| in america 1 part 3 - 2002 october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
16 October 2002 San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society meeting in a chilly cavern in Balboa Park. A lot of people, all the chairs full. Plain people, strong plain women, weakish plain men. The room was large and had bookcases to waist height on all four walls. Hidden behind locked lattice doors were what looked to be old and dull books. The room was very cold. People sat obediently faced toward a large boy-man with red curls all over his head. He was from a restoration company, invited to give a talk about starting native plants from seed. On long tables on two sides of him quite deep cardboard boxes full to the top with seeds gathered in the wild, a potent notion. Karen Campbell writes that she and I will do a minicourse on theory in January. She will talk about poststructuralism and postcolonialism, etc, and I will talk about the theoretical enterprise itself. I will say theory is close to madness. I will talk about 'distance' and left hemisphere confabulation, working metaphor, indirection. Religion as theory. [theory notes not transcribed] - At that moment the phone rings and it's Judie calling to say Ed's dying, either quickly or slowly. Said she's tired of Christian ideology and old people. I was surprised that I could hear La Glace in her voice, Mennonites too. Notes on shadow and ego-ideal: in any person active structure that isn't self-known tension between desire and inhibition - repression of either is <splitting> sexuality in the broad sense, pleasure in human relationships Incest wounds: developmental splits that block sexual feeling, so spontaneous body is unfelt, fear of spontaneity, identification with self image what we don't accept about self or others, deny, project; shadow-projection, enemy, blaming ego substitutes what is safer, "actually sublimate our longing for human relatedness and sexual fulfillment" sentimental and irresponsible ego as the most unconscious part ego of therapies: "autonomy, independence, self-sufficiency, achievement, initiative, individualism" vs relation, empathy, fluidity Jung: a subpersonality, "the thing one has no wish to be" "One who imagines he actually is only what he cares to know about himself" Golden shadow: burden another with our best Shadow-work as the apprenticeship, male-female is the great work, stability is a function of [parental archetypes] so incest split comes into play in marriage Being able to tolerate paradox and ambiguity, admit to greed, violence, chauvinism, prejudice, admit we will never get it under control I believe the severity of the wound can be measured by the degree of fear one has of losing rational control, even if that fear is not directly related to sexuality. Incest guilt can be avoided as long as one is unaware of experiencing one of the opposites, love or sex. Fear of conscious aggressive desire though responsive to others'. Only forbidden imagery can release repressed instincts. Holding the tension between desire and terror Model a spontaneous, flexible, non-authoritative humanness Jeremiah Abrams 1994 The shadow in America: reclaiming the soul of a nation Nataraj Publishing
Redgrove: "masculine idealisms and abstract sublimations" "the uneasy source of the energy of the evolution of Western society" conversing with images of the unknown anima image mediates between uncon and con because split of mother feeling is at origin of separation dark senses as organs of knowledge imagination as vehicle of understanding such perceptions 'sealed writing' "a confusion ... a relaxation ... a synaesthesia ... image and its theme" 3 months, later bring it to an intention whole breathing, alternate nostril, relaxation, dream recall It is less that she desires worship than that she rejoices in being imagined. pheromonal and electrical emissions from the aware body Peter Redgrove 1988 The black goddess and the unseen real Grove/Atlantic 17 Rowen says Mike and Lise are divorcing and Mike is lost in fantasy, new fantasy every weekend, last time a fantasy of skating for the NHL. When he was a boy he won a skating race against all the other Dutch boys. Is he nuts? I ask. No, Rowen says, I think he is just desperate. As I speak to him I can hear the little ticks of a keyboard. He is vanishing into a computer game.
- Mary drugged, I think, or stunned - slow. She complained of the phone calls, said slyly, competitively, of Ed's doctor, He's my doctor too, you know. Said in an aggrieved way that if I wanted to know whether there was something I could do for my father, I could mail him something. She was assuming I was calling to find out when he would die, to be able to be there "with everybody." I said no I wondered if I could be useful to her. She said Rudy arrived this evening. It seems to be a father-death time. Sharon crashing because of her dad, Cassidy's dad's death, Joan writing about her brother and spirits and death-warning dreams, the neighbourhood with its skeletons, tombstones and ghouls. 18 Nervous of contagion of hysteria. There will be a thick pious atmosphere, people frightened and conforming. The convention of informing everyone, cousins, grandchildren. A buzz. - Interviewer: Do you ever return to Virginia Woolf? Welty: Yes. She was the one who opened the door. When I read To the lighthouse, I felt, Heavens, what is this? I was so excited by the experience I couldn't sleep or eat. I've read it many times since, though more often these days I go back to her diary. [1972] -
