Both of Them

A letter about grief (for those of us unfortunate enough to know it)

Dearest reader,

Today we will break from our regular programming. Before I begin, I wanted to provide a trigger warning about cancer. If you’re feeling raw and tender on the subject, feel free to skip this one — you won’t hurt my feelings, I promise.

Yesterday, May 1st, was the 15th anniversary of my dad’s passing. This time of year is heavy and complicated for me. My dad was my best friend, my person, and he died six days before I gave birth.

May 7th is Juniper’s birthday. The days between are difficult.

Three years ago, I wrote an essay about my experience of losing my dad while expecting my first child — his first grandchild. I entered it for consideration in the CBC Nonfiction Prize. It did not win, nor did it receive an honourable mention.

But today, I’d like to extract it from the archives and provide it my own honourable mention. I’d like to share it with you.

If you’ve ever experienced the disorienting combination of birth and death, I hope that my words will bring you some solace, or help you to feel less alone. It’s a very strange and isolating experience. Or, if you know someone who has had this experience, I hope that you might send my words to them, and that maybe they will feel some peace.

Sending you so, so much love.

Kyra

Dad and me, circa 1987

Both of Them

I brought the sleepers in a duffel bag. The strap pressed against my heart, sitting just above my growing belly.

Before sliding open the curtains around Dad’s bed, I stopped and reminded myself to breathe. Resting my hand on the zipper of the bag, I tried to steady myself.

My mother, a notorious neat freak, had kept the sleepers immaculately stored for 25 years in an airtight, fireproof, royal blue and brass trunk. Periodically throughout my childhood she would drag it out of the basement crawlspace. She’d tug open the lid and lift the soft terrycloth onesies out one by one, pinching them delicately at the shoulders, holding them up to the light.

“Can you believe she used to be this tiny?” she would say to Dad. He’d raise his eyebrows twice, quickly — his trademark. Sometimes he’d tear up a little. Kiss me on the cheek. Such a sentimentalist.

When our ritual was complete, Mom would fold them up all over again and tuck them into the trunk. Push it back into the crawlspace. Turn off the light.

I knew that someday, when I grew up and had a baby of my own, it would become my job to remove the sacred sleepers from their tomb. I would resurrect them.

Now that day had come.

I was pregnant.

I was pregnant and Dad was dying. Life rarely heeds our plans.

The news came at the beginning of my second trimester. The phone rang while I was cooking dinner. With his characteristic composure, Dad explained that his persistent heartburn had pointed the doctors to a tumour in his pancreas. He had pancreatic cancer. It was Stage 4. The doctors said that expecting more than days or weeks was optimistic. At best, he had a couple months.

Before that phone call, we’d all been floating, excited to welcome a brand new baby into the world. After hanging up, I struggled to imagine that world without Dad in it.

Being near him made my shoulders relax, his proximity a reassuring constant. He was wise, affectionate, and endlessly patient. Funny too — his dry humour could make you cry laughing. When he smiled, he smiled with his whole face; his eyes drawing into crescent moons.

What Dad gave me, I realized many years later, was the gift of my own reflection. He truly saw me. When I lost myself in choppy waters, it was him who would pull me back again, ever connected to solid ground.

Not a day went by that we didn’t speak, even after I’d gotten married and moved across the country to Calgary from my hometown of Toronto. Dad’s number was the first one I dialed during every heartache, every triumph, every minor drama or funny coincidence.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Dad joked following his diagnosis, quoting Mark Twain while he was still well enough to talk. “Tell the baby that I’m not going anywhere.”

But pancreatic cancer brings a shockingly abrupt and painful decline. He entered the hospital less than a week after his diagnosis and remained there. I flew home to Toronto right away, swept into a new tide: Stabilizing and plummeting, stabilizing and plummeting. Dad would leave the ICU and be admitted to the oncology unit. We’d celebrate until another crisis would inevitably send him back again; our spirits soaring or sinking in unison with the direction of the elevator. My hand gripped so tightly to Dad’s gurney rail that my knuckles blanched.

Dad feigned strength in our presence, promising to fight for his life and stick around long enough to meet the baby. But I could see the intensity of the pain in the way he grimaced when he thought I wasn’t looking; in the moans he couldn’t stifle once he’d fallen asleep.

Hope became a heavy word. A crushing weight.

My desperation for Dad to meet and love and know his grandchild; for my child to meet and love and know my dad was like being held underwater, my lungs clenched, legs thrashing, hands clawing for the surface.

My husband set up the nursery in Calgary; a solid wood crib, a dresser where we’d change the diapers. I flew back and forth from Toronto, grasping for normal moments — for some semblance of the pregnancy I’d expected. I washed dozens of sheets and receiving blankets and burp pads, folding them into neat little squares and tucking them into drawers. At the end of the day, I’d stand at the door of the baby’s room, surveying our work. But no matter how new or bright or freshly washed, the vibrancy remained for only a flash.

Birth and death may be opposites, but what pregnancy and cancer have in common is that everyone else thinks they know better than you.

Every time I shared the news of Dad’s illness, I was met with an impassioned speech about coffee enemas. Plant-based diets. Experimental drug trials. There was more we should try. We weren’t doing enough.

