It’s happening again. The blood. He can see it, flowing under his skin, making itself known in black and indigo bruises, bringing pain along with the need for medication to control it. But it’s different this time. He’s at home.

Lawrence is sitting in his living room, sun streaming through the window, warming him, dulling the pain. The wing chair feels comfortable. It wraps around him, cocoons him. But he’ll have to stand up soon, go for a pee. The pain will ratchet up then, hitting seven or eight on the self-assessment scale.

The scale is stupid, Lawrence thinks. Until your insides have being ripped apart like his were eleven years ago, how can you conceive of what a pain ranking of ten feels like?

That’s not a problem this morning. A bottle of Hydromorphone sits on the kitchen island next to the Extra Strength Tylenol. If the pain gets out of hand, he can take an extra pill. Swallow it down.

It wasn’t always like this. Lawrence had surgery when he was a teenager. He’d had scar tissue removed from an eyelid that had been cut in a car accident. His father had run into the back of a car that had stopped in the right lane of the highway on a hot and sticky July afternoon.

Lawrence remembers being loaded into an ambulance and taken to the rural hospital near his family’s farm. His family doctor was in the ER that afternoon to stitch up his eyelid, lip and forehead. It was the doctor’s on-call day at the hospital. Back then general practitioners did more than refer patients to specialists or recommend they go to Emergency.

The result wasn’t perfect. Lawrence had a visible scar and his eyelid was a bit disfigured, but he didn’t really notice.

That didn’t last. The next summer, Lawrence dove into the farm pond. His eyelid hurt when he surfaced, a sudden sharp pain. The scar had spread.

He wasn’t privy to the conversations that followed, as his parents balanced his father’s guilt, and the desire to make things right, against the financial cost and how it would impact the family of eight.

Lawrence sat in a taxi cab with his father on route to the hospital, listening to the tick, tick, tick of the meter. He didn’t want to go, didn’t want surgery. Each tick increased his fear.

Fifty years later, Lawrence still remembers the kind, caring nurses who always seemed to be there when he needed them, and his angst when the surgeon said he’d have to spend a third day in hospital because the operation had taken longer than expected.

He’s had very different experiences in hospital since then. The nurses have been no less caring, but there has been more than one long wait after he pressed the call button, and physicians who wouldn’t wait for his pain meds to take effect before undertaking bedside treatment that caused him intense discomfort. Time is in short supply.

Lawrence is remembering those experiences, contemplating how much things have changed since that time, as he lies in a Day Surgery bed waiting to go into the OR where his hernia will finally be fixed. He’s waited more than a year for a surgery date. In that time his relatively small hernia has grown large. When he gets up in the morning, it’s only a matter of seconds before his intestine pushes out through his abdominal wall and settles in his scrotum, just short of his right testicle.

What could have been a quick fix has become much more complicated surgery. It takes a four-inch incision in his skin for the surgeon to get the space he needs to push Lawrence’s intestine back into place, then close and mesh his abdominal wall.

Despite being administered two anesthetics – a spinal hadn’t worked immediately, so Lawrence was given a general anesthetic – there’s no suggestion that he should spend a night in hospital. In 2024, hernia repair is day surgery. Cut, push, stitch, and send the patient home. That would hold true for Lawrence too, his past bleeding issues notwithstanding.

Lawrence wakes up in Recovery. A check of his vital signs and a bit of monitoring, then he’s sent down to Day Surgery to await discharge. He’s told that he must be able to urinate before he can go home.

After an hour or so, he’s asked if he can wiggle his toes, lift his knees off the bed, and feel the touch of a nurse’s hands on his feet. All good. But when they get him up to urinate, he can’t. Lawrence is incontinent. A bit of pee dribbles down his leg, wetting the front of his hospital gown.

His bladder is frozen solid from the spinal. Eight in the evening rolls around. Day Surgery is set to close. The nurses send him back up to Recovery. Lawrence’s wife is told she has to return to the Day Surgery waiting room. She’s not allowed to sit with him in Recovery.

It’s almost nine. Only one other patient besides Lawrence is in Recovery. The nurses want to call it a day. They scan his bladder. It’s full of pee, but still frozen. He can neither feel it nor control it. So they insert a catheter – Lawrence doesn’t feel a thing, his penis is frozen too – and they give his bladder twenty minutes to drain. Then it’s catheter out, diaper on, and Lawrence is discharged.