Amtrak 20th One o'clock Sunday, Santa Barbara. From 4:55 to 5:10 this morning Tom and I in his room in beautiful lamplight, downtown white night at the window, oceanic music by Moby. Tom supplied ambrosia and strawberries for breakfast. I dressed, zipped my pillow into my bag. Tom rolled the sleeping bag he is lending me. Downstairs it was Vince who called me an Orange cab. Tom at his worst and best yesterday. The worst as he arrived from a flat tire and missed buses, freaked and snarling. The best of two kinds, talking about The sexual life of Catherine M, and taking care of me in the room last night. I said I'd thought he'd see himself in Catherine M because she fucked without being sexual. He said yes and talked about the observer. In love with the possibilities of being, I said. Later when he had had time to go home and get ready and I had packed and come downtown on the bus, he worked the stiffness in my neck and stroked my bum so it felt round and lovely. He was full of ardour and I was keeping him just at the line. He had his west wind face and said I looked twenty eight. Klamath Falls, 21st Should I be raking up thoughts about Ed - what is owed the occasion - say it another way, am I feeling anything I'm not aware of - that is one question, the other is, what objective account can there be of his life as such, apart from being mad at him. He's 82. Born January 1920 in the Ukraine. When he was 5 in 1924 his family immigrated to Canada. While they were at sea a whale was sighted. No one would lift him to see over the rail, he said. When he was a boy he would fly into tempers, lie kicking and screaming under the bed. When he was 12, after grade 8, he stopped going to school. He found a bank note on the road but his father took it for the family. He made clay marbles and sold them. In his late teens he went to bible school. He asked one of the bible school teachers what he should do about torments of lust. The man said to marry as soon as he could. He saw Mary reciting a poem and thought her intelligent. Was 23 when he married her. There was a war on, but he had done alternative service as a conscientious objector. Built roads in Jasper National Park. That was his only free time. After he married he was farming. He wrote her poems. Afterward she discovered he had wanted to be a farmer all along - he wanted to win a Master Farm Family award. He had no patience with machinery, was enraged by mechanical breakdowns. He always had a grudge going, he whined, raged. He accumulated enemies. He was faithful but lustful, always looking for pretty women. He was callous with his children, curt, intimidating, sneering, belittling. He gave important things nonetheless. He didn't give them personally or with generous intent, but they were results of who he was. He slaved on the farm, worked his body into the ground, and supported us along with himself because he had to. He gave us his genes, which have been my edge, and my looks, and he gave us the farm. He was an asshole and wonderful things came through him. Beauty, sexual magic, charged silence, power, solitude, brave integrity, spatial imagining, visual bliss, resistance, music, travel. Saying these things, I am saying he didn't intend to give us anything, but he did give us these things. Then it says, no, he intended to give them. Are you sure? Yes, it says. He wanted to stand for something and against something. Did he want to do it for us? Yes. I don't think so. Against the ruin of the false and flabby. Yes. So was I the only one who could use it? Yes. Yes. Does he feel he succeeded with me? Yes. He held wildness. Yes. So this tells me why I don't want a reconciliation. Yes. I'm his heir. Yes. Is there a large self in him. Yes. Is everything that needs to be acknowledged, acknowledged? Yes. We don't have loose ends. Yes. Paul is stuck in complaint because he hasn't acknowledged, taken up, these gifts. Yes. Judie has? No, she's living safe. Saying these things I feel alive in belly and cunt. His unconcealed realness of spite, competition, rage, lust, judgment, jealousy, calculation, irritation, bragging, misery, arrogance, grandstanding, brutality, contempt. - Silently, silently sinking toward sea level along a bank of red silt, broken rock, fir and alder scrub. Willow and poplar yellow. I achieved a stand-off. He knew I would fight every point. He knew there'd be a consequence for every mean act. He knew I was calling him. The stand-off was a true form, private and intense. Vancouver, 22nd Rudy's surprising voice, big bluff old farmer's voice - salty - funny. He says that since they disconnected him Ed is lucid, pinker, eats and drinks. Had a big loose shit. Now's the time to talk to him if you want to, Rudy said. 23 The women on the train. On the afternoon of the second day, swaying through Oregon, I listened to a woman one seat forward on the opposite side of the aisle talk to three different women in the seat ahead of me. I heard three versions of her story. Thirty-five years married to a hydro engineer with a PhD, six children, a recent MA in theology it took her 8 years to get. "I'm an empty-nester," she said three times. Mrs Pleasant. She had a soft ingratiating voice and said not one thing all afternoon that had any kind of bite. At the same time, although she responded 'supportively' to anything said, she could sustain response for one sentence at most before she went back to telling something about herself. The longest conversation was the last, with