Rose's Cantina

Welcome guests, friends, relatives, to this memorial for Jennette, or Jan, or Jen. She went by many names over the years, and a lot of us knew her as a different Jennette or Jan or Jen. She was like a rainbow in many ways. We all saw different colours but we all felt the same way when we were with her. Warm and loved and cared for. She lived her life as if she were in a Maya Angelou poem. She tried to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Her mission in life was not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style. And as Gessie will tell you later, she embraced that style with gusto. Jennette or Jan or Jen, didn’t talk much. She surrounded herself with extroverts who sucked up all the air in the room. Fun people, smart people. She once told me she was first attracted to Roger because he introduced her to so many interesting people, at the press club, in bars and bistros. That’s what she missed abou...

Embed from Getty Images Like many women my age, I'm part of the sandwich generation, an army of clear-eyed women who are caregivers at both ends. By day, I've been looking after little Squishy, my granddaughter who is nearly two. On nights and weekends, I've been caring for Jennette, the cancer patient. Now that Jennette's gone, I'm feeling a little lighter, like an open-faced sandwich missing the top part of the bread. Of course, there is still much work to do in the short-term. I have a funeral to plan, music and pictures to archive, and as her executor, I have many letters to write and meetings to attend. Still, I've got a lot more free time now that her place is cleared out, and Sundays and evenings aren't spent eating fast food and drinking wine to calm the heck down. Last night, I looked at my PVR and realized that it's nearly full. I must have two months worth of Colbert and old movies to watch. Nope, too much stress. Colbert is already...

My son has been very upset about the passing of Jennette. He saw her on Christmas Day, frail, a whisper of a human being with her head taped up like a mummy. He saw her, but he couldn't see her. By that time, the oral cancer had enveloped her like a thermal blanket. Even I, the person who had spent the most time with her, could only see a glimmer of my friend peeking out of her rheumy eyes. Stef was a little freaked, encountering a person who looked vaguely like Jennette who was being consumed by an alien. His normal little auntie blew us off on Christmas Day; she couldn't talk much, didn't want to talk much. "I don't understand it, mum," he told me after a few drinks on his birthday. "I couldn't live like that. If I was sick like that I'd want to end it all." She had had that discussion with her friend Gudrun who was the only one to raise the subject when not in front of medical professionals. Jennette had been given the spe...

On Friday, Scott finished up moving Jennette from her perch at the Hunt Club Manor. That move took us roughly 10 hours, and was a lot easier than the last two times we moved her. The first move was the most challenging. You see, she might have been all of 4 foot 9, but she lived like four people: her mother, who was a keen collector of jewelry and Royal Doulton; her father who was a spirited collector of paper and coins; Roger who was a curator of all things Blue and Jay; and Jennette herself who liked to keep bills, photos and newspapers until they literally disintegrated. The first move came in 2014, after Roger died. Don't get me wrong, the place was well organized, with small paths that took the couple to the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Everything was covered by a inch of ash, including the birdcage which had sat in the middle of the living room over the two years since the Cockatiel Digger died. The aftermath of Digger's death by second hand smoke at th...

Two years ago, when Jennette began her cancer journey, we made a pact. I would help her through it, and she would let me write about it, warts and all. Today's post is not for the squeamish, but if I'm to tell her story fully, it has to be accurate and truthful. And that means talking about what the doctor's call her "smoker's tumour". Nobody is forcing you to read this blog, so feel free to click the little "x" up on the right hand side of your screen.  Otherwise, welcome to my room. Here we go. Look at this beautiful face. It's the face of the person I looked after for the past two years. Tomorrow, I am going to the funeral home and I won't be able to see that face. The funeral director urged me to allow their restoration professionals to fix her up before I come in to identify Jennette's remains. I said I didn't think that was necessary. I had been with her through palliative care, and I thought I'd seen everyt...

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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses. -- John Irving I told the doctor that I wasn't that person in Jennette's life, I wasn't the one who would be hugging her, and holding her hand at the end. It's not that I was afraid to stare death in the face, it was that I, like Homer Wells in Cider House Rules, felt my time was better spent "being of use". And so I busied myself yesterday moving Jennette's remainders out of her assisted living apartment. For the past week, I've been spreading the wealth to the deserving: her coat and the brand new clothing she had bought went to Gessie. Gudrun got her collectibles, Marissa got her bedroom set, and we took the electronics and a few tables. It was unbelievable how little was left at the end of her life; as Scott says, "it's the things that fall away". The move finished, we drove to a little h...

The 5th floor of the Bruyere Residence in Ottawa is well known to paupers and princes. Impending death has a way of levelling the playing field like nothing anyone can imagine. Nobody on the 5th floor was making plans for 2018. My friend Jennette is in Room 508. It's a lovely room with a comfy hospital bed and large reclining chairs. The nurses seat her every day, looking towards the door; perhaps they hope that someone will come and see her. She isn't like my friend Viggo who died there recently. Viggo had a gaggle of kids, and his room was always filled with legacy. Jennette doesn't have much family to speak of and so it is up to friends to visit her. We do so with checkered regularity. Most of her friends are elderly, and on the bus, and with the wind chill setting record levels, it's hard for them to get around. Her elderly stepmom, Lois, is determined to come, to hold her and tell her she loves her so, but the fates haven't been kind to Lois of late. ...

