Celebrating Two Lives.
Both my parents died this year, my mom in March, my dad in August. I’ve always said that this blog was first and foremost a place to record my memories and thoughts. That’s especially the case with this post. In fact, I’m not going to share it anywhere, not even on our own Facebook page. So if you’ve come across this post it’s because you’re either a loyal reader or you just accidentally came across it on the blog. And if you do, I’d appreciate one thing: please don’t send your sympathies and condolences. I know it’s the proper thing to do but it makes me uncomfortable. As much as the death of one’s parents is sad, it’s part of life. Both my parents lived very fulfilling and happy lives and, when the time came, neither suffered. They were both ready to go when they did.
Instead, this post is about sharing some memories of both my mom and my dad. It’s about celebrating their lives, not dwelling on their deaths. It’s also about some lessons learned from their passing.
My Mom (1946 – 2025)
It’s hard to imagine a cooler mother than mine. Besides Lissette, there’s nobody I’ve been closer to. She was my mom but also my friend and my inspiration. Readers know I’m a traveller, but that honestly pales next to her: she’s been in places like Togo, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, the Soloman Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Zimbabwe…in fact she’s been places that I’d probably be a bit anxious to step foot in.
I got my travel bug from her. I lived with both my mom and dad in Zambia for a couple of years when I was 8 or 9. But that’s not where I picked up the travel bug. It started when I was studying in university. She was working in Africa at the time (I was in Montreal) and while every other kid I knew was spending Christmas with their family in Montreal, Ottawa, etc I’d be flying off to Zambia or Zimbabwe to spend 3 weeks with my mom. She’d drive us across the country and we’d stay in a lodge in a National Park somewhere. One of my most pervasive memories was of doing exactly that in Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe. I remember us standing within 20 feet of two very docile white rhinos (we had just arrived at the gates of the park and the Park workers told us that every morning these two rhinos would come and see them when they started work). The same day I was cooking a steak in the fire pit next to our lodge when a huge baboon ran past. A few seconds later came a couple Park Wardens with rifles, also running.
Those were the kind of adventures I had with my mom.
The 50’s
Some might assume my mom had a privileged life to be doing all that travel. Nothing was further from the truth. My mom was born in Erlangen Germany, of a single mom (her father had died just before she was born). She had a sister who was very different and who she never got along with. Even then my mom had the travel bug. She told me of trip she took to Yugoslavia with classmates when she was 13. She had told her mom she would go and her mom let her. She almost drowned on that trip when some currents outside Pula pulled her out to sea. She recalls the man who had saved her, a 20ish dark-skinned man who saw her hands going up as she was going under.
The 60’s
My mom did some studies and work at the coroner’s office in Erlangen and that’s where she met my dad. She was 19 and he was 26, he had come to Germany to do his Masters degree in Chemistry. They fell in love and that same year they left Germany and moved to Ste. Marie de Beauce, a small town 30 minutes from Quebec City.
I was born the next year. That was 1966. Ste. Marie de Beauce was typical small-town living, a pretty place on a river where we lived on a dead-end roundabout. Our neighbours were all young (in their early to mid 20’s) and all had kids at around the same time. Right next door I had the Boutin family, they had two boys my age and it seems to me that I spent most of my time at their house. The parents would get together, have block parties, drink a lot of beer. It was small town life. My dad worked at Vachon Cakes as a food chemist (Vachon was the main employer in town and still today produces fast food cakes that show up on store shelves all over Canada). My mom was mostly a stay-at-home mom but when I got a bit older she worked part-time on the assembly line at Vachon.
The 70’s
Things weren’t going great at home. Small town life bored my mom. There had to be more. When I was 8, I remember being told that we would be moving to Zambia, in Africa. My dad (at my mother’s insistence) had applied for an international posting with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency. He would be working as a chemist and training the locals at a factory producing sunflower oil.
I remember being given English classes by our neighbour, the fantastic Mrs. Boutin. I hated it though, the whole idea of leaving Ste. Marie de Beauce and my friends saddened me.
We moved to Lusaka and settled in. I wrote a few years ago about some of my memories in Zambia. But that’s not important: the bottom line is that relocating didn’t improve the relationship between my mom and dad. A year in my dad moved out and I spent most of my time after that with my mother.
