This Infamous Day

Not for the reasons that you, and everyone else, think

It’s strange when an important date in your life is overshadowed by world events.

It’s not exactly sad, but it’s poignant. It’s at least cringeworthy. Maybe it’s funny, actually. Today, I feel like poor Butters: the lovable, sweet, innocent punching bag of South Park. He can never catch a break, that Butters. In season 8, he’s so excited about a surprise present left on his front stoop that he blurts out: “Wow, what can it be? My birthday isn't until September 11th!” 

I never really wanted to mark January 6 as an “important date”, but now that it’s National American Insurrectionist Day I do feel a little protective of it. I preferred to mark my father’s birthday (June 27) or his second birthday (Sept. 23) with streamers and/or beer. But the day of his death was a good day to skip. No thank you: I’m sad enough regularly! As time elapses, however, you take up all the reminders you can. As the distance grows between a father’s final day alive and the current date you mark all the moments—all of them. Watch them go by, like blizzards or rainbows, and note them in your dayminder.

My father died in 2012 on Jan. 6 at 7:30 p.m. Nine years later, the United States Capitol building was invaded by blah blah blah because of yada yada yada. They looove attention, those guys. It’s not that I find this moment in history unimportant. It’s just that I don’t want to care about it on this day.

Actually, I’d prefer not to have to care about it at all. But this big, bleeding heart my dad gave me just won’t stop bleeding.

& & &

Don’t try this at home—I highly do not recommend it. But, as long as you live for a while, you will have no choice but to try it: moving along a busy city street the day or the week or the month after a death in the family. This is the same strange feeling of how the world keeps turning without a thought for you: “How is this still all going on? Don’t people know?!”

Today, I went for a run in the light snow at noon. Nothing in my pockets. I did this and later my sister went for a ski and later my mother went for a meal. We did these things because we are alive and because Jean Mathieu is not.

Another experiment to miss: forgetting the sound of his voice. That one hurts! It’s not so much the forgetting but the rush of remembering once you hear it, like on a home video.

In 1987, he coaxed me—a dumb potato—to look at the camera: "Regarde mononc' Jim. Regarde matante Jill."

"He's bilingual right now," laughed my mom.

"What part of him is bilingual?" asked her father, Keith, as he filmed them.

Jean smiled, looked into the videocamera, pointed at his 11-day-old son, and said, "Sa tête."

My motivation station.

When I think of how to honour and love him, even through this distance, I turn (always) to this quote from the novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin: “When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf. See things as though with their eyes. Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself. Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot…”

Those deep breaths through my nose when it’s -5°C, the ones that sting my nostrils, I take them for my dad. My legs are still a little sore from my lunchtime run—I imagine he is feeling that soreness. Annie ripped down the mountain and hopefully smoked a joint; Joan ate ribs and garlic mashed potatoes and hopefully opened a bottle of prosecco.

The fictitious character explaining this philosophy of grief in the book goes on to say: “This is how I live without Pelagia’s mother. I have no interest in flowers, but for her I will look at a rock-rose or a lily. For her I eat aubergines, because she loved them…”

For my father I can shuck and eat an oyster. I can order liver and onions. I can eat Red River Cereal. I can watch Looney Tunes. I can listen to Robert Charlebois. And I can go to bed early.

I will continue to do these things, until I can’t.

Hey! You should too. T’es capab’. :)