Marlene has been on mind a lot lately. She’s always on my mind in a quiet receding sort of way, but much more so recently. This July is the tenth anniversary of the start of Marlene’s journey with cancer, a journey that lasted only a brief three years, but perhaps the most intense three years of our lives. (Though it must be said, the last seven years that followed have been a continuation of the most intense years of my life.)

It was one day in early July, 2014, while we were vacationing at a cottage at Lac Ste. Marie; Marlene felt a pain all down her left arm and into her chest. She guessed it was a strained muscle. It wasn’t.

While it is ten years since Marlene first presented with those symptoms, it is likely her lobular cancer, ER+, had been present for a number of years before that fateful day in 2014. She had been stricken with Shingles in 2012 – I think that was a sign that her immune system was stressed. What came first? – the stress? the Shingles?, the cancer? Lobular cancer is quite rare, and sneaky – not detected, or detectable, in her annual mammograms, barely detectable in CT scans and x-rays, even after she had become Stage 3b and terminal. 

Marlene died on August 19, 2017. The funeral was on September 10, the week after Labour Day Sunday. I had wanted to hold it the long weekend to give travelers time to make arrangements and be able to attend Marlene’s funeral but decided that would interfere with other plans people might have. There were a hundred and fifty people attending, though there were many more well-wishers. Many people attended the wake the previous Saturday night but didn’t come to the service.

There was a register of course, for people to sign and leave messages. After the funeral the book rested on a side table in my living room for a few years. I’d look at it, aware it was waiting for me to read the messages it contained. I never did. I never could.

Dozens and dozens of people sent or left condolences cards. Many of those and others left donation cards with Pinecrest Funeral Services for the benefit of Ottawa Hospice.

I saved all those cards and notices in a large wicker basket. It sat on the dining table at 24 Stapledon Crescent and then on the landing of the staircase in my townhouse in Kanata after I moved in 2018. I would pass that basket every day, glance at it as I passed, and its cargo of cards, its siren song resisted. I have never looked at those cards since the funeral.

Except today.

I picked out a few of them. Some were from people I don’t even remember, if I even knew them. Marlene had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances I hardly knew about. They came from colleagues from her workplace – Sir Guy Carleton Secondary School, from the neighbours, from mothers from the Nepean Figure Skating Club, from co-workers and friends from her days at the Rideau Valley Middle School in Kars, from who knows where.

I began to cry.

I couldn’t continue to search through that basket, but I know now I must. Time enough has passed that I can reminisce without having to endure another wave of grief. Only memory.

Why have I been avoiding that basket? I should have long ago dropped a note to every one of those well-wishers, some sort of acknowledgment that their thoughtfulness was received. But I didn’t have the courage. Of course, close family and friends I have been in communication with, and life continues to move forward, not always happily. But all those other people. Friends and well-wishers of Marlene’s paying homage and respect of her life. Somehow I owe them something. And yet most of them have passed out of my life. Very few of them are subscribers to this blog.

I have a hundred excuses for this avoidance. At first it was ‘triggering’ to revisit those raw and recent emotions. Later it was the distraction of living with my hair on fire, and The Philippines. (We described my journey with grief in this blog, and my book, Travels With Myself.) Then it was out of respect for Carmen, that I not wallow in my sadness for the loss of Marlene while she tries to bring happiness into my life. I had 22 months of covid and separation from Carmen, time enough to spend with my memories, and that basket of cards, but I didn’t do it.

In those ten years of grief, especially in the early years, I did not try to hide from my anguish. In many ways I could not hide even if I had wanted to, it just swept over me. I tried distraction, and self-medication; I even celebrated it with rituals and homage. I keep Marlene’s beautiful urn on the bookcase in my sala; it is not filled with her ashes but with fragments of her life, a sort of time capsule. I built a small memorial garden at Marlene’s grave, soon after her burial; it featured two hybrid tea rose bushes, Never Alone. I plant annuals to augment the roses, and bulbs to welcome the Spring; and I tend to that garden all through the summer. When Carmen is here, as she was in 2019, 2022, and now, she goes with me to the cemetery and helps me with my tending chores; she is very respectful. I visit Marlene’s grave site for every significant event during the calendar: Thanksgiving, Christmas (I place a wreath), Easter. And of course, August: our birthdays (3 days apart), our wedding anniversary, her ‘deathday’, all occurring in August. For perhaps five years after her death, depression returned during August as I, inescapably, noted the dates and mourned her passing once again. The dark days have receded the last couple of years, and I think of that almost with regret.

Ten years is a long time to grieve. But grief never goes away, it just gets quieter.

I spent a year writing my autobiography, My Story, Mostly, and the ‘mostly’ was because 50 years of my story was intertwined with Marlene’s story. I spent many hours poring through her memory box and photograph albums reconstructing her life and mine. But I never opened those cards and letters in the wicker basket.

It is the tenth anniversary of Marlene’s beginning journey with cancer and I know I will, finally look through that basket. 

Maybe in August.

Doug Jordan, reporting to you from Kanata

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