Labor Day

The calm is not enough to lull you. It's the microseconds after a hard sprint, before the rush of endorphins washes strain from your muscles, where every sensation tells you that your body is still struggling, still suffering, though you no longer make progress. It is planting your second foot firmly in the snow at 14,000 feet, gasping for breath in the oxygen-thin air, succumbing to your body's demand for respite, but knowing that you've lost your acclimation to the pain when the next step begins. And in that lucid moment you have in pause, you are cognizant enough to look up in search of the aspired for mountain apex, but it's whereabouts are obscured, by cloud or by false summits.

There is an end. You know that in fact, but you cannot know it in feeling. In the animal part of your brain, facts are a weak opponent to what you feel.

Yet you take your next step, always climbing, each step more trying than the last. Each step a commitment to ignore the protests of your muscles, your bones and joints, to pursue your crazed obsession. But here, there is no choice. While mountain fever might possess one to never give up until the top is reached, the option always remains. Turn back. Turn around and instantly feel thicker air with each step. Let gravity ease your burden.

But this is different. The next contraction is an event already decided on 9 months previous. There is no turning back any more.

You may be engulfed into your own personal world of pain laying down, or perhaps sitting. But I stand, arms wrapped around the neck of co-manufacturer of my condition, in the midst of calm. Well before the next wave comes, I can already feel the involuntary tightening ball in my midsection. Oh no. I utter, and the signal is given that soon I will be far from this place, and anything my body does while I am gone is of no concern to me any more.

The sensation grows, sucking me into a black-hole of pain, throwing out only the gamma radiation of primal cries, manufactured by my body in the absence of commands from a now vacated mind. The body has no better instruction and knows no better response.

Information, once entering this black-hole, can never escape. Even the memory of the pain cannot be retained. The knowledge that it was experienced survives from outside the event horizon, but the experience itself will never surface again. At least, until the next contraction.

Slowly, it releases me back to my body, and I am in the moment, understanding only that I am back in the calm I look down. A fat drop of blood, laid thickly in deep red, forms a perfect circle on the laminate hospital floor. I stare at it until the next wave overtakes me.

When I surface, another drop. And I plunge into the world of pain again.

Three drops. Then gone. Four. Five.

Now there are too many drops to count. They have overwhelmed the floor and begun to coalesce and form a crimson pond.

Hours ago, I could remind myself, soon, this experience would all be just a memory. Now, there is no opportunity for such self-reassurances. The mind is unable to collect itself in time to do anything more than recognize its own existence between bouts of oblivion.

Time does not exist as it does normally. Ninety seconds are an eternity, yet the hours that pass collectively are no longer constructed by the minutes and seconds of the clock. They are a series of waves and calms, lined up together, one by one, like beads on a string. There is no end in sight, but neither was there a beginning. This world simply always was, is and will be. The end of labor, like before its start, does not dictate it existence. It has merely defined my visit.

The end of labor and the start of active pushing brings me back the real world. Pain now has purpose. It is active and prophetic. The calms, the few that exist, now host the possibility of hope, desire, fear and anxiety. It is a place where strength of mind and heart can make a difference. Where it is possible to have courage.

Oh no, I utter as each pushing contraction begins to build, but their quality has changed. Before I was dragged away, helpless and passive, to an isolated plane of existence. Now, this pain, andmy words steel me and provide strength. Screams are not the absence of the mind They are products of will.

Here it comes. I gather my strength!

Push! Mind and body act as one with determination.

Do not give up! Now is the time to show strength.

“Okay, look down!” the doctor tells me and I do. Surprising to me, somewhere in the middle of the battle a child was born.

Welcome to the outside world, Eiger.

Neil and Gord

Here I am, newly moved into the first house we've ever bought, nearing the end of what has been a miserable 7 months of pregnancy with our first child, and this is what keeps coming back to me:

Neil Young got a hot new girlfriend, and Gord Downie got brain cancer.

The significance of these juxtaposed Ontario-born and bred singers comes from the fact that they are creative minds behind the music my spouse and I cherish the most. For him, songs of Cinnamon Girls, Southern Men and Hearts of Gold have put him the most as ease. For me, The Tragically Hip has never been far from my side. And now their lead singer has a death sentence that numbers in perhaps months.

Which is to say there is no significance to the fates of these two Canucks – the one who left Canada to become a big name in music in the United States, and the other who never quite penetrated the northern border, but became a symbol of what it means to be Canadian. But I am the daughter of a very long line of devout Roman Catholics. Pattern recognition and finding meaning where coincidence masquerades as divine is a part of my DNA.

I don't find myself often moved by the lives of celebrities. When David Bowie died, I heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth among friends and family, and the world. But his music still exists. I can still watch the Labyrinth at any time and the summation of my relationship with David Bowie is alive as ever. Alan Rickman died, and in some small way, that is sad to me, but I still get a chuckle out of Dogma, or appreciate his dour Professor Snape. Nothing has changed. I never knew these men past their works.

And in many ways, the way I have interacted with The Tragically Hip will remain the same when Gord Downie is gone. The same Silver Jet, way overhead, exists as it did when it punctuated the bittersweet feelings I had as I prepared to leave my life in Japan and return to the United States. It takes all your power to prove that you don't care, but I didn't even try. Even in that awkward state between the blanket of childhood and the declaration of adulthood, the gift of Cordelia from the blonde afro wielding Toronto classmate, along with the shrugged off sentiment of “Yeah, you kind of aren't allowed to be Canadian if you don't like them” had me instantly hooked.

And in the days at the height of my own transient life, the voice of Gord Downie validated my cabin fever, and onward I went, to the next country, the next state, singing “And change yourself into something you love when you leave, when you leave, when you leave?” The quality of my departures differed, yet those lyrics seemed to apply as much to an exciting start to life in rural Japan as it did fleeing deep Appalachia.

Like as with the other close men and women of my life, surely I have sewn my wild oats among other purveyors of song. Perhaps that is even too trite a description, as like with those men and women, my interaction with the movement of words to music were significant to the past lives of younger days. But much like with my spouse, there has always been one set of songs I find myself coming back to, each time, infusing my life with new meaning.

And that's what it means to live a relationship, doesn't it? To continually grow, to constantly see with new eyes what has been before them for years. To change, while staying the same. To live and grow up in synchronicity.

Although perhaps impact has been largely one way. A conversation with back-up singer Paul Langlois about the Canadian Mockumentary Trailer Park Boys in the quiet back parking lot of the Vogue in Indianapolis is a memory only I keep, likely, and Gord extending his hand to mine mid-song in New York City was a product his musical compulsion, I suspect. But with my hand, I wanted to help you lift enormous things, a pinch a sting I don't feel a thing, as the earth revolves around the sun.

On the flipside of this meaninglessly significant contrast of singers, lies another relationship with the music of one Mr. Neil Young. The man who, after 38 years of quintessential love bound in marriage, left his wife and found another woman in short order. Suddenly, the cheerleading I had gotten from him in his ode to old love, that I had grappled onto as I jumped into the unknown world of sticking around instead of running off to the next adventure, seemed to have been disingenuous. Because I'm still in love with you, I want to see you dance again, because I'm still in love with you, on this harvest moon. Once rock solid and supportive, they've become cheap.

Neil Young got a hot new girlfriend, and Gord Downie got brain cancer. Gord, I thought you beat death of inevitability to death just a little bit. I thought you beat the inevitability of death to death just a little bit.