In the same breath, I’d be told that I should move to Toronto. Live across the country from my baby’s dad so I could devote more time to my own. I was visiting too little. I was visiting too much. Planes are bad for pregnancies. I should stop crying, lest I give the baby colic. I should name the baby after Dad. Tom. Or Tommy.

“You could spell it with an ‘i’. T-O-M-I. So it’s more girly.”

One very emphatic oncology nurse believed I should book an elective C-section at 7 months. “Your father deserves to meet his grandbaby before he passes,” she said before disappearing down a disinfected hallway.

The consensus always seemed to be that I had to pick a side. How could I feel joyful when Dad was dying? How could I be devastated with a baby on the way?

I was both. I was neither. I was fractured halfway.

Each time I returned to Toronto, a layer of Dad had been discarded. As I doubled in size at the middle, he shrunk like those Russian nesting dolls. Ever smaller.

I was desperate to keep what was left of his frail frame. I couldn’t bear to let any more go.

So I set out to perform a familiar ritual; an attempt to preserve our last drops of hope. I pushed the trunk out of the basement crawlspace, tucked the sleepers into a duffel bag, and carried them with me to the hospital.

Sliding the metal curtain rings along the j-shaped track that separated Dad’s bed from three other patients, I leaned in and brushed his thinning hair off his forehead. Stroked his cool cheek with my fingertips.

“Hi sweetness,” he whispered, his eyes fluttering open. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too,” I whispered back, pressing my face into his shoulder. The bone was a spindle beneath his loose hospital gown. I set the bag of sleepers on the windowsill and sat in the chair beside his bed. “Did you have a good night?”

A nurse entered, her floral scrubs twisting past us to reach the stacks of machinery. She pressed some buttons and attached a tiny monitor to the tip of one of his fingers. Stuck a thermometer in his ear.

“We all keep asking your dad what that baby’s name is going to be,” she said, glancing at me before jotting notes down on a clipboard. “He won’t tell us though.”

We’d chosen not to tell anyone the name. But I wanted to tell Dad. Just in case. At the very least, he would know what to say when he placed a shaky hand on my belly, whispering about how much love he already had. Despite the morphine drip, he hadn’t spilled the secret; loyal even while his faculties were fading.  

The nurse touched Dad’s arm and smiled. “He’s keeping those lips sealed,” she said as she padded away.

“I have something to show you,” I said, reaching behind me and pulling the duffel bag onto my lap. Opening the zipper, I revealed the first sleeper. It was one of the smallest ones. White with yellow ducks. I smiled as I held it, pinched at the shoulders.

“I brought all of them,” I told Dad, placing the duck sleeper on his stomach. With both his hands, he pinched the shoulders too; tried to raise it up. But his wrists dipped and fell. He kept the terrycloth bunched in his palms, resting on the scratchy hospital linens.

“Isn’t this going to look so cute?” I asked, revealing another from the bag. “Can you believe there’s going to be a baby wearing these in just a couple months?”

I passed the next sleeper to him. He cupped the terrycloth, the skin on the backs of his hands bruised and taped with tubes. He hugged the sleepers to his stomach.

I’m not sure what I had expected him to say.

I kept passing him more sleepers, the pile growing higher as I set them down on his stomach one by one. His lips parted, each breath making a sipping sound through the oxygen machine that hooked into his nostrils.

“I wonder if these will be the right size for a newborn?” I asked him, desperate to break the silence. I was just rambling. Nonsense. “I think maybe when I pack my bag for the delivery I’ll just–”

“Stop,” he whispered, shutting his eyes and opening his palms. “I can’t.” The words crumbled from his mouth like ruins. “I can’t look at them.”

I blinked, unsure of what to do.

His eyes opened again, tears gathered in the corners. “Take them away,” he said.

I wish I could say that it made me sad; that it filled my heart with compassion or empathy.

But it didn’t. Instead, it filled me with rage.

“You promised!” I wanted to yell. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” I wanted to rip the tubes from his nose and make him breathe on his own. Force him to stand. To walk and eat solid food and go to the bathroom without help. To put on his regular clothes and go back to work. I wanted him to be the strong one and make everything right like he always did. I wanted him to hold up the sleepers, his eyes drawing into crescent moons.

“I remember when you were this tiny,” I wanted him to say.

Instead, I silently gathered the sleepers, crumpling them into a pile. Shoved them into the duffel bag. Zipped it tight.

Dad fell asleep quickly, and I remained at his side, staring out the window at the highway. So many people driving by, unaware that the world was ending.

Mom arrived, out of breath, her wet hair clipped up. She’d brought Dad a new tube of toothpaste. A fresh pillowcase from home.

“Did you show him?” she asked, pointing at the duffel bag.

“Not yet,” I replied, still staring out the window.

“Probably best to wait until he’s in a better frame of mind,” she said, resting her hand on my shoulder.

Dad stirred and settled. The beeps and whirs of the machinery, once foreign and chaotic, now formed a familiar rhythm: the soundtrack solemnly marching us into the future.

Turning to the windowsill, Mom unzipped the duffel bag and picked up a sleeper. She sighed as she pinched the shoulders. “Hard to believe a baby’s going to wear these in just a couple months.”

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