Over the years, given the statistics of women surviving men, I had often asked myself, if I had to leave the country, where would I go to live? With Peter’s death the question had suddenly become real, had taken on urgency, and in my frozen state I had no answer. People said to me politely, carefully, “I suppose you’ll buy a house in Eastend and live there?” But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life by myself in Eastend, because, as I have said, from there you could drive a hundred miles in any direction and you still wouldn’t be anywhere. If that had once seemed intriguing to me — to be “not anywhere” — with Peter’s death and my resulting confusion and inability to make decisions, I knew only that such isolation would not be good for me emotionally.
Others said, “You’ll be going back to Saskatoon, of course,” and I would nod in polite agreement, because for many years I had suspected that if anything happened to Peter I would probably go back to where I had come from. But I had arbitrarily chosen to answer “Saskatoon” when people asked where I was from. In truth, I had no hometown, having come from “the bush” south, through three small towns where I’d gone from grade one through grade seven. It was too hard to explain, and not having a hometown seemed to discomfit the questioner, as if it were the same as saying I was a homeless person. Or perhaps the questioner suspected me of lying, and obviously for reasons that had to be disreputable. So I learned to answer “Saskatoon,” because, by the time I married Peter, I had spent the longest period of my life there, and because it saved me certain kinds of speculation as to who I was and what might be expected of me. But I had no ancestral home anywhere in Canada, no farm I could point to as the place I’d been raised as both my parents had been able to do, no fixed location even in Saskatoon that I could call home and mean it. Still I had lived there long enough, had had so many formative experiences there, as to feel fully myself when I was there, as I did not anywhere else other than on the hay farm with Peter. I suppose that is one definition, or an important part of one, of home.
But I had no close family members in Saskatoon; even many of my best friends had moved on, even Sean and his family had moved to Calgary, and housing prices had zoomed upward in the year of Peter’s death so that it now looked too expensive. If I no longer had any choice but to go to a city, my first choice was Vancouver, but it was priced so ridiculously high that you had to be either very young and willing to live cheaply, or else very rich to get into the housing market there. My two remaining sisters (Sheila died in 1998 of breast cancer, and Kathleen in 2014, also of cancer) suggested I move to the small coastal British Columbia community where they lived, and even though being close to family again had huge appeal, those coastal communities felt too isolated to me now. Now that the decision about where to live was mine alone, I swore I’d never live more than two hours from a major airport ever again, or from movie houses showing first-run movies, or from a theatre that staged plays regularly, or from where there were regular chamber music concerts. I see now that I was searching for a place I could call home, but I couldn’t find one that had all the necessary components (not that I had ever articulated what those components were) that would allow me to feel, once again, “fully myself.”
A few others said, “I guess it will be Calgary now,” perhaps thinking that as I was a writer, I belonged in a city, and the closest big city (1.2 million) was indeed Calgary. But for years I’d heard nothing good about it: the dense traffic and belligerent drivers, the intense competitiveness and excessive youthfulness, the super-right-wing tendencies, the way it was Americanized (through oil), the hordes of arrogant, self-indulgent nouveau riche. It was the polar opposite of Eastend, in other words. This judgement, I knew, could be partly attributed to rural people’s natural dislike of any city. But Calgary was too big, too urban; even with Sean there it scared me. Where did I find the courage, then, to choose it?
In the end, I left almost everything behind when I moved to Calgary. I left behind nearly all our furniture, and except for a storage locker in Swift Current loaded mostly with books that I couldn’t part with, I somehow managed to rid myself of thirty-three years of household objects. I brought a few things with me to Calgary because it would be easier to dispose of them in the city than in a rural community with few agencies for the homeless or the very poor. Some items I brought that I thought I would need turned out to be useless to me in my new life, and eventually I gave them away, the best example being during the aftermath of the great flood of 2013, when I stuffed four large plastic garbage bags with bedding and gave them to a flood-relief drive. Starting again cleanly was turning out to be what I most wanted to do.
Perhaps I felt that such a thing would come in the natural course of living. Perhaps I thought I could simply shake off all those years as if they had never happened, and emerge new to start another new life, as I had once abandoned my career, friends, and family to join Peter on his ranch.