Making it home feels good. It’s so different from his other recent hospital visits, the first in 2013 when he went to Emergency with stomach pains, spent a gruelling two hours waiting to be seen by a doctor, and was promptly admitted. All he remembers is getting into a ward bed, waking up briefly in the Intensive Care Unit, and someone saying that he’s being transferred to a larger hospital where they might be able to stop his internal bleeding.

But he does remember what came next. The ambulance ride, lights and siren on, arriving in Emergency, and the long wait, in extreme pain, to be seen. How could that possibly make sense? He’s been transported from an ICU to get potentially life-saving surgery in a different, larger hospital, and dumped in Emergency. There’s a drug addict in the bed next to his, screaming for attention, needing Methadone. Finally Lawrence’s stepdaughter loses it. Insists that someone at least look at him.

Eventually he gets moved into the larger hospital’s ICU. He’s only been there a few minutes when he’s told off by the doctor in charge of the unit for pressing the call bell during a staff shift change and requesting help. Advised in no uncertain terms that he would have to wait. Couldn’t he see that people were busy? Lawrence holds his pee.

He’s a week in the ICU. Lawrence doesn’t remember a lot of it. His wife went through hell, watching him writhe in pain as nurses and doctors struggled, brutally at times, to insert a catheter into his bladder and keep his kidneys from failing. They manage to ram one into his prostate. It didn’t work, and was eventually removed.

Lawrence also remembers a surreal trip to the operating room, hallucinating about black spiders hanging down off the ceiling. Two hours later, an urologist succeeds at putting a catheter in. Lawrence’s kidneys start working again.

Ten years later, he’s back in an ICU. His surgeon had told him that he was being discharged after an appendectomy. Lawrence said he was dizzy and weak, not ready to go. The surgeon insisted. Lawrence stood up, then passed out on the floor. He’d been bleeding internally, unnoticed, for two days.
                                                            ****
It came as a shock, those five words: We’re going to admit him. He’d fallen sick on vacation in Hawaii. A bad cold had morphed into something much worse. He coughed up great gobs of phlegm, couldn’t eat, and soaked the bed every night with sweat.

My husband. I could have killed him when he insisted on going to work a couple of days after we got home, despite feeling like death warmed over. He lasted half day in the office, then made the hour long commute home and put himself to bed, which is where he should have been in the first place.

I found out later that he’d stopped at the sweet shop on his way home, to buy me a box of chocolates and a card for Valentines’ Day. Larry had walked to our house from there, so weak that he almost didn’t make it.

A few days later, he insisted on going back to work, and staggered his way onto the bus and into his office despite my protests. He lasted a couple of days, then put himself back to bed.

My recurring nightmare began shortly after that. He told me that he had a bad pain in his abdomen, and that he was going to the walk-in clinic. The doctor gave him a referral for an ultrasound, and told Larry to go to Emergency if the pain got worse.

It did. Which I why I found myself sitting with him there two days later. Larry got up to use the loo. Afterwards, when he was walking back toward me, he passed out. Two nurses managed to catch him before he hit the floor. He’s seen by a doctor and admitted shortly afterwards.

I sit by his bed for hours. Neither of us can believe he’s there. Finally, I go home. He needs to sleep, I need to take our dog out for a last pee and be comforted by him. Pippin is the rock I hang on to.

The call comes later that evening, after I’ve arranged with a friend and neighbour to walk the dog the next morning: “We don’t think your husband will make it through the night. If he has other family, you may wish to call them.”

I phone Larry’s sister, Jenny, the physician. She says she’ll let his Mum and siblings know, and to call her if I need anything. What I need is a miracle. I say a prayer in my head, phone my daughter to tell her what’s happening, then call my youngest sister, and drive back to the hospital in shock.

Visiting hours are over. It’s quiet. I find the Intensive Care Unit and am told the rules. But they let me in. I sit with my unconscious husband. Watch as bags of fluid and blood drain into his arm. Morning comes, a day passes. There is no change.

I go home, hug my Pippin, try to eat, and attempt unsuccessfully to sleep. I need to stay strong for Larry. I need to be there.

