HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS                 
 
It was Christmas of 1985 and we had company from England.  Dave’s
parents Ray and Gina had invited some very old friends with whom they had shared many happy years.  Unfortunately, a couple of days prior to their arrival, several of us came down with the flu’.  A couple of the kids and myself were too sick to enjoy Christmas and spent most of the time sleeping.  Gina was fine over Christmas but started to feel rotten the week after New Year.
The stomach flue is a miserable thing and not really much to do only keep warm, rest and drink fluids.  However, late in January Gina didn’t feel much better and turned a little yellow.  I insisted she go to the doctors and he sent her for tests. After various scans she was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas, a surgery was performed and she now had a colostomy bag, however the cancer was too far gone and she had, maybe, only six months to live.
We were all in shock and had to really grapple with the idea of losing this wonderful family member.  Dave’s brother flew in for a visit and seeing that there was little that could be done for Gina in the hospital, the two boys brought her home.  I am not sure what happened between the house and the car but I had packed a bag with a warm robe, slippers and blanket, for the two guys to bring mom home in.  When they arrived at the hospital, the bag contained only empty beer bottles, that were waiting to be returned to the store.  Mom had to come home in a hospital gown and paper slippers, wearing a coat owned by one of the boys.  We never found the original bag of clothes.
It was as though Gina just gave up at the news that she was terminally ill.  This vibrant, very young at heart woman turned into an old lady before my eyes.  Friends told us about various treatments that had “done wonders” for other people.  There was a special tea, made from exotic tree bark that I boiled and gave her several times each day but this did not help.  She did not want to eat anything so I made little custards and dainty foods to tempt her, but when presented to her she couldn’t manage to eat it.  Though she had no pain she was permanently nauseous and could not keep anything down.
She did love her daytime lounger in the glass studio and, even though it was winter she enjoyed the warmth of the sun through the glass.  We sat and talked for hours, reminiscing our past times.  Watching my favourite person wasting away made me want to die myself, how would I face life without my mom and very best friend?
The last few days of her life she had a visiting nurse come and give her injections, she sank into a coma and the nurse said the end was near.  She had me practice how to inject a grapefruit so that I could give Gina morphine if she woke up but she just slipped away without waking, just six weeks after her diagnosis.  Dave and his dad scattered her ashes on one of their favourite picnic sites.  Fifteen years later, we scattered dad over the same ground.
Dave’s dad got on with life and we did the same.  Life goes on but I felt I was on automatic pilot, not navigating my own route.  I was amazed that I handled my grief so well, just managing to go on as normal.  However, a few months after this our Golden Lab, George, died and suddenly and I went to pieces.  I really felt like an idiot but it was all just too much losing two of my most faithful fans in such a short time.
About twelve months later Ray met up with a nice lady on a seniors’ dating site and, for a few months he tried dating.  I told him that I was really happy for him but that if they became serious, I did not want her to move into what had been Gina’s home.  He did understand and several months later, he moved in with her.
The basement seemed sad and empty now and so we put the house up for sale and had a brand new home built.  Still in the same area and still with the same view.  Our married daughter and husband moved from their apartment to a house and, very soon a baby, our first grandson arrived on Christmas Day and brought real joy back to our hearts.  After her maternity leave she went back to work part time and between her mom in law and myself, she had willing baby sitters.
Fourteen months later and baby number two arrived.  He was a very fretful baby so I spent many of those early days entertaining the older child while my daughter tried to soothe the new arrival and catching up on lost sleep when she could put him down.  The better weather arrived and we had the opportunity to get the children out on walks to the park and the grizzly child turned into a happy daredevil of a boy.  As soon as he could walk, he could climb and he had no fear of anything.
It was around this time that Dave’s job became threatened.  He worked in a Vancouver brewery that was now going to merge with another local plant.  The workforce was to be cut in half.  Older men would take an early pension but the younger ones had a chance of losing their jobs, according to seniority.  Dave was forty five, too young for early retirement but having only worked there for eight years, didn’t have too much seniority.
Several years before, I had hurt my back and had needed surgery so had had to give up my heavy cooking job.  Cooking for eighty residents plus staff in an assisted living facility, meant big pots and pans and I could no longer manage.  I had helpers, of course, but it is very difficult for two people, of different heights, to move pots of boiling vegetables.  I had therefore retrained and gone to work at a halfway house for schizophrenic teens, recently released from a mental health facility, and needed to be retrained in the skill of coping with living independently.   I had loved the job but, over the years, government regulations and the closing of a major mental health facility, meant that patients were being released who were far too ill to ever live alone.
Some of our residents had conversations with inanimate objects like fruit and vegetables others had a permanent fear of the devil getting them, very sad but a very interesting job.  However, over time government rules changed so we had to be permanently writing reports of strange behaviours, which were becoming a regular occurrence, due to the sickness of the resident.  I seemed to spend more time and effort writing reports instead of attending to the residents.  It was very frustrating and I was getting stressed.
This seemed to be an indication that we needed to start a new phase in our lives, we needed to find jobs that were more rewarding and less stressful.  Two of our daughters were living independently, another was attending university and working part time and the other daughter was working, still living at home but in a stressful relationship that she wanted to get out of.
We had spent much of our life enjoying camping holidays, because A/ we could not afford anything else and B/ we loved doing that.  We had always talked about owning our own campground and this now seemed to be the ideal time to do it.  We found rental accommodation for daughter number three and the fourth girl moved with us to our new life.  After sixteen years in Port Coquitlam it was time to find some sunshine and a different way of life.
Oliver, here we come.