I could not take the land with me — I would deal with that grief later — but I would take a few symbolic remnants of it. I took one buffalo horn, actually the casing thereof, that I had myself found and dug out of the prairie and that I prized as a connection to the heroic past, and a small chunk of the backbone of a cow that was rough-surfaced and stained a dark brown-gold with age and that was to me beautiful art; I took a fossilized piece of fish that either Peter or I had found in the river, one side of which still glimmered purple, green, and blue; I took a few scrapers or flakes I had picked up in the early days, before I developed my own protocol about what I might pick up and what had to stay where it was, that had fluted edges cut by a First Nations person a hundred or a thousand years ago; I prized a large red sandstone scraper I had first found in the field and that represented a place where spirit had spoken to me. I took also — although I can’t find it now — the small white skull with the delicate white antlers of a young deer that I nearly tripped over one day in the field. I had held it in my hands in awe at its grace, feeling blessed at having found it. Then I had looked up and counted twenty-two deer, motionless and silent, gazing down at me from the ridge. I brought with me the eagle feather in its carved box that was given me by a First Nations person after Peter’s funeral and sometime after an honour song had been sung for him. I gathered what I was afraid would be my last bouquet of pasture sage to put on my desk once I was settled in the city, where it was to fill the room with the blessed, muted, yet pungent scent of Canadian prairie.
I began slowly to understand that my life as a householder was over. I meant by “householder” a woman who had been married one way or another for most of her adult life and who had boxes and boxes of accumulated papers, objects, photos, family heirlooms, most of which would have to be thrown away. Being a householder meant having maybe three sets of dishes instead of one: the everyday dishes, the better dishes, and the used-at-Christmas-and-major-celebrations-only dishes, plus battered pots and pans left from my first marriage, plus my usual ill-matching ones and a few glamorous new ones. I would have to strip my housewife’s equipment to a basic few things, as if I were a tinker now, or an old-fashioned gypsy living in a caravan.
I would not live in a single house again, so I would not need the lawnmower or the snow shovels or the garden hoses, not even that one that didn’t leak. Nor the bluebird houses Peter had attached to the fence posts around our yard, nor my many flower pots of different sizes, nor the large red clay sunburst plaque that I brought from Rome that we’d hung on the outside wall by the back door. A householder has a backlog of things connected to an entire home, not just a house, to times when the kids were young, and to various long-dead pets and, in our case, to the ranching life; I no longer had a home in the old sense of the word. To even think this thought, that I no longer had a home, was frightening, but held hints of exhilarating possibility, like faint tinges of colour on the far horizon. I might even, in some ways, have felt relieved. Without all those objects I could now really start a new life.
I went even farther and surprised even myself by dropping my membership to the political party that had been my great hope since I was nineteen years old. It was not that I no longer believed in what the party stood for, but that I was starting over, for the third time in my life. I needed to be rid of settled things, defining things, things that entangled me in small, closed worlds. I told almost nobody when I was going, let alone my destination. I said good-bye to my friends, mostly people new to the community who generously put on a small farewell supper. Although people must have known that for months now I had been trying to clean the place of the detritus of so many years of Butala life, and although the assumption was that I was getting ready to sell and leave, I told only two or three local ranching woman-friends of my plans, but not the date I would go. If I thought I was almost invisible as a determinedly independent writer, as a widow I was even more so. Sometimes, when I could think at all, it astonished me how the circle of community life continued on all around me, closing slowly and inexorably to leave me on the outside, while I still stood there, still living and breathing. Often it felt as if I had never been there.
I chose Calgary, even though I had said it was the last place on earth I wanted to go to, because Sean and his wife and children lived there. Of course, I did not think that it was by any means my final destination. With my beloved son’s help, I rented that small dark apartment not far from where he and his family lived, and eventually, in late October 2008, I moved in. Of that initial period, other than the constant help Sean willingly gave me, one of my happiest moments in years came the night within the first few days of my arrival when there was a knock on my door and Sean, his wife, Carol, and my two grandchildren filed in, having come to help me put furniture — most of it newly bought — and various belongings into place in my new, if temporary, home. Family at last, joined with me in a family endeavour, after so many years of long-distance communication. This was the first and most blessed boon of my move.
I told myself that in the city I would belong as myself now. In fact, in my first two years in Calgary, apart from the constant loneliness and my rather dismal surroundings, and despite the ongoing hair-clothing-makeup crisis, I was otherwise immersed in city activity: art galleries, museums, film after film after film, nearly as many plays, chamber music concerts, occasionally the opera, and once in a while the symphony or a choral performance, lectures at the university, and especially public readings by writers from around the country. I went home from this sophisticated life to my dingy apartment, a fact that my friends were increasingly pointing out. Something was wrong, but I ignored it. Instead, I was taking t’ai chi classes, yoga classes, fitness classes. Anything to distract myself.