a somewhat younger community college councilor. They traded I sentences for hours without hearing themselves say anything they haven't already subscribed to. The saddest were about their dogs and cats. My dog will sit on a chair by the window and wait for me to come home. When I'm away my dog won't sleep unless my husband lets him under the covers on my side of the bed. My cat hugs me. My cat will touch my face with her paw. There had been a Chicano boy in the seat across from me all the way from LA. I saw him at the station in San Diego. I noticed him for the ingenious way he had taped a cardboard box to a small bag with a strap, so he could carry them together. He was carefully dressed in immaculate white trainers, very baggy pants low at the hip, short sleeved shirt with small checks, white socks, white undershirt. He stayed in his seat listening to a headset, kept his space in good order. His destination slip said TAK so I knew I'd have to talk to him before Tacoma if at all. I'd given him the sports pages from the USA Today I bought in Portland. His name was Gilbert. He had grown up in Chula Vista, was going to live with his aunt to get away from the gangs and finish senior year. He turned seventeen in September. His mom is high up in a company that sells crystal. Her picture is on the cover of a book about sales. She'll get him a car if he graduates. When we were half an hour from Tacoma he excused himself, got up to go downstairs to brush his teeth. Two hours before he had put on cologne, sprayed his hair with something scented. As soon as he was off the train both women ahead of me jumped up gushing. That was a very frightened young man, you really helped him. That was wonderful, you really drew him out. You're so nonjudgmental. I'm very judgmental, I said. We all are, said the red lipstick smiling, smiling, smiling guidance councilor. This went on for a bit and then something else happened. The empty nester was standing up talking about dealing with her sons when they were teenagers. She said she hadn't known how to handle them. She had never talked back to her parents. You are a different generation, said the guidance councilor supportively. I talked back to my mother once and she slapped my face, I never did it again. The empty nester was standing by her seat actually shouting. Both women were called Karen. By the time we got to Seattle Karen empty nest was saying the meeting had been meant. "There is much more to life than we know." In fact the meeting was veiled competition from end to end, my conversation with Gilbert included. The shadow in America. Karen councilor tried several times to recoup by jumping up and offering advice on web teaching programs I could learn. She tried to break into the conversation with Gilbert too by popping her head up and talking about community college. She trumped poor Karen empty nest decisively at the end by giving her some sort of professional evaluation sheet just as we were pulling into Seattle. I found myself organizing people with baggage difficulties. Young man - young man in the blue hat - would you help this woman carry one of her bags? 25th A bodies concentration, embodiment concentration? Is that where to go instead of social action / peace and justice? Shelley wanting queer studies, make it unusual bodies studies, way to talk about nature/culture at the same time, integrated as structure. What is it about the social sciences and social improvement talk that I can't stand. It's all imaginary. It's ungrounded. Danielle wants to talk about epistemology but she means being analytical and self-critical about knowledge systems, which is fine but I want that more grounded too, how is knowing done? What would the concentration ideally do? It is a perspective shift. What would happen, how would the other disciplines look, if they were founded in a recognition of embodiment as the platform? No cognition without physical structure. Cognitive structural changes are responsive, interactive. Bodies are immersed. The diagram: world/universe as the unbounded ground. Within it individual bodies. This view is compatible with Dewey, Dewey seems to have implicitly held it. Social descriptions would be descriptions over individual bodies. An understanding that levels/aspects/elements of theory are ungrounded, imaginary, working metaphors that need to be floated. Question of theory is central. Is Karen [Campbell] interested in nation because it's imaginary? Nation cultural [miasma]. Polysemy of the term, metaphoric nature of the term. What it has to do with bodies. Commitment to a shift in progress. Social action has no cutting edge, collection of worthy people it would stun me with boredom to work with. It is social action but. Social action agendas are discredited and part of an old mindset, no recognition for the paradoxes and qualities. Correct social action doesn't happen that way. Rock music. It's mixed in with living other values. The ethos of social action is stupid. Not sure there should never be war. It is an idealism that creates a blind shadow. The creation of a nice world. Not sure everybody should be treated the same way. Novelist's vision. Action as aggressive. Mixedness of motives. Mandate to thrive in competition. Tragic facts, death, illness. Social action and local people. End to right-left ideological politics. Education, health care, water, air, employment, valued participation, food, assertion/action/skilled creation, contact with nature. Deep comprehension of structures of those who fear optimism. Body-based values, thriving. A false dynamic of status, glamour, fame, wealth, security. Embodied politics, power struggle when these are being prevented by a dominant group. Minority categories, marked categories, categories of disadvantage. Prejudice and partitioned nets, neurological discomfort of for instance dealing with an accent. A moral model, a physical model of how it works. - Rowen's Graal character: Geos was born dead. Another being moved into him wanting to keep him alive, supported him, sacrificing himself gradually. There came a moment when the sacrifice was complete and Geos was whole. At that moment his hair turned blue. He wears amber armour. Rowen is building his castle.