I was 9 (or 10) when I left Africa with my mom. She decided that we would live in Vancouver. Actually, she would live in Vancouver: I was sent to a private boys school on Vancouver Island. She said it something that she regretted all her life but at the time she was in her late 20’s (my mom and I had a 20 year difference) and newly separated. She didn’t know how she’d be able to cope being a single mother, plus she had to find some kind of work.
But things worked out. She got a secretarial job at the post office. I didn’t much like the private school, it felt a bit like a boot camp. I remember 7am runs along a country road being chased by Dobermans (owned by a family down the road from the school). It scared the crap out of all of us boys. I was also picked on by some of the older boys because of my accent and I remember quite a few fights. Maybe it toughened me up a bit. What I most appreciated was the nature surrounding the school and I remember time alone kayaking on Shawnigan Lake. Every few weeks or so I would take the ferry across to the mainland and visit my mother. It always felt like a holiday.
A year later my mom decided we’d move to Ottawa. It is Canada’s capital and my mom wanted an international job. She didn’t know what, but she thought her prospects would be better in Ottawa.
So I was 11, my mom 31, when we hitchhiked across the country to Ottawa. I remember rides with truckers and sleeping in apple orchards and national parks. Again, later in life my mom kicked herself for taking such risks. But the 70’s were a different time.
In Ottawa, my mom found a job as a receptionist/secretary at United Way. We lived in a suburb called Bayshore and I went to school there. Life was a lot better than in Vancouver, we had a nice townhouse and I played a lot of sports at school. I was what they call a “key latch kid” because most nights of the week my mom took accounting classes. She hoped to work her way up at United Way. It’s one of the things I always admired about my mom, she always worked hard to better herself.
The 80’s
The above was our way of life for few years. At some point she met Mauro at school. She was about 34 at the time. She started dating him and it got serious.
I was 15 – she was 35 – when we moved to a neighbourhood closer to downtown Ottawa. There were two reasons for that: I had finished primary school and the next step would be secondary school. My mom had lobbied hard to get me into Lisgar Collegiate Institute, probably the best public High School in Ottawa. She succeeded (it wasn’t easy. I was a shit student). The 2nd reason was to get a home with Mauro, who she would end up marrying a few years later. So we moved into a house closer to downtown.
The next few years were about work and school. My mom continued and worked up the ranks at United Way, then changed organizations for CUSO (A Canadian non-profit funded by the Canadian government that took care of international projects around the world). While she did that I struggled through school. Lisgar was very challenging. But it paid off, eventually my grades started to get better and I actually excelled my last few years of high school.
At home, life had ups and downs. Mauro was a moody character, a person with tons of projects who never lived up to them. Outside of his work in IT, he was going to be a chef, a writer, a cartoonist. He was talented in everything he did but was the type that never followed through. He bought a $3000 Bianchi racing bike (a lot of money in the 80’s) because he was going to get in shape. I ended up getting that bike because he never used it. It would be my bike for the next 45 years…I had it fitted with regular, non-racing handles and it would be my bike when I worked as a bicycle courier while in university and much later as my transport getting to work downtown. I loved that bike.
In 1987 I finished secondary school. The plan was to go to university in Montreal, I could have gone to university in Ottawa but university fees in the province of Ontario were much more expensive. But, as I found out, there was another reason my mom wanted me to study in Montreal.
She helped me find an apartment in Montreal and stayed with me a few weeks to set it up. I remember how much she cried leaving the apartment to go back to Ottawa. It wasn’t long after that she gave me the news – she was leaving Mauro and would taking a work contract with CUSO that would see travelling around the world training local staff on the CUSO accounting system.
That’s when she set off on her travels. She would be gone for months at a time, going to (what seemed like) exotic islands in the Pacific, South East Asia and West Africa. We would write letters at the time (this was a long time before internet and emails) and I remember excitedly reading her stories of travel and work.
By 1988 she had settled in Lusaka, Zambia, the same city where we had lived with my dad about 10 years previous. CUSO had their Southern Africa office there and that would be her base when not travelling. And that’s how I got to travel to exotic places in the late 80’s: Zambia, Zimbabwe and the one summer where I met her in Greece. It was my mom that showed me the world.
The 90’s
The 90’s were a turning point in both our lives. While in Lusaka, my mom was to meet the man who would be her 3rd husband: Brian, a round, gentle man with a good heart. Brian also worked at CUSO as a consultant on projects.