Life in the city, I was finding, was an unending education: I had for nearly thirty-five years lived in an area so remote it was possible to drive on secondary highways for two hours in any direction without meeting or passing another vehicle, and now I was routinely driving down busy, fast freeways, white-knuckling it to the bookstore I had longed for for so many years, and in despair finally learning to take the LRT downtown and back because of the impossibility of finding parking there. I hadn’t parallel-parked since the late sixties and used to joke with people that I’d married Peter because ranchers had lots of room to park. It wasn’t just the continuous problem that merely getting from A to B was becoming for me, but that daily life in the city, it seemed to me, was one challenge after another. I had lost the courage for life I had developed in the country. For a city newcomer like me, neither young nor daring, every day is made of difficulties, buying your breakfast cereal or a new pair of shoes, getting your glasses fixed or going to a friend’s house to visit. And any widow will tell you that there is a limit to how much help she can ask of her grown children. Every day I fought with myself about staying or going, but I never knew where I should go, and so I kept on with my relentless activity, my frenetic effort to have at all costs what for thirty-three years I had done without.
I often took public transportation and more than once was treated to a close-up view of the underside of city life: an exchange of drugs (powdered white stuff in a plastic baggie) for money between dealer and client, a perfectly ordinary-looking young man, on a downtown street that everybody else on the street seemed blind to; the strange, often disheartening and sometimes frightening little vignettes that felt as if they had come out of Dostoevsky or perhaps Tolstoy, which by virtue of my age and invisibility (and writerly curiosity) I saw from and on the LRT; the enormous differences in wealth that shocked me beyond words. I felt as if I had skipped into a modern Henry James novel. There were rows of mansions just one block off a busy street virtually everywhere I went. Nobody in the entire city drove a car cheaper than a Lexus or an Acura, a BMW or a Mercedes (something that in my day, growing up in Saskatoon, we thought only happened in Los Angeles). It is competitive wealth, my clever but much calmer friends said. I was discovering that you do not understand what real wealth is until you live in an oil-and-gas-based city.
At moments of uncertainty and bewilderment about my new life, I would remember my mother’s father, our dear grandfather, as an old man, sitting in his armchair in the living room smoking his pipe with the radio on the table with the barley twist legs beside him, listening to the news, shifting only to take out his pipe to knock out the ashes, or to recross his legs, while our grandmother moved quietly about the spotless kitchen or sat across from him on the sofa, the two of them listening to the news again, and then again, all day long. Their lives had seemed so long and hard to me that I thought when I was a child and a young woman they needed only rest. But, looking back, I think they were in their late seventies, not a lot older than I am now, and they both lived until about ninety and died in nursing homes. I think they were listening to the news all day as a substitute for being in life. I wanted desperately not to be like them in their last years, but to be in life.
Occasionally, lying in bed sleepless, I would wonder what was going to become of me. Could I go on like this, living from day to day, for twenty years? What would I do if and when my health and vigour began to fail? How would I fill my endless days? A terror would grip me in the darkness. I would clutch the bedclothes, sweat breaking out over my body; I would gasp for air, seeing in front of me the abyss, the one that said, You are nobody now, you have no life and never will again. It is an astonishing, terrifying truth that so easily one can go from living a meaningful life to feeling utter displacement from the human community. Nothing can prepare you for this. But you can overcome it in time.
Very late one night, when I couldn’t sleep and my mind was drifting, anchorless, I slowly sank into the ambience of my rural and small-town childhood, when my four sisters and I were at home with our mother and father and we were a family. I am not speaking of a particular time or memory, nor would I say I had a happy childhood, although sometimes I was happy, nor were we a happy family, although sometimes we were. But I was there again, fully immersed in the moment. In this visionary instant, my body, my mind, my senses were inseparable, a perfect fit with each other, and drifting upward out of my past, I felt such pure pleasure, such comfort, of a type I can’t remember ever experiencing before at being back in that world of childhood. How rich our lives once were, how perfect when we were children. We didn’t question our rightness on earth and knew nothing but what our senses brought us, even as we experienced the pain and incomprehension of being children. I found myself filled with wonder and gratefulness for the life I had had. I saw that my losses are commonplace among women my age, rather than extraordinary. I vowed then that I would say yes to everything. I told myself that if I wanted a new life, I would have to be at least open to the opportunities arriving on my doorstep.
