Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind …
—William Wordsworth,
“Ode on Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood”
Grief moves us like love. Grief is love …
Love as a backwards glance.
— Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden
I wish I had my camera, Andrew Christiansen thinks to himself as he leans against the wall-to-wall glass window that offers a perfect view of the Metropolitan United Church and the little park in front. The trees in the park blow in the strong winds of the autumn storm that has been battering Toronto for three days.
Andrew is thirty-six, long-limbed, angular, and wears his thick dark hair combed back close against his skull. He berates himself for thinking about taking a photograph at a time like this. An hour has passed since Dr. Farshad has updated him, his sister Natalie, and father Gregory about his mother’s grave condition and disappeared into the ICU, saying he will do his best in response to Natalie’s plea not to let their mother die.
One painful hour and still neither the doctor nor the nurses have shown their faces in the waiting room on the fourth floor of the hospital where they, the Christiansen family, are the only people at ten-thirty in the morning. Having paced the long, narrow room for what felt like an eternity and registering his sister’s livid glare, silently imploring him to sit, Andrew finally stopped moving and slouched against the glass wall, directly facing his sister and father who are sitting on the poorly upholstered sofa, their tense bodies shifting every once in a while, choosing a posture and holding still as if constructing a tableau vivant.
It is their current posture that makes Andrew wish he brought his camera, which is locked in the glove compartment of his car. Andrew’s father sits hunched, elbows pressed against thighs, head lowered as if pouring all his attention into a small hole on the floor between his feet. Natalie sags against their father’s large frame, resting her head on the left side of his back, her round, olive-skinned face severe and expressionless.
It is a perfect representation of grief, poignant in its apparent powerlessness but also revealing a slight, palpable undertone of hope that their beloved Ella will rally one more time as she has done on several occasions already in the past year. Andrew is almost moved to tears by the simple arrangement of their limbs: father bowing his head as if silently praying to a God he has lost faith in but turns to now out of desperation; sister, exhausted, empty of tears, propped against her father, if not for strength, then consolation.
Andrew tries to ignore the small part of him that is jealous of Natalie’s ability to unselfconsciously seek and find warmth and comfort — however small — from physical contact with their father. He wishes it were as easy for him to do the same. Why is it that such a simple intimacy between men as leaning against each other in times of great need looks awkward and unsightly? Andrew has always felt the existence of a shaky bridge between himself and his father, and its crossing is, he realizes, at best clumsy and forced, at worst, downright needy and undignified.
He remembers when his father called him in Helsinki and told him that his mother had been diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. Six days later his father picked him up at Pearson International Airport. Dragging a large black suitcase, a heavy knapsack perched on his shoulders, Andrew came out of the terminal to find his father waiting by the grey Volvo. He quickened his pace, and his father did the same. When they finally stood face to face after a three-year absence, all they could do to show how much each missed the other was a strong handshake and a hug that consisted of the merest contact of their chests before recoiling and busying themselves with the luggage.
As Andrew stares at his sister and father now, he longs to know what that kind of contact feels like. Of all the people he knows, there are few, if any, he admires more than his father. Gregory was the one person whose respect and approval Andrew sought the most, from the time he was a boy and lived for those Sundays when the two of them rode bicycles through the nearby park or played baseball together, all the way to the day he left home for university and desperately yearned to tell his father how much he would miss him, only to have words fail him.
His mother’s love, on the other hand, Andrew never had to seek. He would have had it whether he won the Nobel Prize or sat in a prison cell. Andrew went to sleep at night and woke up every day with the certainty that his mother loved him. Even if Gregory didn’t mean it intentionally, Andrew always believed he had to work hard to get the same attention from his father. And now that he is in his mid-thirties, now that he can no longer lobby for his father’s affection as shamelessly as he did when he was a boy, he feels hopeless that they will ever go back to the way they were. For the Christiansen men these are the days of hellos and handshakes.
Andrew’s thoughts on the state of affairs between himself and his father are cut short when he sees Dr. Farshad walking in the centre of the shiny hallway toward them. Springing away from the wall he has been slumping against, Andrew prompts his father and sister to jump out of their seats, violently destroying their beautiful tableau. All of them now stand in the middle of the waiting room, eyes watching the small-framed man in the white coat heading their way. They look to his eyes for some sign, but find nothing, only the neutral, exhausted gaze of a medical professional.
With the air of a man who has become too used to striding into waiting rooms full of bereaved families praying for miracles, Dr. Farshad stands before them and in a tone of distant tenderness says, “I’m very sorry. I’m afraid we’ve lost her. We’ve tried everything, but her heart just gave out.” A long silence fills the room. “For what it’s worth, the end was peaceful, she didn’t …” The doctor’s words trail off, as if he can’t bring himself to actually say that she didn’t suffer. Instead, he simply raises his hand, lightly pats Gregory’s shoulder, and repeats, “I’m so very sorry.” Then he turns and makes his way back along the corridor, the squeaky sounds of his Nikes against the well-scrubbed ivory linoleum floor dying off with each step.
Andrew tries his best to stand still and not crumple under the weight of the doctor’s words of finality: “Her heart just gave out.” He feels powerless, like an astronomer glimpsing Venus tip off its axis, defy the gravitational laws of the galaxies, and head straight toward Earth, with nothing he and all the science in the world can do to prevent it from crashing.
Natalie, whose face has already convulsed into despair, runs after the doctor, as though by following him she can reverse time. Andrew tries to reach for her hand to stop her, but she is too fast and all he can do is watch her rush by. His father — too weak or too shocked to sprint — ambles in the opposite direction toward the exit. Andrew doesn’t know where his father is headed, but he knows that shuffling away and being alone for a while is how Gregory handles extreme emotions. So he makes no attempt to hinder his father.
Alone in the waiting room, Andrew collapses onto the nearby sofa, finally digesting the news that his mother, the woman around whom everyone and everything he knew and loved orbited, the woman to whom they all looked to for comfort, guidance, and validation has, after fighting for two years, surrendered and quietly slipped out of their lives forever.