Jenny calls. She, Larry’s mother, another sister and his two brothers are flying in that afternoon. My sister Cath will arrive before them. Only things change. Larry’s doctor knows a surgeon at Vancouver General who has experience tying off bleeding arteries to stop internal bleeding. They consult, conclude that it might be worth trying. I have hope again.

Larry wakes up as the doctor inserts large needles into his neck, just in case he needs dialysis. He tells me that it’s OK, if he doesn’t make it, for me to fall in love with someone else. That he wants me to be happy. I don’t tell him how scared those words make me feel.

I follow the ambulance, my daughter in the passenger seat beside me. We’re anxious. Trying to keep up. I run a red light.

Emergency is hell. Larry has had nothing to eat or drink for three days. Now that he’s awake, he’s desperately thirsty. But he’s not allowed even a swallow of water. The best the nurse is willing to do is give him a damp sponge on a stick – a moisture lollipop – to put in his mouth. But the nurse is run off his feet, trying to help the addict in the next bed. Finally my daughter loses it – demands attention for her stepfather – I’m too much in shock to do it myself.

Teams of doctors come down into Emergency to examine Larry. Finally, they move him to the ICU. There’s a haematologist in charge of the unit.

My sister arrives. It feels so good, that shoulder to cry on. Then Larry’s family starts to dribble in. Naturally, they all want to see him. But patients are only allowed two visitors at a time in ICU. I hate to give up my place to one of them. All I want is to spend every possible minute with my husband.

Things get worse. I walk into his room one morning. Larry is in what looks like a straightjacket, screaming as a male nurse is trying to ram a catheter into him. Jenny assures me it’s necessary and leads me back to the waiting area, but that image remains etched in my mind. The procedure fails.

Larry’s kidneys struggle. He’s barely with us. I’m trying to stay strong for him, but it’s hard.
A young urologist comes to see Larry. He’s got wires and cameras, and he’s confident that he can insert a catheter into Larry’s bladder. Only he can’t, and in the process of trying he rips Larry’s insides, causing him intense pain. My husband is praying to God for help. I can’t imagine the agony he’s in.

Finally the urologist gives up. Larry’s scrotum and penis are a dark red colour, swollen to fifteen times their normal size. He’s barely conscious. I sign the consent for them to attempt the procedure in the OR. Then we wait.

I sit holding Larry’s hand before they take him away, but I’m not sure he knows I’m there. After he’s gone, all of us stress, watching the clock, hoping that he lives through the surgery. I could have screamed.

After two hours, Dr. Mah finds us. He’s got a catheter in. Larry’s alive. Then we wait for him to come down out of Recovery.

Larry said afterwards that his nightmare began with the pain caused by the wires and cameras. It continued in a miserable ward room, full of noise but not sleep, with pain followed by more pain as he undergoes bladder irrigation to clear the blood clots blocking his catheter. Eventually it morphs into a bad dream.

His hospital stay and bleeding drag on for five more weeks. We finally take him home. His memories of that time fade. They don’t return for ten years, and only briefly, when he finds himself in the ICU again, bleeding internally, and praying, following an appendectomy. The recurrence fourteen months later, when he bled again following surgery to fix a hernia, was just a hiccup.

But my nightmare has persisted. Images of his pain are burned into my mind. They still haunt me at night, still resurface in my daydreams. The fear has never left me; the worry that he could bleed again, the understanding that it could take him from me.

I listen for him, even now. The click he makes when he walks the floors of our home; the thud when he falls.

Old age did not come creeping up on my boy. It came on him quickly, first affecting his brain, then taking his muscle mass. He has the equivalent of nighttime Alzheimer’s. We leave two lights on for him when we go to bed, and leave our bedroom door open, but it makes no difference. As soon as he senses that we are getting ready to turn in, he gets nervous.

Sometimes he can control it. He’s asleep in his bed when we wake up, eyes closed, tongue stuck out between his teeth, peaceful. Those are the best mornings. When he hasn’t walked.

The crying nights are the worst. I get out of bed to comfort him. Often Pippin doesn’t know me or that I am there. On those nights I hold him against me, stroke his head, say soothing things. Sometimes I carry him upstairs and sleep there with him. He seems to like the room he occasionally shares with his sitter. Other times he’ll settle and fall asleep in his own bed. But there are nights when he just walks and walks. We lie awake listening for a minute or two, hoping he’ll stop. Then I get up.