- What did I see - not a lot - I stood looking at him - he said, You're Ellie aren't you, I didn't recognize you. I just looked and he looked back and then he started sobbing and turned his head away. I sit by the bed and put my elbows on the bar. How is it? How is it? Well it is quite hard. Later I say, The farm was hard for you, but it was good for us. I don't know how to take that, he says. I mean it was hard work for you and good for us to be there. You can take it as thank you. His arms are very thin, bruises on the backs of his hands that he rubs down over his face. That gesture, and the way he says, well ..., have been there all along. A lot to think about a lot to think about a lot to think about, he says, as if he has stuck there. It's maybe seven thirty in a room with two beds. The man in the other bed has gangrene in his right foot. At the moment his wife is praying aloud before she goes home for the night. Ed has his eyes closed. There are two small lights at the foot of his bed, one blinking. Before I came I fired a note to Victor Enns at rhubarb magazine. I said it was interesting that he needed to soften what was after all my sentence. "I am not 'at odds' with the nastiness of Mennonite patriarchy but at war with it, actively opposed. I am not a pacifist and neither were the Mennonite patriarchs who were at war with the spontaneity and potency of the children and women." He is wearing a blue print nightgown and has one hand under his chin. There is the busy silence of a corridor with squeaking footprints. When Rudy and Mary are here they seem to be speaking too loud. There's a fan on at all times. Rudy - how is Rudy - small, a small man in strange shoes for an oilpatch man, light loafers in some sort of woven leather. He is 47, there is just a bit of grey in the underlayers of the hair at the back of the neck. He sometimes startles into very loud laughter. Later when Ed was breaking into sobbing again I said, You could cry, I won't think worse of you for it. He said, What about your crying? I cry, I said. Do you? he said. Well, do I? Not much any more. Lillian came to the door swollen like a frog wearing magenta lipstick. She was too interested in the medical details. When I first came in he was asleep curled over with his head on a pillow by the side restraint on the far side. I watched his breath at his shoulder. Shallow, irregular, with jerks at midbreath. I was breathing with him. Lillian tried to discover whether I have post-polio symptoms. I didn't give her anything, said I felt better in California because I have a sweetie there. But walking to the train station carrying a bag I did something to my left leg, it's hurting from the hip down. I'm hobbling. All night in the pale yellow room. Ed was sleeping under a yellow blanket, a long but very slight form from small old skull to the distant peak of one foot crossed over the other at the ankles. He lay very quietly. Around one o'clock I couldn't see breathing and went to sit next to him. He hiccupped. 28th There are some things I need to say or ask myself. I didn't understand his state. He would cry whenever Mary said my name, it seemed. He would wipe his hand down over his face. He would come out with a charming sentence like "I don't want her to flit," but within the same two minutes he would be unable to say anything. It was as if he were feeling inarticulately, maybe feeling without object. I wasn't impressed with the significance of the death-bed scene, though there was that aura about it. I mean that a deathbed declaration doesn't seem to have much reach, especially from someone already confused. When he says he forgives I assume he means it as a blessing, but he is forgiving me for something that wasn't a sin. And then when there was more he wanted to say Mary was prompting him, Do you want to say I love you, is that what you want to say? Don't push him, I said indignantly. I meant, In your usual ham-handed way you are messing it up. If you say it, he has not said it and you have moreover kept him from saying it. Moreover saying something when you are dying does not make it true. It is a declaration with no reach into the time when it would make a difference. What I was feeling was in fact that nothing happening on the deathbed could make any difference to me, and it wasn't clear either what kind of difference it could make to him. The sort of thing I did like was the flit sentence and a moment before I left when I said, looking at the yellow blanket over his almost flat form, Where are your hands, and he raised his left index finger at a point over his chest. It tented the blanket like a little penis. I gave it a quick squeeze. There were also two times giving him water when I held the back of his head in my left hand like a baby's. It is a small