first day of the rest of my internet life.

alright. online blog. i never thought it would come to this.
however, i feel like since i live so far away from my friends, this might be a good way for people to see what my life is like over here in rural PEI.
I started working on a new zine before christmas. Here's what I have so far... it's sort of a brief synopsis of where I am so far:



December 23rd, 2009. Two days before Christmas. A lot’s changed in the past year.

Last Christmas was very surreal. Thrown into the festivities of “the holidays” a month after my Dad died. We went through the motions, but no one was happy.

My Dad had cancer. Throat cancer. This was his third bout of it in 5 years. He’d been through a lot. Radiation, operations, testing, more testing, and after the second time it hit him he was left without a voice box. He had a tube in his throat to breathe through, he could talk a little with a prosthesis, but he didn’t use it much. He tried so hard to stay positive, just glad he was alive, but it was hard for him. It was hard for all of us. Mom was left to take care of him for those last few years. It took all her time, but she never complained. She was just glad to still have him.

Before his final diagnosis, he had noticed he had trouble swallowing. His throat hadn’t healed right, and he had to be fed through a tube in his nose. Back and forth from Halifax for doctor’s appointments, they were sure it wasn’t cancer again. He went back in for some tissue tests, and they happened to take some extra samples. It was cancer. It had been there for a while, unnoticed by the doctors. They did radiation for the second time (which they normally wouldn’t do, because skin tissue is so heavily damaged after one treatment that it would be dangerous for a second, even years later).

After all that, it wasn’t even the cancer that killed him.

He had just gotten home from a doctor’s appointment, excited for the first time in a long time that he had actually received some good news: They thought they got it all.

The week before he’d had a blood vessel burst in his neck, because his tissue was so damaged, and had spent the last week in the hospital. Now he was finally home again. Dad always hated the hospital. “It’s dirty”, mom would say. “They don’t even clean him up.”

The last time he’d been in the hospital in Halifax, I was still living there. I’d go in every day after work and sit with him, get him the newspaper, tell him about work, news, things I’d read about. I’d clean him up and put socks on him (his feet were always freezing). I never said anything real. I was always afraid to tell him how I was feeling. I think we all were. Pretending.

That night after the Doctor’s, Dad was happy. Hopeful. Sometime in the night, he got up, bleeding everywhere from his neck. Mom woke up, and he was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. Bleeding and panicked. He was rushed to the hospital. They didn’t even think he’d make it there.

I was still living in Halifax at the time. My life there had just finished completely falling apart and I was trying my best to decifer what was left. My boyfriend of three years had cheated on me, our picturesque apartment was now empty, I was back living in a punkhouse kids I had just met. They were amazing. Kyle would always have talks with me and tell me that I was making a bad decision (I was always making bad decisions), Travis was always inventing things, and coming up with crazy schemes, Laurie was always being the most productive person ever. Building things, working, being social. And Aaron was always good for a laugh.

I had just started dating a very nice boy from Montreal. Cud. He had just hitchhiked down to visit me. I had just started a new job at a shitty call center, after not working and busking, begging, and bribing my way through a few months of no job. I think I’d been working there a week. Work felt like kindergarten.

I was at work when I got the call. It was 10AM. It was my brother. My dad was in the hospital. He wouldn’t make it, probably not even long enough for me to drive the 5 hours to PEI. I left work, picked up Cud at my house, asked Kyle to take care of Piston for a few days, and drove home.

When we got to the hospital, Dad was still alive. He was bleeding to death. A main artery had burst in his neck from the radiation. It wouldn’t clot. That was it. My mom, my aunt Pauline, Cud, my brother and I were all there in his room. Waiting. It was a horrible feeling, to wait for someone you love to die. We kept thinking “oh, this is it. He’s goanna go now.” His breathing would get shallow and we’d all wait. The first few hours we were all there. Talking to him. He was sedated, so he wouldn’t move around. But they said he could hear us. We sat around, telling stories about funny times we’d had, reminiscing about before the cancer. When my brother and I were little kids. How bad we’d been. It was really nice. I think it was good for him and us. It was hard to see him like that, and remembering him before seemed more important than ever in that moment.