If Pippin has a string of restless nights, getting up to be with him, to calm him, is hard. I go through days when it feels like I have severe jet lag. But it doesn’t matter. He’s my special boy.

Eventually we get too tired. I find myself sleeping through the clicking. Other times I hear him and lie awake listening, without getting up, hoping he will settle. If I fall back asleep before he does, I feel guilty the next day.

We’ve tried to help him with medication. Gabapentin, Melatonin, Clomicalm. It’s supposed to calm him, make him sleep. And once we get the dosage right, the drugs work well for days or weeks at a time. At least he no longer cries in the night.

But then his muscle mass begins to diminish, followed by his hearing, then his eyesight.
​
Pippin starts to walk at night again. Sometimes in the early morning, other times in the middle of the night. We hear the clicking, the thuds when he falls. I get up to calm him. Some nights he’ll stop walking and let me stroke him. I tell him what a good boy he it, that everything is OK. If we connect, he’ll lie down near me, close his eyes and be still. Other nights, he’ll walk himself into exhaustion.

We first met Pippin when he was just a few weeks old. He was the little boy with the purple collar, his ears and tail still down, his eyes recently opened. He came home with us four weeks later, with a long list of instructions from his breeder, a favourite toy, a piece of his mother’s blanket.

Pip started to cry, then threw up on the drive home, so my wife took him out of his crate and cuddled him on her lap. What else could a mother do? Our boy was so cute, so precious.

For the first few months, as per our instructions, we put Pip to bed at nine, first giving him two tablespoons of Greek yogurt, then settling him in his crate with a hot water bottle, his toy and the scrap of blanket we’d been given.

We’d made a sleeping area and playpen for Pip in the hall outside our family room, using a baby gate and the glass door at the entrance to the room to create a small enclosure. At night and when we were out during the day, we’d put his crate in it, leaving the crate door open, and place newspaper on the exposed tile floor.

When Pip went to bed, we’d turn the television’s volume way down to avoid disturbing his rest. It didn’t work. Within thirty minutes he’d be awake, standing on his back legs, tapping at the glass with his front paws, asking to be with us. How could we resist?

For the first few months, until he’d had all his vaccinations, I’d carry him under my jacket when we went for walks. We’d give him enough grass and sniff time to take care of business, while keeping his contact with other dogs to a minimum. It was January, damp and cold where we lived in the Lower Mainland. My boy and I snuggled. We bonded.

At puppy training, Pippin was too clever to learn. Treats were used to teach pups the basics, from walking on a leash to coming when called. Only Pip would typically find the people with the best treats, and gravitate toward them. On more than once occasion, it wasn’t us. He had an independent streak, even then.

Pippin wasn’t a dog who liked to play. He had his favourite squeaky toys – first a rubber black cat that he’d sometimes run around the family room with, then a plastic green hippo with a deep squeak that he loved. Playtime was usually brief and, with one exception, always indoors. Our boy neither fetched, nor ran after thrown balls, outdoors. He only played with one friend – Dasher – chasing after him through the park.

But he seemed happy. Pippin loved strolling down the beach and dipping his feet in the ocean. He liked walking in the park, and scoring biscuits from his people friends.

When I came home in 2013 after spending six weeks in hospital with internal bleeding, there was nothing Pip liked more than lying on a chaise longue with me soaking up the May sun. We’d nap for hours at a time, happy together.

Our boy had his quirks, from periodically gnawing holes in our wallboard, to burying his dental chew in plain sight. He’d find the perfect place to hide his chewy – on the cushion of his favourite chair or in the corner of a room – then use his nose to push imaginary dirt over it until he deemed it to be sufficiently covered. Pippin was happiest when he snuck a chewy outside to cover with real dirt in the garden. He’d come back in with a satisfied look on his face and his nose covered in earth. My contented boy.

We assumed that his holes in the wall were fear related, caused by the racoons that made nocturnal visits to our garden pond. Pip went ballistic when they came.  He wouldn’t settle until I’d scared the racoons away, told him they were gone, and let him look through the patio door window to verify that for himself.