Their relationship brought them back to Ottawa. My mom went back to working at the CUSO main office while Brian worked mainly from home (they bought a condo together) or was overseas on projects.
It was strange to see my mom domesticated. But in the 90’s were a time we talked less: I myself had gotten married, had a child, and was in the beginnings of a career. By the mid-90’s I had my own relationship problems. My mom had her own issues: CUSO downsized and she took a retirement package. She was almost 50 and had to start over.
I remember doing that time she got into selling Mary Kay products (that’s a pyramid scheme. She lost money doing that). Then she sewed clothes which she sold at local fairs…but there was not money in that either.
It took her a year or two of being a bit lost until she got into Financial Consultancy. I don’t remember how she got into that but she excelled. Within a couple of years she had built up a good list of clients and was one of the top earning consultants in Ontario.
In the meantime, I had built my career and had just started as a Controller for a Canadian Exporter. The 90’s was a tough decade but things were looking up as we hit the turn of the century.
The 00’s
My mom announced that she was leaving Brian. In think it was the year 2000. I didn’t like it to be honest, I think we all want the best for our family members and I didn’t want her leaving Brian. But she wasn’t happy. Relationships were my mom’s weakness, she’s often owned up to that in the years since. I don’t think my mom was the marrying type. Marriage always meant not living the next adventure.
She was 55 at that point. She sold her house, sold her business. And life, again, took her overseas.
This time it was South East Asia.
After travelling around for about a year, she settled down in Chiang Mai (Thailand). She loved it there and made many friends among the many Expats who made Thailand a temporary home: she had friends from Canada, Finland, Germany. But the best friend she made was with Nine, the Thai owner of the guesthouse. They kept in touch the 20+ years until my mom died.
I was working and didn’t see my mom except for the occasional time when she would come back to Canada. But we had a memorable trip in 2004:
She had said to me “why don’t we meet up in Lake Toba, in Sumatra?”. I said ok. I flew to Thailand and on to Medan, the largest city in Northern Sumatra. From there I took a minibus 5 hours into the interior, arriving in Parapet, a town on the lake. Back then I didn’t have a cell phone and didn’t have a way of communicating with my mom. I had told her the day I had expected to arrive but I had warned her that I might be delayed.
I arrived in Parapet and from there had to take a small ferry to Samosir, the island in the middle of Lake Toba (the lake, by the way, is located within the crater of a volcano that blew up about 70,000 years ago. It’s the largest volcanic lake in the world). Lucky enough, it was 10 PM and I caught the last ferry to the island. I still remember the ferry pulling up to the dock of my mom’s guesthouse and hearing “Frank??”. She rushed out to the dock and gave me a hug, crying. My mom and I had many dramatic Hellos and Goodbyes over the years but that was one of the most memorable.
We spent 10 days together and had adventures and mishaps: almost hitting a water buffalo with the motorbike, getting the motorbike stuck in heavy mud and then getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere…I wrote about it all on our Lake Toba post.
In 2005 I met Lissette. It changed the dynamic between my mom and I for a few years to be honest. My mom didn’t do well with other females in my life. It didn’t have to be that way, Lissette always wanted a “mother” in her life. My mom came back to Canada for a summer that year, I think she was hoping to permanently move back to Canada. It created a lot of friction, with Lissette new in my life and my mom trying take on the role of mother that she had always had. Between these two (headstrong) females, I was stuck in the middle.
The end result was that my mom decided to go back to her life in Thailand. On paper, the idea of coming back and being part of a life with me, my son, and my new girlfriend might have sounded good…but in reality we all had busy lives and I think my mom realized that it wasn’t going to work.
While we kept in regular contact, there was a cooling-off period at this time where we weren’t as close as we used to be.
The 10’s
In 2011 I was fired/quit. While it wasn’t according to plan and created many sleepless nights, it would forever change my life for the better. It also brought a whole new chapter to our mother-son relationship.
Lissette and I left Canada to travel full-time in 2014. At the same time, my mom had decided to leave Thailand for Mexico: she wanted something different and she was tired of the pollution in Chiang Mai created by the annual burning. They say that Chiang Mai has the worst air quality rating in the world from February to May. My mom said it was making her sick. Remember this as I recount the rest of my mom’s story…
My retirement meant that I could basically meet my mom anytime I wanted. Lissette never had issues, she knew what my mom meant to me.
