For Your Tomorrow (29 page)

He circled this final passage with fluorescent orange marker. Many blank pages follow, pages never to be written
on—half of a notebook, half of a life. But the part that was writ, was writ large—in his small, floating script: the examined life, “not bare existence.”
Amor fati
.

J
ULY
4, 2008. When I arrive at the cemetery at noon, everyone is already there—Marilyn, Mica, Aaron, Marion, Russ and Sylvie. Ry—twenty months old now—peeks out from behind his father’s black granite headstone. He toddles forth to see the familiar stranger walking up the hill with an armful of pink and purple lupins. I squat to greet him, and a spark of recognition flickers in his blue eyes. Dressed in his red-and-white soccer suit, he now has the soccer ball to go with it. He practises his kicks and throws as we gather around Jeff’s stone. Placed three days ago, on Canada Day, it’s etched with laser photos of Jeff—some in Afghanistan; one with his newborn son, adjacent to the epitaph

His feathery brown hair damp with sweat, Ry can sit only long enough for quick sips of cold lemonade. “Tu as très
chaud,” I say, holding the plastic cup up to his lips. “Veux-tu nager? On va à Malagash pour nager dans la mer?

“Oui,” he nods, smiling, then runs over to his Gramps who is holding a bunch of red and white helium balloons tied with red and white ribbons.

Russ hands each of us one red and one white balloon. “At this time—two o’clock in the afternoon—one year ago,” he says with tear-filled eyes, “we learned about Jeff’s death. I miss him more than I can say … my heart aches for him every day. These balloons are for Jeff and his five comrades. Let’s release them into the air.”

As the balloons drift up, Ry cries out and clutches his ribbons. “It’s okay,” his gran says, kneeling beside him, “they’re going up to Daddy.” He glances over to his father’s stone, then looks back up into the sky. He opens his hand, and watches his balloons float up, higher and higher—red and white specks receding into pale blue space.

“Look at the sun,” Russ says. A rainbow encircles it. Not a sundog, the white ring that signals inclement weather, but a halo of pastel hues. We stand mesmerized, gazing at the rainbow-circled sun.

The soul moves in circles
, said Plotinus,
hovering, returning, and renewing
.

I feel a tug on my skirt. Ry peers up at me with imploring eyes. “Nage?”

“Mais oui,” I say, smiling. “On va à Malagash maintenant.”

We park in front of a sandy-brown cottage with a red A-shaped roof, tucked in the salt-water maple and spruce
trees—“Alma–Cliff Cottage” on the sign above the door. It remains a work in progress on the inside—rafters, two-by-four studs, pressboard walls, electrical wiring still exposed. But it feels homey and comfortable, furnished with our grandparents’ wooden drop-leaf table, our uncle’s handmade pine chairs, Mom’s and Jeff’s linens, kitchen appliances, dishes, cutlery, cooking utensils. Colourful rugs cover the painted cement floor. A picture window looks out upon the sea.

It’s our first family gathering at the Alma—Cliff. Ry, the fifth generation on this ancestral land, scampers about, checking out this strange house with curtain walls. From the screened-in porch, he stares out at the seagulls screeching over the Strait. We eat warm biscuits topped with juicy strawberries and whipped cream. Then Ry and I don our bathing suits; his is a navy blue UV suit with yellow flames streaking up the sides.

I take his soft hand in mine, and we step down the sandstone path through Jeff’s Way, past the ferns, variegated hostas and evergreen shrubs, past the horseshoe pits, through the feathery grass. His small sandalled feet stumble on the rocky bank, so I carry him down to the shore. Long-legged sandpipers skitter and squeak,
peet-weet, peet-weet
, heads bobbing into the foam. His toes touch the cool water, and he flinches. But he’s soon entranced by this new world of tidal pools—scuttling crabs, iridescent mussel shells, purple starfish, slimy lime-green sea grass draping the boulders. He digs in the wet sand with a clamshell and mounds it over the barnacled rocks. I lie down beside him and paddle
my feet, gently splashing water over his face. He licks his lips, tastes its saltiness and smiles uncertainly.

I sling him onto my hip, and we wade into the sea. At low tide we can walk out a long way, see through the clear brine, down to the rippled sandbar of the ocean floor. Tiny hermit crabs scurry. Burgundy blobs of jellyfish drift, trailing wispy hair-like tentacles. Yellow-brown strands of seaweed float in the sun-dappled water. We stop and turn around to look back. We are far from the shore where his grandparents stand, waving. Ry gazes at them for several seconds, then turns back and points out to the infinite blue sea and merging sky. “Go!” he says.

