1997 to 2005, Toronto, Canada

By Katherine Arnup

One January evening in 1997, my sister Carol called and told me the cancer had returned. The next morning I was in the first class car on the train to Toronto, 300 miles from home. It was only 11:30 a.m., and I was drinking vodka and tonic.

I never drink before 5. You can’t drink until the sun goes over the yard arm. It’s my father’s rule. No matter what the season or weather, at 5 p.m., the sun goes over the yardarm and you can have a cocktail. There is no yardarm on the train. Just the steward offering me a cocktail.

You do what you have to do when someone you love is dying. That’s what I told myself. There are no rules. I could carry tiny bottles of vodka in my backpack to my sister’s house where she lay dying in a hospital bed in the living room. At 1:00, every single day, I could make myself a Caesar. Tiny bottle of vodka. Little can of Clamatto juice stolen from the First Class lounge in the train station. I would pretend I was drinking tomato juice, a noon hour pick-me-up, since I rarely eat lunch. If my sister thought otherwise, she never said so.

Sometimes when she would have to go to the hospital, and I felt like I couldn’t last for one more second without crying in front of her, I would fill a Dixie cup with ice from the ice machine down the hall from her room, and I would pour in vodka and orange juice. I was terrified I’d get caught. That they’d throw me out of the hospital and then I couldn’t take care of my sister.

The day she went to the hospital for the last time, I didn’t eat anything all day. When she was finally settled in her room, I went downstairs to make phone calls to arrange for a private duty nurse, tell Dad what had happened, tell work I wouldn’t be back for a while.

I had a tiny plastic bottle of vodka in my backpack. I bought a small container of Tropicana orange juice at the cafeteria. As I stood at the payphone making calls, I opened the carton of orange juice and took a sip, then poured in vodka and took a slug, shaking the carton between gulps. After each sip, I poured in more vodka. I kept doing that, as I talked on the phone, until all the vodka was gone.

At 6:30 that night, my sisters picked me up from the hospital to take me to dinner. At the restaurant, we sat down at the table with our enormous menus. I ordered a glass of wine. The second the waiter left, I looked at my sisters and fell forward onto the table. I don’t remember anything except a feeling of falling onto the softest mattress in the world. I have no idea how long I lay face down on the table. When I sat up, my sisters were staring at me with enormous frightened eyes.

“What happened to you?” they chorused.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You fainted,” my younger sister, Jane said.

“Oh,” I said. I’d never fainted before, except when I was 9 and we played endless games of “pass out” by hyperventilating, and even then it was really pretend fainting.

My younger sister, who can, sometimes, be funny said, “I’ve been praying all week, ‘Lord, take my sister please,’ but when you fell onto the table, I wanted to say, “NOT THAT ONE!”

We laughed. It was the first time we’d laughed in a week. Probably longer.

When Carol died, two days later, we drank an entire bottle of wine, my younger sister, Carol’s friend Marsha, and I. It was 10:30 a.m.

Now it is May 2005 and my father is dying. And I am off to Toronto again. I am trying to remember which exit to take off Highway 401 to get to my father’s apartment. I always get it wrong. That means I’ll probably get it wrong again today. It’s so hot in my car I feel like I’ve wet myself.

It’s noon. I left the house at 6:30 in early morning mist. Drove 300 miles without air conditioning. I had to stop for a nap, curled up in a ball in the driver’s seat, unaware of the curious eyes of other road-weary travelers seeking solace in Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts.

I find solace in nothing. Except maybe drinking. This is my fourth trip in three weeks since Dad collapsed in his apartment and stopped breathing. He had a DNR order. The caregiver shouldn’t have called 911. The firemen shouldn’t have resuscitated him. He shouldn’t be breathing again. But he is. And I’m coming to do some chores, make sure the caregivers are doing their job, and drive home again.

Before I go to his building, I pull into the mall. I tell myself I need another lined note pad for making lists. Refills for my favorite pen. Jack Astor’s Lounge beckons beside the stationary store.

“I just want a drink,” I tell the hostess. Depending on their mood they may try to seat me in the bar area, a hermetically sealed room where men who look 75 but are in fact 40 are speeding up the dying process one cigarette at a time.

“I don’t smoke,” I say, “and I’m asthmatic. Can I sit in the restaurant area?”

She waves to a young man who leads me to a tiny booth along the wall.

“Here OK?”

“It’s great,” I say, unpacking my journal and pen from my backpack.

I order my new favorite drink – a raspberry freezie. Raspberry and lemon vodkas frozen and blended into a slushy. Three frozen raspberries on top. The waiter pours a small vial of raspberry liquor onto the mixture. “Enjoy,” he says, with a tone that suggests he finds me vaguely pathetic.

I write frantically for 20 minutes. There is no possible way anyone including me could read this. But I never have time to re-read my journal now, so that doesn’t matter. What matters is the writing. What matters is the drink. What matters is I don’t feel like crying now, though I will if I have a second one, so I decline the waiter’s offer of a refill.

It’s been half an hour now. “I’ll be there just after noon, Dad,” I had said, “depending on the traffic.” And now it’s 12:40. He’ll be worried.

At the door to his building – Don Mills Seniors’ Residence: “luxurious living for today’s seniors” – I pause, waiting for the automatic door to open. At the second door, I wait for the concierge to spot me. Despite the fact that I am here every week now, I am not entrusted with a key. I read the sign: “WARNING: anyone with a cold, flu, pneumonia, or respiratory infection, or any of the following signs - fatigue, aches, malaise - is requested not to enter the building.”

Each time I read that sign, I laugh.

Fatigue. Do you count nearly falling asleep on the highway? In my office? In the movies?

Malaise. I suffer from malaise every minute of every one of these long days of my father’s slow dying.

The Concierge buzzes me in. She smiles when I pass by the desk.

“How are you this afternoon? How was your drive?”

More questions than my father will ask.

I walk up the carpeted incline past the elevator. Choose the stairs, climbing them two at a time, burning off excess energy. Arrive at his door. Apartment 205. Breathe. Push open the door. I look to my left. My father sits in his glider, watching television. He hasn’t heard me enter.

“Hi, Dad,” I say, walking up close to him. “I’m here.”

“Oh,” he says. “I thought you had decided not to come.”

“Dad,” I say, “I would never not come. There was a ton of traffic. It’s a holiday weekend, and it took me over five hours to get here.” I hope he can’t smell the vodka on my breath as I lean in to give him a kiss on his cheek.

He nods, before turning back to the television.

He doesn’t offer me a cold drink like he used to when I visited him at the cottage. He doesn’t ask if I’d like some lunch. He doesn’t ask how the drive was, nor how my children are. He doesn’t ask how work is or who’s in charge in my absence. He doesn’t ask if I considered driving my car into the median near Belleville, nor how I kept myself from doing that.

He hardly seems to notice I am here, though I’m sure he would be sad if I weren’t. I’m sure he would notice.

Katherine Arnup is a writer, mother, daughter, sister, and professor living and working in Ottawa, Canada.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 | Email This Post

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