Memory, to which I had chiefly paid no attention up to the time of my mother’s death in 1987, now became a puzzling but essential part of my life. On the one hand, I felt I should try to forget Peter and my life with him on the ranch and the hay farm, because if I did not, I was afraid I would slowly disintegrate into a shell of a living, breathing human being, someone merely waiting for death. On the other hand, the more I mulled over my past and the way I personally had lived it, the more it seemed to me essential that I not forget one detail of it, nor of the research I’d done, the years of reading, the endless, repetitive social events I’d attended, the small dramas and scandals I’d seen or heard about, or my own travails there with Peter. Over and over again, I thought of him rooting around in that small, overgrown cemetery surrounded by richly leafed trees I often couldn’t name, in the low green mountains of Slovakia, on his knees, oblivious to me and to the young people with us, looking for something in the tall grass and the rotting and falling-over crosses, something he could not name, nor could I. I too wanted, and want very much, to pay homage to the past I lived and the people in it, and to the past before that, in Ireland and Scotland, and in France in the early seventeenth century. I was not alone in the world because so many family members were dead, and my husband too; I felt them with me often, and dreamt of them, and understood, slowly, dimly, that not only was I not alone in the world because they were dead, but that I was a part of a tapestry, both recent and ancient. Sean and his family had full, rich lives, a fact for which I could never be grateful enough, but in which I could never fully participate without intruding. I knew that I had to live my own life, whether I wanted to or not.
I had been a writer; for thirty years I had spent a large part of each day in my study working on a story, an article, a play, an essay, a book. If at first, after Peter died, I could barely hold a pencil and could not do the actual physical act of writing a word, I had eventually moved into something that resembled writing.
My conscience bothered me consistently when I was not working. After all those hard years of struggle and study, for many of them rising at 5 a.m. when Peter did and going straight to my desk, producing all those published books and articles, receiving the occasional grant to spur me in my work and once in a while an award, I had fallen into laziness. I was failing my vocation, which had often felt sacred to me.
At the same time, I often lay awake and worried that my writing life was over, that perhaps I would never write a book or an essay or an article again. But if I couldn’t write, I convinced myself that it wasn’t my fault, was not some failure in me.
Still, the spiritual transformation I think now I was looking for did not come: the wholly new life; the new person. How many years had I dreamt of having all these city amenities immediately available to me without needing a hotel reservation, a plan, a five-hour drive each way to attend them? Why was I flagging only a few years into this new life? What was it I was missing?
I wanted to find a way to live that made me feel I was myself again, to live a life that was my own. I wanted an authentic life, that didn’t feel as though I was wearing somebody else’s ill-fitting clothing. I wanted to find my way back, after two confusing and difficult years, back to the self I had been, not when I left the university for the ranch when I was thirty-six, as I had been doing, but instead, the person I was at sixty-six when Peter died. I saw now that this was a mistake. I couldn’t relive the past; I could only go on to a new future. I was no longer an eager thirty-six-year-old with an unimaginably long time before me. I was having to come to terms, finally, with the steady state of, in the midst of life, being old. From now on, my job would be discovering not just how to live the rest of my life, but how to live it while growing old.
In those early years in the city, thinking of the concept of home, I sometimes remembered my mother talking to us when we were children about the big house on the farm in Manitoba that had been her grandparents’ on her father’s side, of certain objects in it, such as a very large china soup tureen and ladle, or the china pitchers and matching china basins in each bedroom. Her face softened when she remembered these items, gone many years before, forever, from her life, relics of a happy childhood, a life that before too many years turned into exile and too often led her into want. But she didn’t dwell on this, and I chose not to dwell on my lost house either. When I was a child, we had moved a lot, yet I don’t recall ever having the sense of having lost a home, because wherever we went I had my parents and my sisters still. “Home” went with us everywhere as long as we were all together. Since I grew up and went out into the world on my own, I have had many homes, many physical settings in which I built a life for myself. I suspect that for many women this is the case. It is what you bring to each place, what you invest each place with that sustains you.
Though the mouse-free place in which I now live turned out not to be paradise, I have my past to bolster me, those long years on the prairie with Peter that I cannot ever abandon. Even now, some mornings I wake up and gaze around my bedroom, and realize that for seven and more years I have been waiting for all this nonsense to stop so that I can go back to Peter, that this Calgary life has been only a momentary aberration. My real home is still waiting for me back in that house enclosed in the curve of the Frenchman River with the high hills behind it. I enjoy that momentary dream. I suppose that in time this bit of madness will fade, but part of me hopes that it will take a very long time to do so, the rest of my life. For it gives me great happiness and a sense of wholeness to know that I came from somewhere substantial and, in its way, beautiful.
I still have a strong sense of Peter waiting for me. It is surprising how often he works beside me at household tasks, or sleeps beside me in our bed. And yet, despite these fleeting dreams, I don’t believe that we will be together in that Great Beyond; I don’t for a moment believe that in the next life we just carry on with our old lives. Still, he is a constant companion in my mind.