My mom and I met up a few times in Germany, she’d show me around the country where she grew up. After a few years of doing that, her desire to travel far-away places waned. We started to stick to Mexico. Every year I would come for 3 weeks to a month and we would explore different places in Mexico, usually with part of our time spent in San Miguel de Allende (where she lived). Being with her 3 weeks to a month was actually the most time that I had been with her since being a teenager and coming to visit her felt like coming home. And being older, we were more friends than mother-son, we could talk about almost anything. At this point in life we were closer than we had ever been.
The 20’s
In 2020, Lissette and I settled in Spain. Visiting my mom became a regular thing, something I always looked forward to.
Over the last few years she became frailer. She went through bouts of violent coughing where she would spit up phlegm. She saw many doctors over the years and had different diagnoses and was given various drugs. But it only got worse. She was convinced that her problems had originated with the pollution in Chiang Mai. She also had problems with her sciatic nerve. With the years it affected her mobility more and more. It meant planning our trips more carefully and less ambitiously.
Last November (2024) I spent another month with her. This time she had a mission: she wanted to find another home in Mexico. She had tired of San Miguel. So we took some scouting trips to Morelia and Guadalajara. We didn’t just sightsee, we actually went to a few Expat get-togethers to meet people who lived there.
She was excited by the whole experience and by the people she met. She decided that her goal in 2025 was to move to Morelia.
My Mom’s death
In February my mom wrote me from hospital. She sounded horrible but assured me that she was ok and would be going home.
I wrote her neighbour who was more forthcoming: my mother had had coughing fits for a few days and had been weak with a fever. The neighbour had entered the house and found my mom on the bed, hardly able to open her eyes.
My mom had spent 2 days at the hospital where she was treated for dehydration and an UTI infection. They ran a whole bunch of tests on her.
The next day my mom came home. The doctors had wanted to keep her but she was adamant – she was going home. Her hospital bill had come out to $12,000 Canadian dollars. She told me she’d never spend another day in a hospital again and that she’d had it with doctors. She had always told me that she’d never allow herself to be cleaned out by a hospital (which had always been her biggest concern living in Mexico).
Over the next few days I had a few emails with my mom, checking up on her. Her replies were always short.
Finally she sent me a proper email, asking me if I could come to Mexico. I was shocked and worried. I called her. “I’m going to die” she said, tearfully, “and I would like you here with me”.
She confessed that in addition to her lungs that she had severe arterial blocking. She risked having a heart attack or stroke, to the degree that her doctors wanted her readmitted to the hospital. She had too many issues; “I just want to die peacefully”.
I came to Mexico as quickly as I could. I was with her 10 days before she died. Every day we hugged, we cried. We even made jokes of her dying. I saw ups and down, there were days where she seemed perfectly fine, when we walked about like we had on my previous visits. On one of those times we walked around San Miguel’s Botanical Gardens. Then there were days where she just wanted to lay down and rest, hooked up on the oxygen machine that she had rented.
On March 11th she died, her heart giving out. I held her hands during her final moments. She was 78 years old.
I said at the top that I had the coolest mom. It wasn’t just the travel stories. I remember the first year in Bayshore playing hockey with her: we’d go to the basement and I’d put on my goalie equipment and she’d take a hockey stick and shoot balls at me. An embarrassing story I haven’t told many: in my early teens she and Mauro once took me for a ride around Ottawa’s Byward market, a place where Ottawa’s prostitutes hung out. Driving slowly, she asked me if I liked any of them. Yes, my mom was actually trolling for prostitutes for me. I was weirded out but looking back my mom probably figured that she’d have to help me get my first experience.
My mom wasn’t the typical mom. But she did all the things both a mom and dad would do. She somehow got me in the best schools despite my grades. And she didn’t let me quit: I had one year in university where, discouraged, I contemplated taking 6 months off. “No way” said she. She didn’t nag or push me hard in other ways, but when it came to education she didn’t budge. I had to get a degree. And that’s how she was with everything, pretty relaxed about the day-to-day but always firm as to what I needed to achieve.
