![\"dead](\"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_0457-e1622305688728.jpg\")
<\/a>dead after four centuries<\/p><\/div>\n<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n
I\u2019ve never seen a tree before. It\u2019s pretty!<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s dead\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n Blade Runner 2049<\/em><\/p>\n Death is a complicated business and how one might feel about a particular death has a lot to do with how understandable it was,\u00a0how inevitable. The loss of a loved one, near and dear, opens up a hole and the memories that flood in to fill it, though they\u00a0might bring comfort, never completely make up for the extinguishment, the permanent elimination of an actual physical being from our lives. It is the finality of death\u00a0that\u00a0makes it so daunting. Most of us realize this (of course!)\u00a0but we wish it weren\u2019t true. We mitigate our grief by imagining\u00a0our dear departed being \u2018in a better place\u2019 or \u2018resting in peace\u2019 or otherwise liberated from mortal suffering as if after death some remnant of the self might still remain\u00a0that is able\u00a0to experience relief. Who knows? Maybe dead is just dead?<\/p>\n Within the span of a year, I lost both my parents. \u2018Lost\u2019 is a strange way to put it \u2013 I\u00a0know<\/em>\u00a0where they are\u00a0\u2013 their cremains scattered under some bushes\u00a0against the red brick wall of an old church beside a highway in\u00a0suburban Toronto. The ground\u00a0there shakes every time a big truck rolls by, which is pretty often\u00a0due to the\u00a0heavy traffic. Mom and Dad chose this spot\u00a0many years ago when their deaths still seemed like a far-off possibility. Though they were both in their eighties by the time they passed on, (an average lifespan\u00a0in Canada which still\u00a0retains the\u00a0tattered\u00a0remnants of a public healthcare system,\u00a0the\u00a0way<\/em>\u00a0they each died came as a\u00a0surprise. I don\u2019t know what I was expecting really. Perhaps I\u00a0had just put the inevitability of them dying out of my mind\u00a0until the\u00a0medical emergencies started\u00a0to pile on, one after the other\u00a0and their mortality became impossible to ignore. Yet\u00a0the end of life is an issue we all have to face, sooner or later, ready or not.<\/p>\n As to why\u00a0my parents\u00a0wanted to be\u00a0interred next to that particular church\u2013it was because they’d developed a deep affinity for both the building and the community that congregated in it.\u00a0That it was a Presbyterian church and they had\u00a0always\u00a0identified as German Lutherans didn\u2019t seem to\u00a0be a problem for them.\u00a0At the top of a hill overlooking\u00a0a sweeping river valley, the little church serves as a\u00a0landmark in\u00a0the neighbourhood\u00a0where\u00a0they\u00a0had established deep roots. Before his mind started unravelling, Dad spent years as a church elder, overseeing the\u00a0renovation of\u00a0the steeple and visiting the sick. The\u00a0memory garden where I scattered\u00a0his and Mom’s\u00a0ashes was\u00a0installed\u00a0by my brother,\u00a0his first major commission\u00a0after landscaping school. Our\u00a0family home was just down the road in an old red brick house of similar vintage\u00a0to the church, since we moved there in 1969. My parents lived there until it seemed prudent for them to\u00a0downsize\u00a0to a nearby apartment when Dad started\u00a0his long decline.<\/p>\n not cornfields anymore!<\/p><\/div>\n Mom and Dad arrived in Canada in the late 1950s as impecunious immigrants from a war-ravaged Germany and I was born shortly thereafter. At that time, Dad\u00a0did\u00a0night shifts in a\u00a0styrene factory\u00a0as well as serving\u00a0as the superintendent\u00a0for the walkup apartment building\u00a0where we lived. Mom\u00a0toile away as a\u00a0supermarket cashier. With the hard work and determination\u00a0of the immigrant working class,\u00a0Mom and Dad eventually rode the surging tide of Canada\u2019s postwar economy from their blue-collar\u00a0beginnings into the\u00a0ranks of the lower middle class. The high point was when Dad got promoted from the factory floor\u00a0to salesman,\u00a0a job that came\u00a0with a company car. When that happened, Mom celebratoriously\u00a0ditched her unionized cashier job for\u00a0a less remunerative one as a bank teller which she thought\u00a0conveyed a higher social status because\u00a0she could \u2018wear nice clothes\u2019 and not be spending\u00a0her days stuffing\u00a0bleeding\u00a0chickens\u00a0into paper bags at the cash register.\u00a0Mom and Dad weren’t the\u00a0bourgeoisie exactly but\u00a0they genuinely felt they had made it in\u00a0this new land of opportunity.