That assumption seemed logical, since Pip never made wall holes after we moved from B.C. to Ontario. He settled well in our new open-concept home. Maybe it was because he had the run of the place at night, rather than being confined to the family room. Maybe it was the absence of racoons. Perhaps it was because our bedroom is on the ground floor, near his favourite chair, and he knew we were close by.

After our move, we found new places to walk. He loved strolling along the Niagara River with us, stopping at every bench along the way to demand a treat. The line of trees beside the soccer fields was a favourite haunt. I can still picture him in the daffodils along the Niagara Parkway, and running though the fall leaves on the Common. My white Westie.

But it didn’t last. Pippin started walking the floors at night. He’d cry. We tried leaving lights on for him – my boy had become afraid of the dark – we left our bedroom door open. We moved his blanket and bed into our bedroom. It helped.

Then things progressed. Pippin’s back legs started to weaken. I built ramps to help him get down onto our deck and into the garage. Then he lost his hearing. One of his back legs would not stay under him. His eyesight dimmed. At night I’d hear the clicking of his nails, the thuds when he fell. It was time to let him go, to help him die. But it was so hard.

Our boy became increasingly reluctant to get up in the morning.

We tried to help, took Pippin to the clinic, got liquid Tylenol to ease his joint pain. It worked for a few weeks, until the side effects forced us to stop using it.

I was awake the night he fell down the basement stairs. The crash brought instant guilt. I jumped out of bed and ran to the landing, angry at myself for not going to his aid sooner. Pippin was on his feet, dazed, peering down the remaining stairs into the basement. I carried him back upstairs, put him down gently on the kitchen rug and stayed with him for the rest of the night.
Pippin seemed OK in the morning. A bit stiff, but otherwise his usual self.

We started blocking the basement stairs at night. If he started walking, I’d wait a minute, then, if he hadn’t settled, I’d get up and sit with him. He’d usually go back to sleep, or try to. But only if I stayed with him until morning. Pippin didn’t like the night.

In his last week, Pippin’s anxiety and pain got the better of him. He’d always been stoic, but he could not hide his nighttime fears nor, lately, his joint pain. We made an appointment to provide him medical assistance in dying. It seemed like the right thing to do. Yet, our remaining time with Pip was surreal. We loved him. He was so much a part of us. How could we let him go?

Pippin was only just coping. One night he started walking at 2:30 in the morning. I listened, heard him fall, got out of bed to be with him. It took me several minutes to calm him. I stroked his head, scratched his back and spoke to him, although he probably couldn’t hear me. Finally he settled beside me on the kitchen rug. He picked his head up and looked toward me every few minutes, or he may have been looking at his back legs – he might have been in pain. It took him a long time to sleep. I stayed beside him till morning, then got out of my chair to make my breakfast. Pippin got up with me, and walked over to the cupboard where his food was, letting me know he was hungry.

My boy had a wonderful appetite in the last few months of his life. Pippin often asked to be fed when I got up in the morning. That was first breakfast. He’d often have second breakfast when he got back from his morning walk, followed by dinner after his afternoon walk, and a treat-stuffed Kong when we were sitting down to our own meal.

But Pippin’s world had become so diminished. Our little West Highland terrier, who had romped through parks with us just a year before, now often had trouble walking more than a block down the street and back. Some days it was all he could do to walk across the street. Occasionally he seemed lost.

On the day of his MAID appointment, Pippin had a bad morning. He didn’t want to get up, and he bared his teeth at me when I tried to help him. We took our time, stroked him, encouraged him. Finally he made it to his feet. His walk was brief, a bladder emptying pee in the grass immediately adjacent to the driveway, then down the sidewalk beside our house, across the street, a poo in the grass there, then back home, up his ramp and into the house. He seemed disorientated.

When the time came to bring him to the vet, Pippin wanted to repeat his morning walk. I took him, but when we crossed the street it was clear that he did not know where he was or why he was there.

My wife sat in the backseat with him on the way to his appointment. It felt unbelievable and tragic that we were making this drive, even if it was for him and we knew it was right. Neither of us can contemplate life without him.

We repeat our usual routine when we arrive. I lift Pip out of the car, put him on the ground and ask him if he needs a panic pee. The two of us march down the sidewalk to the grass boulevard adjacent to the road. He has the poop that he’d wanted to do before we left home. It struck me as we walked back to the vet and I dumped the poo bag in the trash that it would be his last one.