Once night hit, we started taking turns sitting with him. At first one person would leave for a half hour, and the rest would stay. That way we could get food, coffee, go to the washroom. And Dad just kept hanging on. The next day came and went, and we were all still there, someone always holding his hand. By the third day, we were all exhausted.

C ud had never met any of my family before this. We’d only been dating a few weeks. But he was amazing. Staying up with me, getting us coffees, being supportive. I feel like he really got to know my Dad, even though he was never conscious, through the stories we told, and he saw a side of my mother that he would most people would probably never see.

After the third day, we starting trying to sleep. We would sit in shifts of two. Mom and Pauline would stay with Dad, Cud and I would squeeze onto the tiny couch in the family room and try to sleep. After a couple of hours, we’d switch. I don’t know if any of us really slept. But we tried.

By the fourth day, he was still alive. A lot of the blood had clotted outside of his body, pools in his neck, and nose, and it was coming out much slower now. They couldn’t give him any fluids or blood the whole time, because it would just make the bleeding worse. We all felt horrible about it. His being hungry and dehydrated and sedated and alone inside his own head. But there was nothing we could do.

They had given us a cot in his room, so we could sleep closer to him. That’s where I was when he started to go. November 16th. I got up and held his hand. It was all very surreal. He just sort of went grey. That’s how we knew it was close. And after a few minutes, that was it. He took a breath. And didn’t take another.

The funeral, the wake, the food, the people, it was all a blur.

Next thing you know, it was Christmas. Dad’s favorite holiday. Cud was there with my brother, my mom, and i. Still. Through it all. I’ve never seen anyone more selfless. Christmas sucked, and I fell in love.

My mom wanted me to move back to PEI. Cud decided to move here as well from Montreal, feeling sick of the city life. We bought a tiny little house with some help from my mom, and he moved in in December. I went on tour for a week, packed up my life in Halifax, and got here in January.

That was a year ago. Now it’s Christmas. Again. And my whole life is completely different than in was last November. But, Christmas still sucks. It’ll never be the same.


They says time heals. But I don’t think that’s true. I think time just means you cry more alone, when no one’s watching. I still cry all the time about Dad. Mostly driving. I’m sure it’s not the safest time, but it’s when I think about him the most.

Dad loved to drive. He’d drive anywhere if someone would go with him. After he lost his voice, I’d come home and visit, and dad and I would drive around. He had this old car. A Jetta, diesel. It was so loud that you couldn’t talk over the rumble of the engine. But it didn’t matter, dad wouldn’t talk anyways. He’d just drive around town, pointing out what had changed, how is had grown in some ways, and gotten smaller in others. A new house, a new real estate scheme, an abandoned building. We’d go out to the woods, in Cardigan. The 60 acres he had given me just after he had gotten sick the second time. He’d point out all the property lines, show me little things about the forest I never would have known otherwise. He’d show me where he would build a house there, and I’d talk about how I was going to do it, soon, in the summer. He was so excited about the idea of it all. Me moving back home to the Island, building a house on his land, something he had talked about doing but never done. Excited that I’d be nearby. He hated when I would leave after a visit. I would say goodbye to him, trying to act like I would see him again, no worries. And he’d well up every time. I’d want to tell him I loved him, but I didn’t want him thinking that this was a real goodbye, not a “see you later”. I’d leave, he’d cry, I’d cry. But we never talked about it.

There were so many things I really thought he’d be here for. Nine months after he died we did build a house on the land, Cud and I. I thought about him every day. How excited he would have been. How he would have been out there, helping us, working 12 hour days like we were if he could. If he hadn’t been sick. But he just missed it, just barely. I never even got to move back to the Island before he died. Never got to spend quality time with him. I was always putting off moving back while he was sick. But two months later, there I was, living in my hometown again.

Now I work at the rink here. I drive the Zamboni and make the ice.

My first week of work, I noticed an old whiteboard in the Zamboni room office. It had my name on it. “Sam. W.”. I’m the only Sam W. in Georgetown, but I didn’t write it, and I’d never been in the office before I started working there. The whiteboard came from my dad. He’d given it to the rink when I was a little girl. It was like some weird kind of fate or something. That I’d be working there, 20 years later. Now I see it everyday, and it’s like having a little piece of Dad with me.