\u00a0We children came along in tidy five-year intervals, first me, just squeezing into the tail of the 1950s, my sister following in 1964,\u00a0and\u00a0my brother in ’69.\u00a0Dutiful and committed, my parents continued to build their immigrant dream, rarely complaining through life\u2019s many trials\u00a0and reminding us children on regular occasions life\u00a0was\u00a0\u2018so much better now than it was during\u00a0the war,\u2019<\/em>\u00a0which of course it must have been \u2013 not that we were in any position to judge. They maintained decades-long friendships, mostly within the German diaspora and gave their time generously to various community causes. After all those years of living, loving and helping others, their lives simply ran out, one after the other, within the span of just over a year.\u00a0 We who were\u00a0bereaved\u00a0are left with our memories of course, but in the end, all that was left of Mom and Dad\u00a0was sticky grey ash, not\u00a0even enough\u00a0to fill the\u00a0small wooden box which\u00a0I carried out to the churchyard to sprinkle onto the shrubs.<\/p>\n So how did it all go down, their deaths? And did they make any sense?<\/p>\n On the face of it, the way each\u00a0of my parents’ lives ended\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0make some basic sense though it would be nice if they had been able to live a bit longer. Their\u00a0lives each spooled out as all of ours will\u2013my mother’s abruptly,\u00a0and my father’s more slowly.\u00a0\u00a0The details will vary of course, but the end\u00a0is assured. The luckiest\u00a0of us might\u00a0get to die peacefully in\u00a0our beds deep in old age but for the rest, our demise\u00a0might just as easily be precipitous. Life expectancy in OECD countries like Canada is\u00a0currently averaging at 80.3 years. In the US, where I now live, the expected life span\u00a0is\u00a0actually dropping<\/a>\u00a0but still\u00a0averages\u00a0out at 78.7.\u00a0 Mom and Dad both made it past\u00a0the eighty-year mark\u00a0and\u00a0thus died\u00a0within an unremarkable window of longevity.<\/p>\n Before his Alzheimer’s, Dad had struggled with two major bouts of cancer, a legacy of his time working\u00a0with toxic chemicals\u00a0\u2013 first in\u00a0a styrene plant, around the time that I was born, then\u00a0subsequently in a factory\u00a0producing Fiberglass fronted concrete blocks,\u00a0conceived to\u00a0speed up the construction of fast-food restaurants that were popping up like mushrooms all over\u00a0Toronto’s rapidly-developing bedroom communities like the one in which we lived. My earliest memories of Dad are his smell. I remember the odour of burnt\u00a0styrofoam\u00a0emanating from the pores of his\u00a0skin\u00a0when he\u00a0brought his face close to mine after returning home from the plant. The car upholstery smelled the same way, having absorbed his plastic-scented perspiration.\u00a0 It was just the way Dad smelled and the presence of his personal\u00a0polystyrene cloud served to comfort me\u00a0and\u00a0made me feel safe.<\/p>\n Mercifully his cancer didn\u2019t kick until he was nearing retirement, albeit a retirement that was involuntary, due to\u00a0a corporate merger\u00a0that\u00a0subsumed the company he had given so\u00a0much of his life to,\u00a0from\u00a0his years\u00a0in the plant to his ascendance to the sales force. Neoliberalism had hit its stride after NAFTA was signed and the good jobs in Southern Ontario\u2019s\u00a0manufacturing heartland\u00a0began predictably evaporating\u00a0as companies\u00a0took advantage of the opportunities to shift production\u00a0to countries where\u00a0labour was cheap. All over the region, legions of loyal workers\u00a0were cut adrift. For many like my father, the immigrant dream was beginning to unravel.<\/p>\n I can’t help thinking that the psychological stresses of\u00a0this\u00a0precarious time\u00a0strained his health, but at least Dad\u00a0saw see his children\u00a0grow up before getting hit by the big \u2018C\u2019. When cancer came,\u00a0he took it surprisingly in stride.\u00a0The first round was a near-fatal non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma, cancer that typically affects\u00a0workers\u00a0exposed to the type of chemicals that are used in plastic manufacturing.