Like I Would
1
Now, seven long years later, I was returning to Thunder Bay for the first time. I’d kept in touch with Marc the first year or two out of school, hardly. It had been too painful to even hear about how he and Angie were doing.
I’d done a little bit of everything since leaving Thunder Bay just weeks after graduation. From helping to build a school in Tanzania, to helping teach ESL in Spain for a year, some freelance articles here and there throughout all the other ventures. I’d dropped out of my Journalism program after two years, feeling too restrained stuck in my small dorm room on campus. That’s when I’d caught a flight across the ocean and started working over there. I’d actually been doing modeling for the past two years – I’d been walking from my flat for some coffee and had been approached and handed a business card. On a whim I called, and it had taken off from there – I was never really a ‘pretty’ girl growing up, so to have been approached seemed surreal. Let alone to have seen my face on and in magazines in London and Paris afterward.
I wouldn’t even be back, if I hadn’t got the worst news of my life. I’d been out on a shoot in South Africa, and decided that after the four days of work I’d take a three-day mini-vacation, cell and Wi-fi free, to get a handle on how crazy things had become. Little had I known that my three days of being without a cell phone would cost me more than I could ever imagine. My dad had tried to phone me, several times, and I hadn’t gotten so much as a voicemail. Worse than that I was whisked off to another shoot in Milan as soon as my “vacation” was up, and spent another week being too busy to breath let alone get my always-unreliable cell phone to work in another country.
So by the time I finally arrived home in London I was exhausted, and when I began listening to the voicemails I’d received felt as if my entire world was crashing down around me. He was sick – he’d waited and waited to go to a doctor and had instead collapsed at home, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. They determined he had cancer, and found out his cancer was stage four and terminal. He didn’t have much time left, and he wanted me to come home.
That was all it took. In a matter of a day and a half I’d managed to cancel my upcoming jobs indefinitely, pack a bag, clean and lock up my house and find a flight back to Canada. I phoned him during my layover in Toronto, the panic too much to handle when they said he’d ben rushed into ICU and I couldn’t speak to him. I broke down in the middle of the airport, and hardly pulled myself together long enough to make my flight to Thunder Bay.
I got to the hospital, demanded they let me see my dad, but the look on the nurse’s face told me everything I’d never wanted to hear. She tried to explain that the pneumonia he’d contracted due to his weakened immune system had been too complex for his body to handle, that it really was better he was no longer suffering, and all it did was break me down and make me angry. How could she say he was better off? How could she tell me that when I didn’t even get to see him? When I didn’t have the chance to talk to him or even have the opportunity to say some sort of goodbye?
So after the longest evening of my entire life they sent me home, insisting that I should meet with a grief counselor tomorrow and start going over funeral arrangements, etc. Not that I should have time to understand and come to terms emotionally with his death, just that I should start dealing with the practicalities. That hurt nearly as much as knowing he was gone.
I somehow managed to get a rental car, and make my way out to the house I’d grown up in. It was small, a little bungalow on an acreage just outside the limits – where we had a driveway rather than a street – and turned in to park. My entire body was shaking, unable to wrap my head around the concept that when I went up to the door he wouldn’t be there to meet me. Wouldn’t wrap me up in a hug and ask what latest adventure I’d been on. There wouldn’t be the usual smell of coffee, or a box of store-bought cookies on the counter – his weakness. It brought on an onslaught of tears like I’d never before experienced. He was the only family I had, and now he was gone. I’d been alone in England, and over seas and everywhere else I’d been, but not like this. Never before had I been so alone that I didn’t have anyone.
And now I was.
I’d done a little bit of everything since leaving Thunder Bay just weeks after graduation. From helping to build a school in Tanzania, to helping teach ESL in Spain for a year, some freelance articles here and there throughout all the other ventures. I’d dropped out of my Journalism program after two years, feeling too restrained stuck in my small dorm room on campus. That’s when I’d caught a flight across the ocean and started working over there. I’d actually been doing modeling for the past two years – I’d been walking from my flat for some coffee and had been approached and handed a business card. On a whim I called, and it had taken off from there – I was never really a ‘pretty’ girl growing up, so to have been approached seemed surreal. Let alone to have seen my face on and in magazines in London and Paris afterward.
I wouldn’t even be back, if I hadn’t got the worst news of my life. I’d been out on a shoot in South Africa, and decided that after the four days of work I’d take a three-day mini-vacation, cell and Wi-fi free, to get a handle on how crazy things had become. Little had I known that my three days of being without a cell phone would cost me more than I could ever imagine. My dad had tried to phone me, several times, and I hadn’t gotten so much as a voicemail. Worse than that I was whisked off to another shoot in Milan as soon as my “vacation” was up, and spent another week being too busy to breath let alone get my always-unreliable cell phone to work in another country.
So by the time I finally arrived home in London I was exhausted, and when I began listening to the voicemails I’d received felt as if my entire world was crashing down around me. He was sick – he’d waited and waited to go to a doctor and had instead collapsed at home, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. They determined he had cancer, and found out his cancer was stage four and terminal. He didn’t have much time left, and he wanted me to come home.
That was all it took. In a matter of a day and a half I’d managed to cancel my upcoming jobs indefinitely, pack a bag, clean and lock up my house and find a flight back to Canada. I phoned him during my layover in Toronto, the panic too much to handle when they said he’d ben rushed into ICU and I couldn’t speak to him. I broke down in the middle of the airport, and hardly pulled myself together long enough to make my flight to Thunder Bay.
I got to the hospital, demanded they let me see my dad, but the look on the nurse’s face told me everything I’d never wanted to hear. She tried to explain that the pneumonia he’d contracted due to his weakened immune system had been too complex for his body to handle, that it really was better he was no longer suffering, and all it did was break me down and make me angry. How could she say he was better off? How could she tell me that when I didn’t even get to see him? When I didn’t have the chance to talk to him or even have the opportunity to say some sort of goodbye?
So after the longest evening of my entire life they sent me home, insisting that I should meet with a grief counselor tomorrow and start going over funeral arrangements, etc. Not that I should have time to understand and come to terms emotionally with his death, just that I should start dealing with the practicalities. That hurt nearly as much as knowing he was gone.
I somehow managed to get a rental car, and make my way out to the house I’d grown up in. It was small, a little bungalow on an acreage just outside the limits – where we had a driveway rather than a street – and turned in to park. My entire body was shaking, unable to wrap my head around the concept that when I went up to the door he wouldn’t be there to meet me. Wouldn’t wrap me up in a hug and ask what latest adventure I’d been on. There wouldn’t be the usual smell of coffee, or a box of store-bought cookies on the counter – his weakness. It brought on an onslaught of tears like I’d never before experienced. He was the only family I had, and now he was gone. I’d been alone in England, and over seas and everywhere else I’d been, but not like this. Never before had I been so alone that I didn’t have anyone.
And now I was.