And so we go, headlong into the waves.

The opening quotation from the foreword to
Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants
, eds. Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren, Random House Canada, by Roméo Dallaire © 2007. Reprinted by permission of Westwood Creative Artists Ltd.

The epigraph is from
American Pastoral
, copyright © 1997 by Philip Roth. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The quotation “We are a spark beleaguered by darkness …” is from Earle Birney’s poem “Vancouver Lights” in
Fall by Fury
, McClelland & Stewart, 1978.

The Little Prince
, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, translated by Katherine Woods, Harcourt Brace, 1971.

Joseph Campbell quotations are from
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, Princeton University Press, 1949; and
The Power of Myth
, Doubleday, 1988.

“Amor fati”
reference is from
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path
, by James Hollis, Inner City Books, 2001.

Katherine G. Sutherland, from her essay “Land of their Graves” in
Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning
, ed. Christian Riegel, University of Alberta Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

Saint Martin’s story appears in
The Catholic Encyclopedia
.
www.newadvent.org
.

The Joseph Campbell quotation is from
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, Princeton University Press, 1949.

The Rudolf Steiner quotation is from a lecture cited without reference by Elisabeth Vreede in
Anthroposophy and Astrology: The Astronomical Letters of Elisabeth Vreede
, Steiner Books, 2001.

The Goethe quotation is from
Conception, Birth & Early Childhood
, by Norbert Glas, Steiner Books, 1983.

The information and quotations about Mars and Scorpio come from
The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols
, by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, translated by John Buchanan-Brown, Penguin, 1969.

The John Prebble quotation is from
The Highland Clearances
, Penguin, 1963.

Angus Sutherland’s story appears in
The Rise and Decline of the Community of Earltown: 1813-1970
, by G.R. Sutherland, Colchester Historical Museum, 1980.

The Catharine Parr Traill quotation is from
The Backwoods of Canada
, McClelland & Stewart, 1966.

The Samuel Johnson quotation is in
How Scots Invented the Modern World
, by Arthur Herman, Crown, 2001.

James Hillman,
A Terrible Love of War
, Penguin, 2004.

St. Christopher’s story is from
The Catholic Encyclopaedia
.
www.newadvent.org
.

The story of Thetis and Achilles appears in
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
, by Edith Hamilton, Grand Central Publishing, 1969.

Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time,” from the CD
The Future
, Sony, 1992.

Jung quotation from
Children’s Dreams
, Princeton University Press, 2008.

Joseph Campbell quotation from
The Power of Myth
, Doubleday, 1988.

Rita Dove quotation from her poem “Mother Love,” in
Mother Love: Poems
, Norton, 1996.

David Adams Leeming,
Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero
, Oxford, 1998. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

Carlos Castaneda,
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
, Washington Square Press, 1996.

“I am a part of all that I have met” is from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,”
The Norton
Anthology
of English Literature
, 7
^th
ed. Norton, 2001.

“[T]hrough the unknown, remembered gate” is from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding,”
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
, 7
^th
ed., Norton, 2001.

James Hollis,
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path
, Inner City Books, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, 2000.

Chögyam Trungpa,
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
, Shambhala, 2007.

James Hollis, from
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path
, Inner City Books, 2001.

Salary figures for Canadian Forces members and civilian workers are from a Statistics Canada report by Jungee Park, “A Profile of the Canadian Forces” in
Perspectives
(July 2008).

The phrase “changed, changed utterly” is from W.B. Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916,”
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
, 7
^th
ed., Norton, 2001.

Van Morrison’s “The Philosopher’s Stone” is from the CD
The Philosopher’s Stone
, Polydor, 1998.

Joseph Campbell,
The Power of Myth
, Doubleday, 1988.

“It is easier not to take the journey … but then life can dry up” is from
The Power of Myth
.

“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson,
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Back Bay Books, 1976.

“[T]o strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” is from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,”
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
, 7
^th
ed., Norton, 2001.

Nichola Goddard’s letter is in
Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants
, ed. Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren, Random House, 2007.

Excerpt from
Heroes: The Champions of Our Literary Imaginations
, copyright 2007, by Bruce Meyer, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Timothy Findley,
The Wars
, Penguin, 1977.

Joseph Campbell,
The Power of Myth
, Doubleday, 1988. Reprinted with permission.

“Fear no more the heat ’o the sun …” is a quotation from Shakespeare’s play
Cymbeline
in
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works
, ed. Alfred Harbage, Penguin, 1969.

The Aztecs’ “the house of the sun” is from
The Codex Mendoza
, Vol. 1, by Frances F. Berden and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, University of California Press, 1991.