On a Sunday night in 1984, having been on the road for a while, I rolled off the 403 into Hamilton, crawled up the Jolley Cut, along Concession and home to George and Bunny’s apartment on Ben Lomond Place. When I opened the apartment door, Bunny was waiting in her apron and looked tired and upset. I got the impression she’d been waiting there for a while.
George was becoming very forgetful, losing interest in the news on the radio and his favourite TV programs, drifting off and changing subjects during simple conversations. They had been in Niagara Falls for the weekend, and George had struggled to remember where he was or how to get around the small hotel room.
Bunny always mapped out foreign territory for George by leading his hand along the walls, counting steps from one point to the next, directing him away from furniture that might be bumped into or knocked over along the way. But that weekend he couldn’t follow Bunny’s careful instructions or remember the map. He had no idea where he was and kept asking her to go get Bunny. When she told him that she was Bunny he became aggressive and called for his real wife.
George was falling down the long dark hole of Alzheimer’s, and Bunny had just noticed. She was devastated and confused herself, and she was looking for someone to blame. But there was no one. Bunny was about to lose another piece of the man she loved.
It’s one kind of misery to forget, to not know your loved ones or your surroundings, to lose your sense of time and space. But to lose all this and be blind too is a merciless torture for everyone.
Bunny spoon-fed George his meals. She kept watch over his every move, through every sleepless night. I watched them together and realized theirs was a true love story.
Bunny saw George for the first time across the floor of an armed forces dance just outside Montreal. He was wearing his uniform. She took one look at him, leaned over to her sister Doris and whispered, “There’s the man I’m going to marry.” And that was that.
They got married in a flurry, and then she watched him hop on a train at Montreal’s Windsor Station with thousands of other Canadian Forces servicemen and disappear into war. She was there when he came home blinded, addicted to morphine. She sat beside him on barstools at the El Mocambo, carried him home to their apartment on Huron Street, and now, forty years later, was still front and centre to love him through his final battle with the son-of-a-bitch disease that steals you from yourself.
After a while Bunny couldn’t deal with George at home. One day, I drove them to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, where Bunny checked George into Warrior’s Hall. Hospitals are horrible places to begin with, but this one was infused with all the sadness that comes with an unwelcome finale. Wheelchairs lined the hallways. There was no clean corner to stand in. There were no magic answers.
I wheeled George out of the elevator and down to the end of the hallway, and got him comfortable in his room. Bunny insisted on unpacking his things, organizing them in his closet and drawers. I watched her arrange what seemed like ancient artifacts in the bathroom’s medicine cabinet. The razor George used when, as small child, I would stand watching him shave. George would pretend to put Aqua Velva on my face and I would use my Dennis the Menace razor beside him. Now Bunny shaved George every morning with George’s same razor, and she’d brought a bottle of Aqua Velva too.
His leather winter hat and his boots were placed in the closet, but he wouldn’t need them again. George Wilson wasn’t going anywhere.
I wanted a drink. More, I just wanted to wash all this from my brain. I pushed away my selfishness and stood tall to support Bunny. She was acting like everything was all right and that this was all just temporary. I stayed true to the pretense. I would not betray the weakened fringes I saw all around her. I pretended her pain went unnoticed.
It was a game the two of us had perfected through a lifetime together. We might have folded. Kept each other company. Consoled one another. But I was too scared and weak. And Bunny was just Bunny. Hard-shelled outside, soft centre, with a veil over the whole mess, disguising her every move.
I sat there with Bunny and George for hours before Bunny finally tore herself from his side and we left the ward and took the drive home to Hamilton. The next morning, though, Bunny was up and out the door, on the GO bus to Union Station, and then onto a subway all the way up to Davisville, then onto the Bayview Avenue bus that took her to Sunnybrook so she could feed George lunch.
This went on for four years. George was emptied out. Held upside down and all the contents shaken from his pockets. He sat outside his hospital room in a wheelchair, unidentified to the universe. Who he was had disappeared through a pinhole of light.
But maybe he had escaped. Maybe his shell, his skull, his arms and legs were stuck sitting in Warrior’s Hall at Sunnybrook Hospital, but in his long-gone mind he was running along a beach somewhere, watching the sun set into an ocean. Or maybe he was back in Cookstown with his mom and dad, taking off across the fields on a tractor, or back in Ireland, skinning his knees in the Dublin streets.
I wondered how long he would hold on. No sight, no legs, no speech, and as deaf as you could get before turning to stone. Sometimes I’d pull up a wheelchair and sleep beside him. I didn’t know what else to do.
I tried not to think about the two if us getting haircuts together at the Fennell Square barber shop when I was little, or about him laying out towels for us in the front yard to have snacks on. I didn’t think about building blanket forts around him in his chair in the living room. I didn’t think about him drinking rum and smoking Export Plains at the kitchen table, or whistling along with Don Messer or cursing Dave Hodge on Hockey Night in Canada. All that was gone for both of us. I shared the darkness in his head and the nothingness that he felt as I sat in the chair beside him drifting in and out of sleep.
And then on December 12, 1988, I got a call from Bunny telling me that I should come in right away. “Your father is dying.”
In slow motion, I watched myself get out of bed, get dressed, find my car keys and head out the front door of our rundown house. I knew I should have been rushing, I knew George was dying. I saw the big flakes of snow falling and filling in any colour of the day with white, but I just could not adjust my speed. I brushed off my old Crown Victoria, backed out of the driveway and, without snow tires, skidded down Barnesdale Boulevard to King Street, turned left and headed through downtown Hamilton towards the 403.
Somewhere around Bay Street I spotted an old rounder I knew from the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto. He was standing in the snow just off the curb, hitchhiking. I used to buy coke off him. He was living in Hamilton now, hanging around Hess Village, causing shit, playing in bands, screwing everyone’s girlfriends, and he had recently developed a large, unhealthy appetite for heroin. He was mostly drunk whenever I saw him, which was weekly because I was causing my own shit around the village at the time and we’d bump into each other in the wee hours after the bars closed down. And there he stood with his thumb in the air in a snowstorm. George was dying, Bunny told me I needed to hurry. But I pulled over, rolled down my window and asked this ne’-er-do-well where he was heading. Turns out he’d had a cheque waiting for him at the Horseshoe for a year but he was now so broke he was finally going to pick it up. I told him to hop in, that I’d get him there.
Why did I do that?
Maybe I thought he was holding and he’d have a couple of lines to wake me up, help me face what waited for me at Warrior’s Hall. Or maybe I just wanted to avoid the obvious face of death. Maybe I was scared. I don’t know, but the guilt I hold in me for picking him up, dropping him off and getting to Sunnybrook forty-five minutes after George Wilson died will eat at me until the day I myself die.