember asking my mother why dad "yelled during the night". She told me not to worry about that "it's from the war" she said. That "yelling" continued until he died at the age of 83."

A friend of a soldier said, "H... and I were best friends in school. He was full of devilry and loads of fun. When he came back from the war he was a changed man. I never knew him after that and we never got close again".

In 2012, I attended Remembrance ceremonies in Ottawa at the same war memorial at which Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was standing when he was shot in 2014. I felt my ancestors – and the souls of those who fought in WWII - turning in their graves. The 45 minute service did not mention peace once.

As we approach another November 11^th, let us honour those who died, value those who survived and re-gird our determination that they not have died in vain. We must encourage our government to build civil society instead of bomb infrastructure.

Grandma was right. Grown men and women should not be resorting to guns to solve their differences.