It’s been a long pause since my last blog post in March 2021 on Lent Recalibrates Relationships (https://carolinmparadis.com/2021/02/28/lent-recalibrates-relationships/). It’s not what I intended, but I have good reasons. I was exploring a Lenten theme with a series of weekly posts that steered away from the usual ideas of abstinence. Adding to Lenten spiritual practices rather than taking away was the notion (to noodle.) The posts never happened. But a lot else did: a desert journey.
I pick up the dropped thread now. Maybe as an exercise to understand the vagaries of a poor choice. Or maybe to distill events that mirrored Jesus’ forty day walk through the desert. More likely, it was a journey intended to strengthen my dependence on God when charting unfamiliar territory in an uncertain landscape. A reflection of Jesus’ wanderings.
Many Lents have passed since this story began, but the subsequent glow from Easter morning’s resurrection still radiates. For me, even now, its warmth continues to heal wounds collected on a desert journey.
The Vagaries of Poor Choices
It began early March 2021 with a desperate telephone call. COVID-19 was in full bloom. But the real start was decades before. For a woman who juggled for over thirty-five years the inconsistencies of everyday living, it was odd the exaggerated confidence in her own enduring health and sustained physical strength. She had an entrenched belief in her personal infallibility and plainly ignored any plans for old age and potential incapacity. As head nurse of the Montreal General Hospital emergency department, Pam, was not immune to the havoc born from vagaries of daily mishaps. Yet, failed to accept her vulnerability to the same vagaries that launched her desert journey and ours.
For years, my mother, and her sister before she died, pleaded with their aging friend to move to Toronto. Nurses are frank with each other. Pam would benefit from the proximity of their support and from the support their families offered.
Having emigrated in 1955 to Montreal from England with a group of five nurses, including my mother and aunt, Pam and Mum were the last living remnants of this cohort. But unlike my mother and her sister, Pam never married or had children. We never knew her to be involved with a significant other except for a broken engagement in her early twenties. With her sisters deceased in England, her only surviving relations were distant nieces and nephews, also in England. In Montreal, she was alone and with little support.
As excellent nurses and friends do, their cohort had stayed in touch, especially as they aged. In weekly telephone calls, my mother cajoled Pam to move to Toronto, to be closer to our extended family.
“Pam, the kids will help you. They want to.”
Although not a blood relation, Pam’s shared history had conferred on her family status.
And we wanted to help. My cousin, my sister-in-law, and me, we recognized these women as icons of their era—a bonding of nurses after the Second World War. They were a sisterhood; a special brand of women whose quiet fortitude and resilient spirits impressed upon our lives, qualities of compassion, caring, and professionalism.
And Pam said the right words. How wonderful to be closer. But she never made the change; never considered the possibility of outliving her Montreal community of support. But as friends and neighbors died or became ill and incapacitated, she noted with increasing alarm her circle becoming smaller.
“Grace isn’t doing so well,” she shared with my mother. “She has stage four cancer.”
Pam’s retired but much younger apartment neighbors, Grace and Ted, ran errands for Pam. Compounded by severe scoliosis, a hip replacement and old age, Pam’s walking gait rivaled that of a seasoned sailor. With lightening quickness reminiscent of her busy days as a ward nurse, she lurched through hallways, but even with a cane, her mobility and balance were precarious. She often fell. Later, we discovered just how heavily she relied on Grace and Ted for her daily needs. But Grace was not getting better. And then the Pandemic exacerbated seasonal winter restrictions. In eighteen months, Pam barely stepped outside her apartment.
Her worry was clear. “I never thought it would be this way.”
Pam had fully expected to pre-decease her dearest, closest and younger best friend, Evelyn, who had helped Pam, but died eighteen months earlier. Now Evelyn’s sister, at age eighty-nine, trekked by bus to bring Pam needed cash.
Retiring before becoming computer educated, Pam had never waded into the information age. Her technological illiteracy barred her from internet banking, on-line shopping, and other useful assists in a home-bound person. Her sunset years had turned into a desert journey, her isolation compounded by a global pandemic.
We Call Her “Aunty Pam”
We call her Aunty Pam. My brother and I, and our two cousins, knew Pam our whole lives as our mother’s friend, who joined a group of five nurses to sail across the Atlantic for a temporary adventure. Excited to have secured positions at the Montreal General Hospital, the nurses pooled their money to afford board house lodgings. Pam shared a bedroom with my aunt. She intended to return home after six months, but fell in love with her job and with Montreal.
During the years my family lived in Montreal, Pam took us children on annual adventures. One year it was to the Montreal Forum to see The Shriner’s Circus. I recall breathlessly watching the daring escapades of aerial trapeze artists. Agile bodies leaping from high platforms, anchoring precariously from slim ladder rungs, bodies effortlessly whirling through the air, reaching with assurance for the seemingly unreachable next rung. With eyes fastened on the trapeze artists and hope resting on perfect timing, my arms would shake from the grip on the chair armrests, my iron grip releasing only when they reached the next saving rung.
And there were other thrilling adventures. Capturing the magic of storytelling through skating The Ice Capades rolled out streams of lithe, graceful, and sometimes ridiculous, ice dancers—princes and princesses falling in love but whose happiness gets thwarted by an evil but entertaining magician, rollicking and familiar cartoon characters like the ever-frustrated coyote chasing the elusive road runner with the flair of a slippery surface, and assorted careening clowns piling up on the ice in human clown bundles scooped into a goalie hockey net.
Kind, attentive, and generous, Pam treated us like her adopted family. To us, as kids, that’s what she was. I now appreciate she was one of a few from an iconic and disappearing era. A veteran nurse landed in a desert journey. And who would hold a poor choice against an ailing and hospitalized ninety-one-year-old?
To be continued…