Chapter 1: 1. Death Notice

I thought I would never write this down.  It wasn’t that I thought I might write this down but had no faith in myself that I would get the task accomplished.  No, I believed I would never write this down because I had convinced myself that I shouldn’t write this down even though I had promised someone once that I would write her story.  After recent revelations I realized it was time to record the true events as I knew them and events that later were detailed to me.

It started with a death notice.  In fact, there were really two death notices.  

It was late fall of 2004 and I had been away for almost a year teaching English as a second language in South Korea.  It had been one of those advertised opportunities and my life was not so set or encumbered with ties that I couldn’t consider the opportunity.  I saw it as an adventure and something to add to a life that, up to my reading of the second death notice, seemed markedly unremarkable.  I gave up my apartment, sold some things, gave others away, and put the rest in storage.  This, however, is not the story of that story.  I don’t think I’ll ever write that down but then I didn’t think I would write this story either.

The first death notice was my Father’s.  The phone rang one late night and it was my brother Rod saying that my Father had died suddenly.  Suddenly.  I was both thankful and suspicious of that word.  If it was sudden then he hadn’t suffered but maybe he had been suffering and he eventually died and Rod was just then letting me know.  I had been away almost a year and news from home was sparse or edited so as not to concern me.  The truth was, it was sudden.  One day my Father was there and then he wasn’t.  Then there was the phone call.  I choose not to write down my Father’s story either.

My teaching abroad was suddenly ended.  Suddenly because of my Father’s death but also a prolonged ending that finalized because I went home again and I stayed.  This is part of the story that I’m writing now.

There are details that don’t need telling here.  I flew home and there was a funeral and a fight.  Rod wanted me to stay and start taking care of my Mother.  I wanted to go back to Korea.  If there is a card game of family then Rod played all the guilt cards in the deck.  My year abroad had left him in charge and he felt it was my turn.  He quickly pointed out my lack of ties and my current unencumbered status and threw in some other bits from our youth of how, being the older brother, he had always had to be the responsible one.  I’m not sure he didn’t cry a bit, too.  So I stayed.

After the funeral and after the fight, I made my stay at my Mother’s a more or less permanent thing.  The more being I didn’t have my own place anymore and the less being the less options I really had available to me.  I had no ex-wife or ex-girlfriend in recent history but then that’s part of this story and I haven’t gotten to that bit yet.

The second death notice.  I had been away for almost a year.  I know I’ve said that already but in being away for a year, and giving up my own apartment,  I had had to have my mail forwarded somewhere.  You guessed it, my forwarding address was my Mother’s home.  You would think that in a year, that would amount to something but with no ties or few personal connections, there would be no bills or letters.  At least, that’s what I thought.

There had been a gathering at my mother’s house after the funeral.  They always call them a celebration of life but coming on the heels of a death, you’d think there’d be a more apt title.  So, there was this death gathering, which isn’t a title I’m proposing, and my mother’s house had been full for a few hours.  I didn’t recognize half of the people and the half were relatives or friends of my parents who I had not seen in a long time.

No one close to me had been there and that was expected.  I hadn’t been close to anyone in a while and a death gathering wasn’t the place you went to anyhow to catch up.  Still, I had hoped to see one person.  I wasn’t sure she’d come or what I would have said to her if she had been there.  That’s a big part of this story and leads to the second notice.

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I was in the kitchen with my mother tidying up after the gathering.  My brother Rod had begged off with some excuse after everyone else had left and I knew that he expected me to take charge of the clean-up now that I was living there.

“Where do you want me to put these?” I asked my mother as we stood there with some unused paper plates and napkins.

“Oh just put those on top of the refrigerator,” she responded.  “I’ve got to tidy up the counters.  Just leave everything else for now.”  

“There’s already something up here,” I said, as I grabbed up a stack of papers held together by an elastic. 

“Oh, that’s yours,” she replied.  “I bundled all your mail together over this past year.” “It’s not much.  With everything else, I had forgotten I had put them up there.”

She was right, it wasn’t much.  A few fliers or sale invitations were mingled throughout with a couple of Alumni Magazines from Trent University.  I don’t know what drew me to those but it was probably because they were on top.  I usually skipped the articles and only really checked the section devoted to alumni students and what they had been up to.  The Spring edition didn’t feature anyone I knew.  Part way through the Fall edition, I had to sit down.  Here is what I read:

Pippa Lavoie (née Bailey) ’83 died on August 17 at the age of 43, surrounded by her family, after a sudden battle with cancer.  From Belleville, Ontario, she came to Trent for an Honours Business degree.  She has resided in Montreal for the past eleven years.  A memorial Mass was held in Belleville on September 14.  If friends wish, please donate to your local Cancer Society in Pippa’s memory.  

This was the woman I had looked for at the gathering.  I hadn’t really expected her but I also hadn’t expected this notice.  This was the end of a story that I thought I would never tell.  To me, this was as awful as my Father’s passing.  Pippa was gone.  

That paragraph in the Alumni magazine had been very short on details.  It was a sad culmination of a life that had once been entwined deeply with mine.  Sitting there re-reading the summary of Pippa’s passing, I realized that she deserved better.  I knew then that I had to fulfill my promise and write her story.

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