Pip starts to tremble as we approach the door to the clinic. It’s something he’s done on past visits, and I do what I always do: pick him up in my arms, snuggle him to my chest, and carry him through the door, telling him he’s a good boy, that it will be OK. Only I know it won’t. Nothing will ever be the same.

I get down on the floor with him after we’re in the examining room, scratching his ears, stoking him, talking to him. That’s where I am when he’s given a sedative to calm him, when he gets an anesthetic to ensure he will not feel anything at the end, when the vet injects the drug that will stop his heart, when she says he’s gone, when his skin starts to turn cold to the touch. He was so perfect, so special. Our Pippin.

My wife is down on the floor with us now, sobs wracking her body. Her rock, her always there friend, is gone. I continue to stroke my boy, my Pippin, my grief stuck high in my throat. He still looks perfect.

It takes several minutes before we’re able to leave the room. I put his leash down beside him. Say goodbye. It’s almost impossible to go without him, but we must. With tears streaming down my wife’s face and me choked up, we walk out of the vet’s office, get back in the car and drive home.
The house feels so empty.

We leave Pippin’s bed in its usual place. I clean his bowls and put them back down where they normally go on the floor. We leave our bedroom door open for him that night when we go to bed. His body has died, but not his spirit, not the force, the energy that made Pip special, that made us love him like a child.

I listen for him, hear the click of his nails on the hardwood.

He is gone, but not gone. Our memories of him are vivid, his essence lingers.

I listen for him, even now.

​It was in the attic room, in the back of a cupboard, out of sight, forgotten, dusty. A black leather suitcase with tan leather trim and straps. There were no Post-it notes affixed to the case – no one had seen it, or no one wanted it. Jack wrote his name on a note and stuck in on the case. For good measure, he also staked his claim to the old desk sitting in the corner. Then he took a moment to look around. He wondered briefly what his grandfather, Pop, had done up there when he was alive.
 
Her grandchildren and children were gathered at Jack’s grandmother’s house to go through her things. Each armed with a pad of Post-it notes and a pen. The rules had been explained. They could choose one small item, something with no price tag on it, as a memento. If they wanted a more valuable item, they had to pay the sticker price. Names would be drawn – from an old, faded garden hat that his gran had loved – should more than one of them want the same thing. The proceeds from the ‘sale’ would go to the estate, and ultimately the beneficiaries of Gran’s will.
 
Jack didn’t know why he put his name on the case and the desk. The concept seemed morbid to him. Scavengers wandering through the house, sniffing around, pawing through her things. Feeling they had to take something, to show they’d loved and would remember her, but thinking that it was all just worthless stuff. It didn’t fit their décor.
 
He took the suitcase home. It was heavy, but he didn’t look inside – he was late for his run. The need to dash overcame what little curiosity he had about the case’s contents. Jack put it in his basement storage locker on his way out the door.
 
When he got back from his run, head cleared, pores cleansed, feeling good, he took two minutes to arrange for the desk to be collected and put in storage, checked his phone for texts, answered three of them naked, then stepped into the shower. By the time he was soaped, rinsed and dried, he’d forgotten about the case.
 
Jack found it again 10 years later, when he moved to a trendier part of town. The movers had left the case in his bedroom. He picked it up to carry to the storage cupboard in his new place. It seemed heavier to him, somehow.
 
That night, he dreamed about the case. He sensed there was something inside it, wanting to get out. In his dream, when he finally opened the case, he couldn’t make out the contents. They were fuzzy, intangible.
 
When he woke, the dream still with him, Jack felt unsettled. He couldn’t find his groove. The radio newscast didn’t register. His morning coffee made him edgy. Finally he took the case out of the cupboard, brought it into his dining room, and hoisted it on the table.
 
Jack opened the case. He was surprised by the contents, which he took out of the case and set on the table one-by-one: A black-and-white framed photo of a man in uniform, with aviators’ wings on his chest; a photo of the same man, in a suit and hat, outside of a church in Ireland, one of him with a young woman, in Montreal; two newspaper clippings about a RCAF lieutenant from Como, Quebec – his uncle Francis – one saying he had received the distinguished flying cross, the other that he had been killed in action over the English Channel; two framed citations from King George VI commending the lieutenant; and the DCF itself.
 