light head like a hazelnut shell. He didn't lean back into my palm, so it wasn't really a supporting gesture. It became a sort of erotic touch, which is true. While he slept I could stare at him. A shabby old head very familiar, pleasing in its form, aquiline nose and sharp cheeks, temple hollows, moustache, shabby grey fuzz on his head. He looked like his father. I was fascinated by him. Am. It was not safe to love him while he was alive. If I made a move in that direction he would crush it. That was true even last August. The standoff was necessary I think, but our actual relation was like a countercurrent to the relation there seemed to be. The standoff was a relation, quite intense and private. I don't understand his crying. His quality when doctors or nurses talked to him was stoic, quiet, a nice tone. He would consider their questions and do his best. The photo I helped myself to has the young men of the CO camp making music in a tent. Abe Siebert is in the foreground. One knee is raised to support the elbow of the arm holding a violin. He is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and has a beautiful soft look on his face. Six young men. They are all farm boys with good shoulders. Ed is sitting on the floor playing a guitar. He is wearing a white shirt and suspenders. His head is turned looking back saying something probably to Henry Janzen in the background. Their freedom was very brief. Within months they were back on the farms, marrying. When he cries Mary brings her head next to his and her arm up to be able to hold his head with her hand. Rudy and I came back from having tea together to find her on the bed with him. She was wearing quite a nice dress with a pleated skirt and looked romantic. In the afternoon vacuuming Mary's horrible place. Oh the threadbare little rugs of miscellaneous kinds, the carpet grimy at its edges where the heavy old vacuum cleaner doesn't reach. The shelves upon shelves of little rubbish, the ugly furniture crowded into small rooms, everywhere the shitty browns. 30th Happy last night. It had been a dazzling day, one pleasure after another. Came home at eight in the dark through tunnels of yellow maple leaves lit from below, then stood at Louie's counter making Greek salad and applesauce before she got home late from work, with the Tallis Singers on, feeling the relief that it is starting to be safe to love my father. More than relief, joy. Paul said that yesterday morning for a while Ed was looking around in wonder. His eyes, which have always been guarded, glowed bright blue. Ed was high, Rudy said on the phone, meaning stoned, hallucinating. Tonight he is less peaceful than he was, twitching hard. His forehead is staying tight. He doesn't have his teeth in, and so he doesn't look himself. I put vaseline on his lips and have been holding his shoulder to try to steady him. 31st There was frost last night, they say. Cold and clear. In the hospital parking lot a strong smell of cedar from a remnant first growth stand that has dropped needles onto the asphalt. Looking north from the TV room at dawn this morning, a serrated wall of mountain, solid blue on pink. I slept crunched into two chairs, slept and woke. Still not a long night. Ed was sometimes in pain. His toothless face would jerk. Oh boy, he'd say, that his strongest protest even in extremity. He could no longer answer, mostly. During the night I heard a nurse ask, Mr Epp, would you like a drink? I've never had one, I don't want to start, he said. It's an old joke. Yesterday sitting near him, watching his face in anxiety and pain, I was feeling something like, it was so short a time ago you were that young man, I mean the young man before I was born. It's dehydration in kidney failure. He is dying of thirst. What I felt with him mostly is that I do not know much about his state. His poor fallen-in mouth working, working. Paul said too, his dignity. 3rd November Rudy phoned at about 3:50 this morning. He sounded drunk. D-day, he said. So Ed died on an early Sunday morning late in fall. Rudy had been at the pub with Paul and Dave Doerksen and was still drunk when he took the call. He sat for several hours smoking in that depressing living room, sobering up enough to be able to make phone calls. When Mary woke he said to her, Mary, it's all over. Email to Luke: Ed died around three this morning. Yes it does mark a point for all of us, and it has been quite lovely to be part of the last two weeks. I've stayed with Louie in Van and gone up the valley to Abbotsford on the Greyhound sometimes, stayed overnight by Ed's bed. It is the most intimate I have ever been with him. There were stages of decline. When I first saw him about ten days ago he was lucid sometimes. It was as if he were afloat in dark vapours where sometimes a bit of something solid would bob up to him. It was possible to have short exchanges with him, not more than about a sentence each way. He was quiet under the yellow blanket, insubstantial as a mummy, just a shabby little skull on the pillow and then far away at the foot of the bed the peak of his feet sticking up. When I first got there Wednesday late afternoon he said You're Ellie aren't you, I didn't recognize you. We just looked at each other for a slow count of maybe five. Then he burst into tears. That evening and next morning he would cry every time he heard my name. When he was out of it he would say Yes. Yes. He slept quietly all night. I would peep at him from my chair at the foot of the bed. He looked