\u00a0Intense\u00a0chemotherapy was needed to bring it under control and even then, it was a long time before his\u00a0remission\u00a0could be assured. The irony that\u00a0it\u00a0took exposure to toxic chemicals\u00a0to cause cancer and\u00a0more toxic chemicals to take\u00a0it away was not lost on Dad. By the time he was in remission, Dad was wrung out and never again regained his once-prodigious vitality. His personality changed too and he became much more\u00a0reflective\u00a0and less prone to the\u00a0piques of anger he had been predisposed to. To those who loved him,\u00a0it was a change for the better and I was moved to hear him\u00a0talk about the long hours he spent volunteering at the cancer ward where he himself had been treated,\u00a0reassuring anxious new patients splayed out on\u00a0the\u00a0leatherette recliners\u00a0with chemo transfusions coursing through their blood vessels. I\u00a0have no doubt his quirky humor and general bonhomie kept more than a few\u00a0cancer patients\u00a0from sinking deeper into their despair and I got the sense he was\u00a0suddenly\u00a0determined\u00a0to give something back to the world\u00a0after himself being granted a new chance at life.<\/p>\n But it wasn’t long before another cancer\u00a0swooped down on\u00a0him like a malevolent front \u2013 bowel cancer this time.\u00a0The good news was it had been detected early\u00a0and his doctors\u00a0were guardedly optimistic he\u00a0might recover. The surgery\u00a0went without complications\u00a0but disaster struck during what was supposed to be the postop. Dad was nearly killed when the hospital staff ill-advisedly rushed\u00a0him into eating solid food. Not wanting to disappoint but nauseous and still in pain, Dad choked and inhaled his own vomit, the violent coughing that ensued\u00a0bursting the sutures in his intestines.\u00a0Emergency surgery\u00a0followed but he was now also\u00a0struck with aspiration pneumonia\u00a0triggered by the\u00a0food sucked into his lungs.\u00a0He went from a cheerful convalescence to\u00a0death’s door in the matter of a day and\u00a0was unconscious\u00a0in the ER amid beeping machines. Called to his bedside, I\u00a0expected\u00a0the worst.\u00a0Flying in from British Columbia, I made sure to pack a\u00a0dark suit to wear at his funeral, which everyone agreed was imminent.\u00a0Amazingly, by the time I had arrived,\u00a0the tide\u00a0had turned and\u00a0his doctors\u00a0were\u00a0allowing he\u00a0might make a slow and somewhat complicated recovery. Mom, ever\u00a0the\u00a0tireless caregiver, nursed him through the\u00a0multi-month convalescence that followed<\/p>\n Dad\u00a0slowly recovered but his weakness was intractable and he seemed mentally dissociated. Though things at first seemed hopeful, in\u00a0a cruel twist of fate, his cognitive state started showing signs of worrying impairment. At first, it seemed like post-surgery depression but then it became clear something more serious was wrong.\u00a0The\u00a0initial bouts of confusion he suffered\u00a0after moving into the\u00a0new apartment progressed into bouts of catatonia and continued exhaustion\u00a0that worsened by the month.\u00a0Dad\u00a0lost his ability to speak, outside of a few unintelligible mutterings and refused to be roused from his bed. Mom was\u00a0angry at him, accusing him of\u00a0‘just not making an effort’ but he continued to stare\u00a0blankly into space. Alzheimer\u2019s was confirmed and Mom\u2019s toil now became never-ending. She\u00a0had\u00a0to cajole him into eating, and if he did put food into his mouth, make sure he remembered to chew. A\u00a0cautious driver, she\u00a0ferried him to countless medical appointments\u00a0throughout the vast suburbs and as he was now incontinent,\u00a0 launder endless loads of his soiled undergarments and bedding.\u00a0It wasn’t long before\u00a0Mom slipped into a serious depression and she confided\u00a0in me during her telephone calls\u00a0to me in New York, where I was now living,\u00a0that she was losing hope. Mom\u2019s Sisyphean labours ended only when Dad happened to fall out of his bed one day,\u00a0breaking his hip. As he recovered in hospital,\u00a0the medical team finally realized the severity of his\u00a0mental impairment and\u00a0fast-tracked him into a dementia care facility. It\u00a0had been obvious to all of us that my increasingly frail mother could no longer cope,\u00a0and sad but relieved,\u00a0she began to realize that with Dad taken care of, she could begin to focus on her own\u00a0health issues.<\/p>\n Yet paradoxically\u00a0Mom\u00a0died before\u00a0Dad\u00a0did. It was sepsis that killed her after routine hip surgery; surgery I\u2019d been hectoring her to have now that she had the time to begin looking after herself.\u00a0Mom had been\u00a0suffering from hip pain for years,\u00a0affecting her sleep and\u00a0forcing her to rely on a cane, which she hated. Her GP told her she was an ideal candidate as she was relatively fit for her age.<\/p>\n \u2018Go get your hip fixed..\u2019\u00a0<\/em>I implored her.\u00a0\u2018It\u2019ll improve your life and you can ditch that cane.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n I soon came to regret those words and\u00a0my naive faith in the infallibility of\u00a0modern medicine.