My mom was resourceful. I mentioned that we didn’t have much when I was young. She would find the deals. After the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, Greyhound gave free travel to Canadians because of our help in getting the hostages out. My mom and I took Greyhound buses from Ottawa to Key West Florida and had a 7-day vacation where, among other things, we went fishing for Barracuda. My mom found a doctor who was giving a special on cosmetic surgery: I had protruding ears when I was a young boy and she had them fixed on the cheap.
In adult life, my mom was a great friend who I could talk to anything about.
She was absolutely the best mother I could have had.
My Dad (1938 – 2025)
I spent most of my life with my mom, so my version of my Dad’s story is much shorter.
My Dad, like my mom, was born in Germany. After WWII, the family moved to Ste Marie de Beauce, his father working as a chemist at Vachon cakes.
I don’t know much about my dad’s childhood in Ste Marie de Beauce. But like his father he studied chemistry and then went to Germany to do his Masters degree. That’s where he met my mom. He was 26 at the time. They dated and went out every night, my mom said she never remembered him ever cracking a book open. Despite that, he breezed through his studies. My dad was extremely intelligent.
They got married in Germany and came back to Ste Marie de Beauce to settle down. My mom always mentioned that my dad’s family was very typically German, stoic and never showing emotion. She always said he hated that, he didn’t have happy memories of childhood. She witnessed the family coldness in the early years when my dad’s younger brother was killed in a car accident. No tears were shed.
Within a year of moving back to St. Marie, I was born. That was 1966. I don’t have very many memories of my parents during the early years of my childhood to be honest, any memories were of playing with my friends in the street. I know my parents had problems though. I mentioned up above that my mom was bored with small town life. But my dad was happy: he had a good job and I remember him going hunting and fishing and being part of a hockey league.
In the end my mom had her way and we all ended up moving to Zambia in 1974.
A year into our lives in Zambia, my dad moved out of the house. After the 2nd year, my mom and I left Africa to live in Vancouver.
While we were back in Canada, my dad finished his working contract in Zambia, did some travelling around Asia, then went back to Ste Marie de Beauce where he went back to working at Vachon. I know my dad always loved Ste. Marie and his social circles. When he came back he got into golf which would end up being a defining passion in his life.
I never saw my dad during my time in Vancouver but when my mom and I moved to Ottawa I would visit him once or twice a year. I’ll be very honest: it wasn’t easy. We had a very hard time communicating. It was always an issue I had with him but it was especially difficult when I was young. I loved my dad but felt I never really got to know him during those years. I took it personally.
My mom always said that communication with my dad was the hardest part of her relationship with him. He just couldn’t communicate and she thought it had to do with his upbringing in that uptight, uncommunicative German family. But one thing that she always said to me and which she continued saying until she died: if there was one person you could count on it was my dad. He was loyal, calm, intelligent, could get things done and didn’t hold a grudge. She always said he was “a good guy, a guy you could depend on”.
My dad remarried in his late 30’s. I was in my mid-teens at the time. Her name was Louise and they, of course, met playing golf. They would stay together until his last days.
The late 80’s brought a twist to their lives: Vachon decided to close their Research and Development division in Ste. Marie. That left my dad without a job.
My dad found a job at McCain Foods, but it meant having to move to Florenceville New Brunswick (500 km away). Most people have probably heard of McCain – it is the largest producer of frozen potatoes in the world. It was diversifying into other frozen products, like pizza, that’s why my dad was hired.
Fun fact: if you’ve ever had McCain Pizza Pockets, well, it was my dad who created them. My dad also came up with Flakies, the cakes made by Vachon. He was proud of his work and once told me that, thanks to him, Vachon cakes could sit on the shelf 4 months without going bad. Think of that next time you’re having a Vachon cake.
Again, I didn’t see my dad and Louise much during the 12 or so years they were in New Brunswick. They were happy enough there and lived their lives playing golf and taking vacations in Europe.
I remember 2001, it was the year I spent the most time with my dad. That year my dad and Louise moved back to their beloved Ste. Marie de Beauce. Vachon offered my dad a 6-month consulting job in Montreal (where I now lived). So, with little notice, my dad informed me that he had rented an apartment room in Montreal.
We developed a routine during those 6 months: once a week we would go play pool somewhere. Another day he would come to my apartment and we would order a pizza and watch a movie with my son. With more time together, we both relaxed a bit more around each other and he was more communicative. One night I took him to a hockey game at the Bell Center and, as a special treat, took him to the skybox where my friend Chantal worked as the director of scoreboard operations. I know he was impressed.