nice, and there was something beautifully gentle and dignified about the way he would answer the nurses. The thing I liked best was Thursday late morning when I was getting ready to leave. He said, Where's Ellie, I am afraid she is going to flit. When I saw him again Saturday of that week he was less comfortable. He didn't have his teeth in so he didn't look like himself. He had an anxious forehead and would move his head as if he were in pain. When it was worst he would say, OH boy. OHH boy. He was no longer recognizing Mary. I didn't see the next stage, but Paul, who had arrived from Toronto in the meantime, said he seemed to be hallucinating. He said that on Wednesday morning this week, Ed's eyes, which have always been remarkably guarded, were glowing and bright blue. He was looking all around in wonder. Friday morning he was gasping for air. Mary was so staggered by seeing him that way that she went dizzy and started to fall. Paul and Rudy took her home. Yesterday Ed was on oxygen and in a coma. Mary says she has been numb. I think physical collapse has been her way of feeling. Don't live on braii fleis and biltong, there is a lot of high blood pressure and heart disease in Mary's family. Take good care of your dear self. Late October in Vancouver as you will remember is very beautiful. There has been sun almost every day, yellow leaves on Hawks Avenue, raveling strings of crows at dawn, frost on the roofs in the pink and blue dawns. A small place on the dark side of the moon stormy and bright sounds lovely. Tom has his privileges suspended at the moment. He was an asshole last summer when I was getting ready for my defense, defenseless, and something in me just went clunk. I discovered I was happy without him. He is working hard to get it all back, and has been a good friend while I've been in CA, but the outcome is unknown for now. CA and teaching are both wonderful. The 6th College project is slowly moving ahead. Slow is fine. It has seemed inevitable. I'll be back at the California number in about a week. You would like the train journey. Twenty-four hours of it are in California, much of it along the coast. One is just gliding, gliding, slowly and smoothly, through more and more world. I am always so relieved to know you are well. 5th A community of people who were young together, congregating in the Valley in their late seventies and early eighties, dying in near vicinity, Ed's contemporaries, Henry Janzen, Nick Siebert, Willie Matties. The wives will die ten years later. Their children, in their fifties, watch carefully: what is dying? 7th Rowen and I got off the bus at Clearbrook Road and walked north one block to the MB church. I had changed clothes in the bus. Rowen flumped along beside me in his too-big shoes. It was a dark damp Wednesday noon. The bus had had tinted windows and the roadside reds and yellows of leaves and grass were beautiful in dark grey light. Judie was at the top of steps in the church foyer as if receiving guests - someone I thought must be Judie. She had uniformly beige hair feathering forward from ear to collarbone. The skin under and around her jaw was a fine-textured white sac tight-filled with fluid. She was wearing a pale blue president's-lady suit that gave the impression of being cut from a minimum of cloth. Thick legs in nylons, square black pumps. Her face had the disordered corrupt look of middle-aged Konrads who don't watch their carbs, a look I have always taken as a look of moral failure. At the same time she was full of energy, good humor and responsibility, a realized human being happy with herself Relatives assembled in the basement for the processional. There was a circle of people, mostly Konrads, with Epp relatives in one quadrant, Mary in what looked to be a new black suit, Rudy in Ed's cream-colored jacket with stains on the shoulder, Paul in what looked more like Armani, charcoal wool. The local minister said a prayer to comfort the mourners before the ordeal of the funeral. Judie and I next to each other did not bow our heads and close our eyes, and neither did one of the old men among the Epps, I was interested to notice. Judie rapidly organized the procession, Rowen and Paul on either side of the widow, supporting her elbows, Judie and Rudy on either side of Ed's old sister. We trod in past pews full of old people we didn't know, who had come for the entertainment and the free lunch. The obit and order of service were printed in a brochure whose cover shows a purple and gold sunrise behind two trees and a cross. My version: Ewald Epp 1920-2002 Ed Epp was born January 26, 1920, near Ruckenau, the Ukraine, the second child of Susanna and Peter Epp. His family immigrated to Canada in 1924, and in 1928 settled on land near Peoria, Alberta, near his mother's family. When Ed was fifteen his parents moved to partially cleared land near La Glace, Alberta. At 21 he served briefly in CO camps, building roads in Jasper National Park. He attended bible school at the La Glace Mennonite Brethren Church for three years, and sang bass there, in the choir and in quartets. It was at choir practice that he first met Mary Konrad, who married him July 6, 1943, when he was 23 years old. He and Mary moved to a quarter section of land east of his father's quarter. They farmed in La Glace and Valhalla for more than forty years. During his life Ed was also a trucker, a sawmill operator, and a land speculator. He designed, and he and Mary built, four of their houses. In 1987, he and Mary retired to