Beppe

My grandmother passed away last night.  It was an incredible experience.  Not incredible as in amazing or exciting, but more surreal than anything else.  I arrived at 9 PM last night, Tuesday, December 22nd to a room full of aunts and uncles around her bed.  I hugged my dad, whom I have grown to appreciate and love more and more every year, outside the room and then was quickly prodded to her bedside.  She looked nothing like she did last month.

Last month, she told me about her arrival into Canada.  We visited her in her retirement/nursing home with misspelled words on the menu for that evening.  Amidst the hubbub of activity given the 20 grandkids and great-grandkids and aunts and uncles, I sat down with Beppe and told her about my new job, working with immigrants and refugees.  And I started in, asking her about her immigrant experience.  'Oh', her eyes lit up remembering the old days, happy not to talk about her health or annoying roommates where she would feign tiredness just to make them stop talking.  'Oh', she remembered coming over with Johnny and Pieta (I hope I have that right), arriving at Pier 21 in Halifax.

They were quickly shuttled off to Montreal in an immigrant holding station.  I have no idea what that would have been like but relate it to the interim transitional housing for refugee families arriving in Toronto, needing a place to stay before they're shuttled somewhere else to begin their lives.  I imagined them sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall while she spoke.  Her hair wrapped up like stereotypical European women have always arrived like, in my mind only for sure.  When she spoke, I heard that they moved to Brandon, Manitoba, current population of 41,000 people.  And I thought, that must have been a small town 50 years ago.  But no, it was Birnie, Manitoba, a tiny village with about 15 houses about a 100 kilometres from Brandon.  And they were outside of Birnie.  Here was what she told me.

'The winters were really cold and long.  But we had to go to church if we could.  We would get a ride into town an hour or two before the service and get picked up again long after the service was done.  It was hard back then and we were far away from anyone.  There was really no one to talk to for miles.  Mike's asthma was acting up because of all the dust from farming and we had two sisters in Frankfurt that invited us to live with them so we decided to move back to Ontario.  The thing about it was that we had to move first and that our furniture was going to come later on a truck.  We had bought a nice wood stove, but we couldn't fit it in the house and used the stove that was previously in the house.  I thought I had made the instructions clear but the movers took the wrong stove and drove it all the way to Ontario with the rest of our furniture.  The woman of the house we left was so mad but what could I do?  I had the wrong stove and there was no way I was going to ship it back to Birnie because my stove was still there.  So, I sent a nice letter just suggesting that we trade the stoves, that she could keep the one we bought and we would forget it happened.  I don't know what came of it but I didn't hear from them again.  She was so mad.  But what could I do?'

She went on to tell me how her husband, Pake, had picked up jobs in the Trenton area and ended up at Quaker Oats, a factory job which was better for his asthma than working on a farm.  She said that the immigrant experience had been hard and lonely at first, that they had to work hard and had to work harder just to get to church on Sunday mornings.  It was a good talk and it sounded like she approved of me working with immigrants now, helping them ease into this beautiful country called Canada.

Having approached her bed at the hospital, I said hello and made the mistake of asking how she was.  The snickers from my aunts and uncles made me realize quickly how dumb a question that is for someone who is dying.  She was dying.  Right before me.  I said, 'It's me Michael, I drove in from Peterborough,' and kissed her on her warm forehead.  The atmosphere in the room was loving.  Her kids were all around her.  They loved her.  I heard that all the girls had slept over the night before and that it would be the boys' responsibility to stay over tonight.  Gary said, 'Easy'.  My dad was in for sure.  And John was going to get some coffee for us.

The others left at around 9:30 to the sound of mom's difficult breathing.  My dad and I settled in to a conversation about work and life in Peterborough.  Gary was doing Sudoku, and John hadn't come back with the coffee quite yet.  I noticed a change in Beppe's breathing and stood up.  You could tell there was fluid in her lungs and that the morphine from an hour before wasn't quite having the same effect.  I put my hand on her forehead and stroked her thin hair.  Her breathing settled, as if comforted by the simple feeling of human touch.  Gary and my dad drew close on the other side.  My dad encouraged me to keep on stroking her hair and keep comforting her because all three of us could somehow tell that this was it.

I didn't think about much other than my hand on her head.  Her breathing was far apart at this point and we knew she was slowing down quickly.  Gary's hand was on her forehead.  Dad's hand was on her cheek.  And she breathed her last and her cheek twitched a few times and the colour drained from her face.  Surreal is a good way to explain it.  She was beautiful in her death, with her family around her, on her last day here.  With a family she loved.  With a family that loved her.

I feel guilty for being there, sharing that moment with her, knowing that the aunts had slept over the night before, that Carla and the other girls have been assisting her for years now and I'm just the grandson from Peterborough rolling in at the last hour.  But maybe Beppe knew and wanted to wait for the girls to go.  She loved them so.