On the eve of 2017, Jennette was looking forward to a new life, unencumbered by caregiving, armed with a new set of choppers the doctors said she would never have. Sure, she missed her dad terribly, as she did her husband who had been her wingman and drinking buddy for over 30 years. But now, she was set. Dad had left her a tidy sum in his will, and she had inherited all of his sunny Florida-themed white furniture. She had bought a new car, and had set herself up in a tidy little apartment on Kilborn Avenue, her little dream palace. Jennette had survived her own personal war. In her late middle age, she worked two jobs because Roger was too sick to work anymore (largely due to a rum and Camels habit that would have put Hemingway to shame). Soon after she retired from her job as an executive assistant for Canada's electronic spy agency, she found herself out of both jobs -- her other job in a clothing store had been stolen away when retail went bust -- and so she became...

In recent months, I've been helping to support my good friend Jennette through the end of life process, as she watched her father Jim transition to his next life after a lengthy battle with heart disease and cancer. It's been a tough road for Jennette who lost her husband Roger just two years ago, also in the month of May. She's also battled oral cancer, and has had to live with disfigurement to her face, and mouth. She's a tough cookie, our Jennette. She faced down the doctors who wanted her to have radiation which would have meant further disfigurement and the loss of her entire set of teeth. They wanted to do radiation to be absolutely sure the cancer would not return but, as they say, the cure would have been worse than the cancer, so she passed on it. Jennette and I have been friends for more than 30 years. She and Roger helped me through the debilitating loss of both my own mother, and my marriage. I lost both within a year and it nearly killed me. L...

Embed from Getty Images The old man was looking forward to his daily visit from his daughter and his lady friend. At 2 p.m., the orderlies bathed and catheterized him, then put him in his diaper. For the first hour or so, he zoomed in and out of consciousness, grateful for the morphine, but frustrated that it basically put him to sleep. His loved ones sat and chatted during these frequent episodes; it's what to be expected in end of days. Suddenly, he sat up. "Oh no, I went again," he cried. Something had gone wrong with his catheter, it sprang a leak. At the same time, he soiled himself unable to control his bowels thanks to the tumour that got him into this mess in the first place. His daughter rang for a nurse. Nobody came. She rang again, and finally went to the nursing station. "My dad needs to be changed," she said. The nurse just looked at her. "He'll have to wait until shift change," she said. "But that'...

Embed from Getty Images The old man celebrated his birthday last week with two mouthfuls of a cupcake, then slid back into oblivion. He had made it to 88, accepting congratulations of staff and family in the hospital. As I sat in my chair, I wondered if it had been worth it. Seeing him here in diapers, catheterized, his leg swollen to twice its size, his once barreled chest sunken, his arms the size of breadsticks, we all wondered when it would end, if it would end badly. We certainly knew this was not the ending of his choosing. The man had been a Master of the Universe, a wealthy man who had been able to retire in his 50s and spend two decades moving back and forth from his posh condo in Ottawa to his posh condo in Florida. There had been cruises, sumptuous dinners out, fine clothes and the latest electronics. The wife had died years ago, but the man was fortunate to find a new beauty, a good solid woman who didn't want him for his money, just his compan...

Embed from Getty Images Last week, I received a frantic call from Jennette. "The radiologist called," she said. "He wants me to come back in." Just a week before, Jennette had received a clean bill of health, a thumbs up from both her surgeon and the radiation oncologist who both assured her that radiation wasn't required as a safety net against the return of her oral cancer which had already robbed her of part of her jaw and most of her bottom teeth. I couldn't believe it. First they give us hope, then they take it away. We returned to the Ottawa Hospital for a meeting with the radiologist who looked very sombre, almost grim. "I know I told you that you wouldn't need radiation," he began. "We had a meeting with your surgeon and the pathologist, looked over your charts at our meeting... "And something just didn't sit well with me." The cancer was too close to edge, is a simple way to say it. The surgeon c...

  Maybe it's because I lost my dad as a little kid. Maybe it's because I lost nearly my entire family by the time I was 16. Maybe it's because I was little Orphan Black before I was middle-aged. In any event, for most of my life, I've been obsessed with the rituals of death and dying. I've never been able to make sense of it. I feared it. I wondered how people survive under the ground without a coat in the winter. The worms go in/The worms go out/ The worms play pinochle on your snout. In any event, I've struggled determining how best to play out the end game. Particularly, I've wondered, why do people spend so much damned money on funerals? When my beloved mother died, she had saved $15,000, most of which went to put her withered butt in the ground after an excruciating and exhausting illness. She never got to spend that money on a Caribbean cruise or a nice wardrobe. The money got pocketed by the nice folks at Butler's Funeral Home wh...