Grande Prairie, Alberta, and then in 1992 they moved to Clearbrook, BC. Ed enjoyed traveling, both before and after he retired. At various times he traveled in Mexico, Europe, and Israel, as well as in the US and Canada. One of his favorite trips was a five-month journey he took with his young family in the winter of 1959, after a good crop. He hitched a small trailer to his camper truck and chose a route south from Winnipeg through Kansas and Oklahoma into Mexico, and then west to celebrate Christmas in the desert in California. Throughout his life, one of Ed's great pleasures was talking to strangers and acquaintances around campfires and in coffee shops. He enjoyed lively and witty people, and liked to be witty himself. He collected proverbs and old saws, and appreciated skilled use of language, spoken or written. His most peaceful times with his family were the Sunday evenings when Mary would read stories from Reader's Digest Condensed Books aloud. Though easily exasperated by mechanical failure, Ed liked owning large machines, and had strong preferences for Case tractors and International trucks. He liked to see work well done - good fences and straight plow lines. On Sunday afternoons in summer he liked to walk in a growing field of grain. When he was a young man Ed played guitar and mandolin, and he continued to enjoy music. He sang with the Abbotsford Men's Choir in Clearbrook as long as he could; it was one of the joys of his retirement. Ed died early on Sunday morning, November 3, 2002. He is survived by his wife Mary, four children, Ellie, Judy, Paul and Rudy, brothers William and Walter, sister Lily, and grandchildren Luke, Akasha, Jennifer, Tova, Kane, Levi, Adam, Konrad and Rowen. Through the service we were faced by maybe forty old men of the Abbotsford Male Choir, uniform in wine-colored jackets and black bow ties. There was a gap in the bass row that might have been intended to show what had been Ed's place. In the congregational hymns I could hear Judie's voice next to me. The pastor directed us to skip verse 2 of How great thou art, presumably because it is the verse that praises rolling thunder and other beauties of the natural world. The sermon was delivered by a large loud man Ed and Mary had known in PRBI [Peace River Bible Institute]. He was a rambling blow-hard but I didn't get angry until he said that although men who serve god sometimes neglect their children, he believes god will make it up to those children. He went on to hope those children would now take up the support of the mission in India that he is affiliated with. At that point I began to express hatred and contempt with every posture and facial shape I could find. On and on he went in that detestable male religious entitlement, standing above the several hundred of us trained to obey moronic self-indulgence. Judie listened placidly beside me, humoring my loud furious out-breaths. When he sat down finally the choir got up and sang what was, in their rapt hushed version, a remarkable homoerotic anthem, O lord, you're beautiful. During the closing prayer I thought of Tom, imagined him beside me violently hating the man of the sermon. The thought lit me up in a blaze of pleasure. Bad fiery Tom is a natural enemy of that asshole. Just thinking of him in that swamp of piety was a sword and shield when I needed them. Then it was the big basement with its long tables set, ham, pickles, processed cheese slices, lemon and cherry Danish cut in half. Rowen sat between Mary and me. We offered his bright energy to be vampirized at need, and also his simplicity and good will to keep her company in her will to simpleness. Judie went to the mic, told some sort of anecdote with great friendly ease, and then read a dull conventional fax from her son. Paul stood up near the end, urbane in his excellent clothes, polished, humorous. Mary had asked him to read the first part of a letter he wrote Ed last winter. It was the buttering-up part, where Paul named ten things he appreciated about Ed. That part of the letter had been a preamble to a plea to know why Ed had tried to rub him out. Ed did not answer the letter. So Mary asked Paul to sell himself out, and he did so, but he did it with an accomplished grace and apparent ease that said, Here I am, I survived the old man's attempted murder and I have years to enjoy possession of a world in which my enemy has been defeated, though not by me. (I didn't see a tear in anyone. Lily was sentimental about her big brother. Mary was shaky and said she doesn't realize the fact. Judie and Paul and I and Mary's family were jovial - no, a tear in Rudy maybe, sitting forward in the pew with the sad look he had when he was a little boy.) The MC was about to shut down the mic when Rowen put up his hand and went forward. He stood there with the planes of his face clean and new, in his contemporary informal clothes, and said "My name is Rowen Epp." Did he say he was my son? I think so, and if he did, he was unknowingly announcing to that assembly that he was the child of an unmarried mother, something Mary had tried to hide by excluding all last names of children and grandchildren in the obit. He went on to say very gracefully and composedly that he had not known his grandfather, but had learned about him from this event, and that he had enjoyed meeting everyone. He had the last word, a young man showing Ed's moxie with another generation's kindness. I have thought for years what I would say at Ed's funeral, but in the event I had no impulse