I remember being sad when the 6 months was up. Really, it was the most time I had ever spent with my father and I felt closer to him than I ever had.
I met Lissette in 2005. I mentioned that my mom and Lissette had a rocky relationship. Not so with my dad. They got along right away: Lissette has an easiness about her and she gets people talking, even my dad. It didn’t hurt that she knew about all the popular snack cakes: Hohos, Ding Dongs, Suzy Q’s, Twinkies. They had something in common and they hit it off.
My father didn’t often give me his opinion on things, I know he didn’t want to interfere in my life. But I remember the time when he did: it was to ask me when Lissette would move in with me. He was pretty insistent that she should. And he was right…Lissette have been together 20 years as I write this.
In the years following, my dad and Louise would visit us in Montreal a couple of times a year, usually staying a night or two. We had a couple of Christmases where we visited them in St. Marie.
The last time we the 4 of us got together was in 2014 prior to Lissette and I leaving Canada to travel full-time. I know he didn’t approve of our plans: Lissette and I were in our mid-40’s and we were taking a chance with our lifestyle choice. My dad was old-school in that way. But I kind of expected that.
We kept in touch over the years, emailing during holidays and birthdays. And I saw my dad and Louise when I came back to Canada in 2017 to sell my condo.
My Dad’s death
In May Louise wrote me, telling me that my dad had an epileptic seizure and was taken to the hospital. Upon further testing, the doctors determined that he had an aggressive brain tumour and that he had 3 – 4 months left.
It came as a shock because all seemed fine, at 87 years old my dad was still walking 18 holes when he played golf (he didn’t believe in taking the cart).
We had already booked our flights back to Canada when Louise called us two weeks later. My dad had had a relapse and probably would die soon. Would we come earlier?
We booked new flights to Canada and arrived in Quebec City 4 days later.
We went straight from the airport to the hospital to see my dad. I’m not sure if he recognized either of us on that first visit. How it was explained was that the expanding brain tumour was applying pressure on the brain, causing different symptoms. Louise told us that when the ambulance arrived after the 2nd seizure, the paramedics said that my dad was talking a “foreign language”. It was German, a language he still spoke if needed but which he hadn’t really used since childhood.
We had booked an apartment for 2 months in Quebec City and during the first couple of weeks would visit my dad twice a week. Drugs had reduced the swelling of his tumour, which made him more lucid. But it was sporadic, often he would talk and make no sense. And he would make a gesture signifying “never mind” – my dad could think straight, but he couldn’t verbalize what he wanted to. So he would talk and then stop, giving us that “never mind” gesture again. Often he would say we could talk and that he would just listen. Trying to talk just made him tired.
But my dad was still there. I asked him if he thought there was anything after death, I told him my mom believed in an after-death, that she looked forward to seeing her mother again. My dad said no, he didn’t believe in anything after death. Death was just an end, there was nothing after. If you asked him a question he would be fast to answer through a mix of speech and gestures. Until the end he (mostly) knew what was going on around him, although the lucidity varied from day to day.
After 2 weeks at the hospital in Levis (across from Quebec City), my dad was transferred to an assisted living facility in Ste. Marie de Beauce. It was better for Louise who could visit him anytime she wanted. It also meant he could sometimes go home for a beer and to sit in his favorite chair. Ste. Marie was always home to him so I know it meant a lot to him that he could die where he had lived most of his life.
But he hated being what amounted to a vegetable. He deteriorated quickly, losing weight and motivation. He just wanted to die and made that be known to everyone. He refused to take his medication and ate little. He just wanted it to be all over with.
One of our best memories was our 2nd to last visit when we had a Pizza Party at the assisted living facility. We had pizza and beer and he enjoyed it. When he started getting tired (which didn’t take much), Lissette and I walked him to his room and offered our elbows. My dad put his arms through them for support. As on every visit, we give him hugs when we left, knowing that it might be the last time.
On our very last visit, he was a bit grouchy. Not towards us but towards the doctor: the doctor had promised a switch in medication. The rules are that my dad couldn’t be aided in dying because 1) he wasn’t in pain and 2) legally, he wasn’t judged mentally competent to make that decision. But my dad’s mental distress in continuing to live in his condition provided another alternative: palliative sedation, where my dad would be basically put to sleep and allowed to die. That day my dad made it clear, with a series of f-bombs, that this was exactly what he wanted.