And yet, I wait for an ending; I wait for a degree of comprehension about those years that will enable me to place them in the story of my life — some story that I haven’t yet written, because I can’t yet draw conclusions; I can’t fit things together nicely, in a clear order. A part of me wants very much to be able to do that; it seems to be part of the task I have set for myself for the remaining years of my life. Because rational thinking has never been my mode of coming to the most telling insights about my life, I haven’t thought that one day this would happen to me. I have waited instead for a visionary moment when I would at last see and everything about my life would fall into place; I have waited, hopefully, for an explanatory dream.
Finally, as I neared the end of the writing of this book, I dreamt that the house on the prairie that Peter and I built and lived in together for thirty years was being flooded. The water was coming up from below at the centre of the house and flooding outward over the floor. It was also flowing, not copiously but inexorably from above, down the raw wood of the centre post that we — another woman and I — had managed to expose in our effort to find the place where the water was coming from. (Of course, there is no centre post in the real house.) The flow both from below and above was unrelenting, and the water itself was not frothy or bubbling or noisy, but silent and perfectly clear, yet it was strange in that it seemed to have a strength in it that tap water, river or lake water, or possibly even rain doesn’t have.
The other woman was someone I seemed to be living with but who had taken on the persona of one of my new urban-rural friends from just before and after Peter’s death. She didn’t look much like the real woman, was dressed in light grey slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, and wore her perfectly smooth pale blonde hair in a sophisticated French twist, a style the real woman would never have worn. I never saw her face, just that perfect, gleaming hair, but she was directing and helping me with the flood of water that was spreading and spreading from the hidden source that we were trying to find. I felt no grief, fear, or panic in the dream, just mild concern because the rug was getting soaked, although we couldn’t see the water on the floor until we stepped in it and it soaked our shoes and rose ankle-high. Awake, I struggled to remember where I had seen that rug that I felt was one I knew intimately. Then I remembered that it was the one Peter and I put down in our bedroom in the ranch house, as one of the very first tasks we did together in the first months of our marriage.
As it happens, the dream insisted that the other woman was Scandinavian, and I knew that would make the centre pole Yggdrasill (pronounced “ig’-druh-sill”), the holy tree, the world tree of Norse legend. On waking, I had some vague memory of having heard of this legend, but I knew none of the details. Years before I had bought a copy of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings, and now I searched my bookshelves until I located it stuffed between Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By and Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, none of which I’d looked at in years.
Yggdrasill, the book on Norse myths said, is the tree that “shelters all creation,” whose branches reach into the heavens and beyond. It has three great roots extending deep down into the earth, ending no one knows where. Under the first root is a spring called Hvergelmir, where a dragon gnaws corpses and does evil against the tree; under the second root “flow[s] the well of Urd, the spring of destiny,” and nearby live the three maiden goddesses, or Norns: Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld (Fate, Being, and Necessity). The third root goes into the realm of the frost giants and under it is a spring guarded by “wise Mimir,” “and the water in that well gave insight to those who tasted it. . . . Odin had given one eye for a single draught from it. He won immense knowledge there and with it the thirst for yet greater wisdom.”
The dream seemed to be that last, fitting comment that I was waiting for, telling me as it did that I had had the fullest possible life all those years that I lived in the wilds of the country among the cattle and horses, the birds and animals, the wind, the grass, and the stars.
And yet, I don’t think that my path, strange as it might have been (although I think it is closer to commonplace), is necessarily the right one for every woman left in late mid-life to make her own way in the world, alone, lonely, and dealing with the deepest grief. I don’t want to set myself up as an example to be followed; life is not like that. But sometimes on the streets I see women, strangers I guess to be about my age, walking by and I see something missing from their faces and their eyes that is more than the effect of growing old. Granted, immense sadness, loneliness, and also age fade our faces and melt and dissolve our once svelte lines. But this absence I’ve seen seems to me to be caused by the flickering light of a spirit going out.
I believe that once you find yourself — your real self — still there inside that old-woman exterior, and you begin to see yourself as alive and, indeed, as worthy of a life, a real life (instead of living in a steady state only as a person nearing death), that drabness will slowly disappear as the spirit flares up again. Grief has its own timetable; grief requires from the sufferer, besides its measure of misery that must be endured, careful, wide-ranging, and intense thought both about the sufferer’s life, and life itself. Grief’s claws grasp deep and cling; it is only the face that, eventually, turns toward things-as-they-are-now, and the future, that can cause those claws to release.
But no one knows better than I how hard it is to do that, and how much courage, indeed, as James Hillman has written in The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, how much pure force of character it takes.