Each morning, he had to be reminded that his wife of 72 years was dead, new grief at dawn. In the seven months he went on alone after our mother died, he did suffer, though. He didn’t linger or dwell, especially not on pain. “I don’t know what she was thinking, really.” If Dad had darkness, I didn’t encounter it in the 60 years I knew him. These stories he rarely told, or if he did, it was with mild surprise and not a lot of interest. Later, raising five kids in Toronto’s east end, she packed off with her bags once a week, and when she was home, she sometimes locked Dad in the basement.
His mother began work in the English cotton mills at 14. RELATED: The guilt and anguish of looking after elderly parentsĭad’s childhood was often precarious, which was perhaps why he was determined to give his children a steady upbringing, with a lot of singing. When he extolled a burnt husk of beef, my teenage self shot death rays at him across the dinner table, because this was his line in the sand-this good cheer over the unchewable brisket meant you couldn’t speak the truth about it, or anything else, without creating a ripple of unrest in his peaceable kingdom. His insistence that everything be seen in the best light as we grew up meant that a lot was shut down. His physical limitations meant his energy to keep going had to be balanced with a frequent need to sit still, and his dementia meant his forward pace had lost much of its purpose now that he couldn’t remember where he’d just been.Īnd yet he held on to his optimism, or it held on to him. “The 80s, I’m not so sure.” His idea that the future was always brighter sustained him throughout his life, until the facts couldn’t keep up with the philosophy. “My 30s were better than my 20s, my 40s were better than my 30s, my 50s were better than my 40s.”ĭad was making a speech in my living room for his 85th birthday, and when he got to the 80s, he hesitated. He said every decade was better than the one that went before it.
My father got happier as he got older, if that was possible. In a year when many Canadians were separated from parents in nursing homes, Cathrin Bradbury recalls happier times with her 94-year-old father William (Bill) in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital Veterans Centre, where she was grateful to spend his final months together.
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