The next day my dad was effectively in sedation and he died 4 days later, on August the 6th.
I deeply respect my dad. In many ways he was a simple man. He would wear his old faded jeans, running shoes, and a big cap sitting high on his head. My dad didn’t believe in pretention. He was, apart from Lissette, the only person who gave me support when I was fired from my job – he had suffered many idiots and assholes during his work career. Like me, hadn’t towed the line and had been fired for it. He stood for what he believed. I respect that.
My dad was incredibly intelligent and resourceful. When he and Louise moved to New Brunswick he re-did a lot of the house, including the plumbing and electricity. My dad had learned it by himself reading manuals. At his home in Ste. Marie he had built a new deck outside. Even a few months before he died he had been re-tiling a bathroom. I haven’t got a handy bone in my body so that always impressed me.
My dad and I didn’t have the closest relationship, as I mentioned, communication was the main issue. We just never had that ease and comfort that I had with my mom. But I have a couple of heart-warming moments that I’ll never forget. The first was on my birthdays: my dad would always call and sing the “Happy Birthday” song in its entirety. It’s just not what someone would expect from my dad. The second was his love for Benny Hill: watching Benny Hill made my dad laugh so hard that he would cry. My dad wasn’t very expressive so seeing that always touched me. One Christmas I bought him the entire Benny Hill collection so that he could watch it at home.
My dad was loved. Every day, when visiting him at the Hospital or the assisting living facility, a friend would pop in to visit him. His eyes would light up. When we had his memorial service, over a hundred people came and paid their respects. Many were friends from golf, people who he used to work with, or just his neighbours.
I’m happy Lissette and I came back to Canada for my father’s last days. Although it was many years since we had seen him, it felt like it had been yesterday. We both felt a closeness and warmth from him even if he couldn’t express it. We also got to know Louise better – although I’ve known her for 40 years, talking to her every day, sharing the experience and holding her when she cried made us get to know her more than we ever did.
I left Quebec grateful for having those last 2 months with my dad.
Lessons learned from death
Death can come out of nowhere and happen fast. I know it’s cliché, but as much as you “know it” it is a shock when it happens. I had just visited my mom and the plan was that she was going to move to Morelia in 2025. She looked forward to a new apartment and to buying some Ikea furniture. Instead, a couple of months later she was dead. In my dad’s case, he was living everyday life, playing golf and re-tiling a bathroom when he suffered the seizure that put him in hospital.
Having both your parents die makes you realize you’re next. The older generation is gone, you’re next to go.
You have to think of health coverage and prepare for the worse. My mom knew she was rolling the dice in Mexico where Public healthcare is poor and private Insurance costly. Many years ago we had a meeting with an insurance company but premiums were prohibitive, especially with my mom’s cancer history. I mentioned that when she got sick the hospital in San Miguel charged her $12,000 for 2 days and tons of tests. She was totally screwed over, but that’s something has happens to a lot of expats who access private healthcare in Mexico without insurance. You can say you’ll go back to the US or Canada for treatment – but what if you get a heart attack or something else that happens so suddenly that you don’t have time to go back “home”? I’ve always loved Mexico but my mom’s experience enforces that I would never move to Mexico without a solid health plan. It also makes me realize that living in Spain where private health care is good and affordable counts for a lot.
Finally, get your paperwork in order. My dad took about 2 months to die yet that was 2 months too long for him. There was someone in the nursing home who had been there 6 years before dying. That’s a living hell. Some people may want to live no matter what but both of my parents wanted it to end as quickly as possible. Their deaths have brought up conversations between Lissette and I on what we would want if either of us had to live with a terminal disease, in pain, or in a vegetative state.
I’ll try to end this post on a happier note…
Both my mom and my dad had good lives. My mom lived until 78, my dad until 87. I think living to either 78 or 87 is a full life. Both were very successful and had exciting and fulfilling lives. Both also received/gave lots of love in their lives. Neither suffered for long at the end. So while it’s sad, I’m celebrating both my mom and dad’s deaths. It’s what they would have wanted.
Related: Memories of Childhood trips
Related: My 2 years as a child Expat in Zambia
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