Jack stopped looking in the case when his phone played music at him. He put the medal down on the table, and went into the kitchen to check his messages, closing the dining room doors behind him.
 
That night, Jack dreamed of his uncle again. He saw his father and uncle, as young men, running a woman’s bra and panties up a flag pole. Then he saw his uncle, in his plane, pushing the stick forward and diving straight down toward a ship on the water, his thumb poised over the bomb-release button. Jack became the man in the plane, gripped in fear, watching flame erupt from the antiaircraft guns, sensing the shells coming at him, wanting desperately to pull the stick back and climb, but holding tight into the dive.
 
Jack awoke as the plane burst into flames. He only had a momentary sense of the heat that engulfed the cockpit, the pain of sizzling flesh, the plane falling. The last thing he saw, from outside the cockpit, just before he returned to the reality of his bed, was a woman’s bra and panties on a flag pole, painted onto the plane’s fuselage.
 
The next morning, the dream still fresh in his mind, Jack phoned his surviving aunt. He arranged to visit her in Como over the weekend, saying he wanted to ask her about the case, about his father and his uncle.
 
He nearly cancelled at the last minute. There was a text from a woman he liked, asking if he wanted to go for a walk on Mount Royal, then lunch. Jack debated calling his aunt, but didn’t want to face that kind of conversation, her disappointment. He would have sent a text, or even an e-mail, but she had neither smartphone nor computer. So he texted the woman friend back that he couldn’t make it.
 
His aunt had fixed lunch for him. They started with a glass of wine in the sunroom, then had a second at the table with their food. Jack heard about the bra and panty incident, about the fun they had had that day, in the time between the wars, in the flapper days, that frantic decade before the crash, when young people lived for the moment. He heard that his uncle enlisted in ’39, was posted to an airfield in Manitoba to train British and Canadian pilots, but kept pushing to be sent to France, to the action, the fight.
 
Jack’s Dad could not go. He’d had an adenoid removed as a child. There had been a trans-Atlantic crossing to have the procedure done in England. His aunt had gone with him, held his hand before he went into the operating theatre. He’d made her seasick on the return voyage, by biting the tops off chocolate-covered marshmallow biscuits, in rough seas.
 
The procedure left Jack’s father deaf in one ear. Declared unfit to fight, he stayed home, went to university, fell in love, married, got polio, spent months in hospital with his legs wrapped in wet flannel, had six children, enjoyed horses, and lived reasonably happily. Not so the uncle. He was killed at 22, as Jack knew from the contents of the case. But he had not known how much fun Francis had been, how people smiled when they were with him.
 
Jack also hadn’t known about the wait, the months of hope and despair his grandparents experienced after the first telegram arrived. The one that said his uncle was missing in action, shot down over the Channel. And he’d never been told about the grief that followed five months later when the second cable arrived, saying Francis had been killed. By the time Jack was born, it had faded, like the fall leaves. Still there, but muted.
 
Pop had retreated to his attic room the day the second telegram arrived, Jack’s aunt told him. He’d taken the suitcase out of the cupboard, put it beside the desk. After an hour, he’d gone to Francis’s room, then to every room in the house, looking for his son. When he found something that said ‘this is who Francis was, this is what my son did,’ Pop brought it up to the attic, put it on the desk. He didn’t cry, he hid his grief and himself behind the pile of things he’d collected. When he was finally ready, when he could cope, he put the things in the case, closed it, and went downstairs.
 
Driving back to the city, Jack remembered Pop. Him reading aloud to his grandchildren from one of the two children’s books he kept in the den for that purpose; him picking Jack and his siblings up from school in the old Studebaker; him giving each of them a dime to buy candy.
 
Jack was remembering Pop’s death when his phone played its music. He reached for it on the passenger seat beside him, glanced down at the text.
 
His sister found the case and its contents on the table when she was going through Jack’s apartment, after his funeral. She saw nothing of value, only an old case and a collection of stuff that she sifted through quickly. She repacked the case, closed it, put it in her car, then storage.
 
Her aunt died the next year, her memories lost, the case forgotten.
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