to say anything. What about that - was it defeat? Was it being blanked, unprepared, letting myself into the water of the family and losing what I am and know? Last night I could feel Mary's face and gestures in my muscles - a horror. (And yet the face I am feeling now is not at all hers.) I have wanted to say various things at various times - I have wanted to sing in broken-heartedness at the life he could have lived and failed to find. I have wanted to speak for all the wives and children terrorized by Mennonite men, for all the intelligence crippled by religious and family lies. Yesterday there seemed no one to say these things to, everyone there already too destroyed to be willing to hear. - No, it wasn't that, although that was mostly so, I think. What was it really? I lacked motive. They were things I wanted to say to him, not to them. That's it, isn't it. My dialogue with him is over. I still have things to say to her, but she won't hear them and so is gone out of my life. His harm remains, his subtlety is gone. The need to refuse lies will remain as long as Mary is alive, so we will send her into the ground rejoicing too. The gathering of semi-near family in the condo assembly room was the worst, George and Hilda, Jake and Elizabeth, Lil and John, Ed's sister Lily, Herman's widow Candy, long-nosed old Tina Wiens with Gerhard, Judy, Mary, Rowen and I, and of the grandchildren Pete and Marianne's Raymond, Jake and Liesbet's Phil. Rudy was meantime taking Paul to the airport in Vancouver. Jake and George are appalling: doughy stiff faces. The women who have married into the family are better, Hilda wearing a beautiful sober wool dress and showing a fine reticence. Candy kept inserting our name in her sentences. "I wasn't ready to sell my house, Ellie, and ..." The Konrad brothers and sisters did not mention Ed, and Mary sat silent among them. She was wearing a good burgundy blouse, sheer, showing a black slip under it. She doesn't color her hair. Her black skirt is riding high under her bosom in the old-lady way. She is stooped and very shaky. When the crowd was gone and we had cleaned up the plates and food and flowers, Judie, with Rowen on the sofa, Mary and I opposite, and Rudy hidden in the recliner, sat around talking about the farm. Mary relaxes when we bring ourselves as children. That's the most of what she wants. Mary Janzen, who calls herself Janet Simpson now, showed up fancy in a beaded sleeveless dress and large earrings, smiling continuously, as I was speaking to Tiny Wiens. Tina was saying, and had said at the mic, that we in La Glace were just one large supportive family. I said sharply that as I remember it, some groups were supportive but there was great rivalry, backbiting, snobbery and competition. Mary said yes, that was how it was. She said she had told Paul she had noticed that in his speech he did not say "Dad," and that she had noticed it because her son Phil had been the same at Henry's funeral. She said Henry had beaten her and the children and then gone off to prayer meeting, where he had been seen as a fine Christian. Neither of her two oldest would have anything to do with religion, she said. After she had left Henry, her children, returning from a visit to her, had happened to be late. They had been silent on the drive, because they were afraid of Henry. When they got to the house he had hit Edith in the face so blood gushed. When Mary left Henry she was cast as a scarlet woman who ran away to another man, and he was cast as a victim of female sexual wantonness. As I was talking to Mary, Paul came to say goodbye. She tried again to join him in complicity that was a little too pushing for his patience. He said quite roughly that we all survived. The fact is that he has joined the oppressors, he is on the other side of the line. Tina at the after-event came crawling up in her crook-backed long-nosed way and said brightly, We will all meet again in heaven. Lillian, who seems to come sit by me whenever she can, was saying to me and Judie, We are proud of your PhDs, but we are prouder that you are good human beings. I said, I am prouder of my PhD. Define 'good,' Judie said. Really. Abe Sieburt. Abe Sieburt was the beautiful one of the day. He came to the mic after Tina had done her Gollum piece, stood clear and straight with his kindly face shining and remembered singing at the CO camp roadsides. Ed had been loyal to him and he spoke simply as the one remaining member of a band of young men in their happiest time. He took out a mouth organ and played one verse each of two tunes. I beamed on him and grasped his hand as he went by, to thank him for much more than he could realize. He was not a man who ever beat a child or contempted his wife. He lived disregarded at the edge of the community, and was considered a weak man, and yet there he stood at 85, hale and clearspirited, really a good being. 8th Rudy took speed, or something, last night. He sat lovingly with Mary. There was alcohol on his breath, but so what, she said. She went to bed. When she woke the food had been cleared out of her fridge, stuff had been ransacked all over the house, her balcony plants were gone. This morning he woke on the couch in his clothes, went out and bought milk and flowers, but she had no prunes for breakfast. Three professors and a major drunk. Rudy is the fuse and he blew. I'm thanking him, laughing. He exploded Mary's tight little cell. He's the only one grieving.
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