<\/p>\n Mom\u2019s was a painful passing. She\u2019d\u00a0been recovering well after\u00a0surgery and my brother had prudently\u00a0booked\u00a0her in for a temporary stay\u00a0at a care home\u00a0so she could recuperate\u00a0with regular meals and monitoring. After Dad had been institutionalized, Mom\u00a0was increasingly forgetful when it came to taking care of herself.\u00a0When the time came for her my brother to take her home, she\u00a0seemed\u00a0lethargic yet\u00a0still eager to leave. She\u00a0was having trouble dressing and on the way down to\u00a0the\u00a0car, she collapsed in the elevator.\u00a0By the time she was in the hospital emergency room, it seemed at first as if it was nothing more than\u00a0a\u00a0touch of the flu but soon her condition became much more serious.\u00a0Mom’s vital signs were in freefall and the doctors scrambled to identify a virulent\u00a0infection raging through her body. Her tissues started to swell and she\u00a0became wracked in unimaginable pain.\u00a0Mom soon lost consciousness and\u00a0was dead within a\u00a0couple of days. I sat vigil by her bedside as the voracious bacillus ate its way through her organs, while outside the\u00a0window of the newly-built suburban\u00a0hospital, sprawling\u00a0over the featureless vastness\u00a0of what used to be farmers\u2019 fields, the gold and vermilion foliage of\u00a0an Ontario autumn\u00a0scintillated under\u00a0the gas flame blue sky. Mom drew her last breath and I\u00a0flew back to NYC to\u00a0return to my\u00a0work and\u00a0await\u00a0her upcoming funeral. A couple of weeks later I was back, standing in the churchyard, clutching\u00a0a small wooden box\u00a0that contained\u00a0all that was left of her \u2013a pile of grey\u00a0ashes and some flecks of white bone.<\/p>\n As the\u00a0first-born,\u00a0the pastor instructed me I was to be\u00a0the first to scatter\u00a0her ashes. It was, to be honest, a little awkward, as there was a stiff breeze blowing in\u00a0from the highway\u00a0that caught them up,\u00a0swirling them\u00a0around me as I struggled to dispense\u00a0the box with at least a modicum of dignity. My jacket sleeve, wrist and hand\u00a0were soon\u00a0covered in a clingy grey film of Mom’s\u00a0mortal remains as the line of mourners formed to shake my hand.\u00a0My melancholy\u00a0flipped quickly into anxiety as\u00a0it\u00a0seemed crass to\u00a0concern myself with tidiness at such a solemn time, to be wiping Mom off \u2013the last vestiges of\u00a0my mother’s\u00a0corporeal existence\u2013 onto a scrunched up wad of toilet paper I\u00a0had been kneading in the pocket of my jacket, while everyone else was watching, scrutinizing even, my performance\u00a0with such focussed kindness and compassion. There was really no recourse, so for the sake of decorum, I turned away for a second and wiped my hand,\u00a0just my sister was taking her turn\u00a0doling out the cremains, my brother\u00a0standing by her with the tears welling up in his eyes. It was all over in a few minutes,\u00a0the last traces of Mom melding in with the topsoil and mulch (well more or less anyway\u2013there were a few alarmingly un-melded spots I was hoping the groundskeeper would see to\u2013 the highway traffic unabated in its thrumming and the assembled party filing into an adjacent reception room for\u00a0a buffet of coffee and sandwiches and a\u00a0spread of homemade baked goods that would have truly lifted Mom\u2019s carbohydrate-admiring\u00a0heart, had she been present on this earthly plane to partake of it. Dad, mute in his dementia, sat transfixed in his wheelchair. He hadn\u2019t uttered a word for the past several months and Mom had been taking it quite personally, despite the unambiguousness of his diagnosis, still stuck on the idea\u00a0that somehow he was shutting her out when she\u00a0made such an effort to visit him on\u00a0his ward. During the service,\u00a0Dad\u00a0seemed\u00a0to show some slight flicker of recognition\u00a0when confronted with familiar faces\u00a0from his congregation\u00a0and he gazed searchingly into the eyes of\u00a0those greeting him,\u00a0though\u00a0there was\u00a0no indication he\u00a0comprehended\u00a0the tragic reason for this occasion. Perhaps it was better that way. Dad had been a mercurially emotional man. Though his relationship with Mom had been complicated in terms of its power dynamic, losing her after over 65 years of marriage\u00a0might well have unmoored him beyond recovery\u00a0had he still been in his right mind. But he wasn\u2019t in his right mind, and that was that, and though\u00a0my siblings and I hoped\u00a0he\u00a0might still have some sense\u00a0of how much we all loved him, what remained of his subjectivity was now completely opaque,\u00a0stuck in\u00a0a labyrinth of blind neurological channels,\u00a0mired in amyloid plaque.<\/p>\n The death of\u00a0someone we love is so emotionally overwhelming, one is bound to perceive the moments\u00a0around its occurrence differently from more quotidian happenings. It is the details that stand out, the small things, and the sensation of Mom\u2019s ashes coating my sleeve, wrist and hand will always be with me. Life, as we know it at any given time, exists in a swarm of such moments, a cloud perhaps, and yet some of these fleeting\u00a0perceptions manage to lose their ephemerality\u00a0and become fixed in our memories, a permanent reminder of who we are, who we have been, the transitions through which we have passed, though they\u00a0might only have lasted an instant, like the dust of\u00a0Mom’s ashes swirling around me in\u00a0the\u00a0stiff breeze beside the highway, the way it felt in my hand, the sound of traffic humming\u00a0as it passed.<\/p>\n The following spring, in\u00a0a\u00a0nondescript care home unobtrusively situated in the vast planar landscape of strip malls and low rise office buildings that characterizes Toronto’s amorphous edge, Dad\u2019s\u00a0decline suddenly accelerated. In keeping with the advance directives he had long ago\u00a0prepared while still of sound mind, there was to be no medical intervention once he started refusing food and could no longer be roused from bed. He had, as I was told, spent previous weeks withdrawing even further from interactions with his caregivers, though he seemed beguiled occasionally by some atmospheric thing like the flash of windshields from the traffic outside\u00a0his window\u00a0bouncing off the ceiling of his room.\u00a0He showed\u00a0no signs of unhappiness or agitation, but\u00a0rather what had remained\u00a0of his neural functions were now simply shutting down,\u00a0which to\u00a0his nurses\u00a0signalled his\u00a0life was drawing\u00a0to a close. We gathered\u00a0by his bedside to wait for the inevitable; me, my brother\u00a0and sister and their spouses, while various friends and former neighbours came and went, paying their respects, sharing\u00a0memories, making small talk with us and drinking coffee. Dad had been a gregarious man and though now unconscious, we all shared the thought he might have\u00a0been\u00a0comforted by\u00a0all of us being there. He wouldn’t have wanted to die alone. The weather outside was pleasant\u00a0and we had just\u00a0returned\u00a0from stretching our legs in the sun-bathed parking lot behind at the back of the building,\u00a0clutching takeout coffee cups, chatting as we had been to pass the time, and as we\u00a0reentered Dad\u2019s room,\u00a0we noticed his forehead strangely twitching and a sudden\u00a0shift in the tone of his skin. Failing circulation had swollen his fingers into tumescent sausages and a grey shadow began to adumbrate his face.\u00a0A purple stain that had earlier appeared\u00a0at the top edge of his ear\u00a0had\u00a0spread ominously and from that moment\u00a0his life leaked out of him apace. Outside it was a\u00a0warm May afternoon with the long-dormant soil beginning to smell again of life and fecundity. The vernal light streamed in through the blinds in golden shafts, illuminating the antiseptic surfaces of linoleum and chrome. When Dad stopped breathing, my brother-in-law\u00a0began\u00a0to sob.\u00a0The Tim Horton’s coffee cups\u00a0still absurdly clutched\u00a0in our hands, we stood there together wordlessly, my sister sobbing softly\u00a0before\u00a0we felt it was time to call in the duty nurse. It wasn\u2019t long before Dad\u2019s ashes too were trickling through my fingers onto the boxwoods and rose bushes of that little\u00a0churchyard\u00a0beside the highway, the trucks rumbling by and the sandwiches waiting in the reception room. The old Latin adage,\u00a0Nos habebit humus<\/em>\u2013 the earth shall have us\u2013never seemed truer.<\/p>\n With the loss of my parents, a part of my world disappeared. I have myriad memories, of course, some good, some not so good, but the living, breathing individuals who conceived me are now irrevocably subsumed into the topsoil beneath a row of ornamental shrubs. Random, disjointed\u00a0images\u00a0keep flooding in from my preconscious childhood.\u00a0I am playing with building blocks on a parquet floor. The sun\u00a0streams in from between the curtains. My mother is reading in an armchair\u00a0holding a cigarette.\u00a0In the blue curls of her smoke, I\u00a0notice for the first time teeming motes of dust \u2013\u00a0each\u00a0in\u00a0its own inscrutable trajectory yet somehow\u00a0keeping its distance\u00a0from its neighbour, each\u00a0illuminated\u00a0in golden light, a specific quality of light that continues to enchant me, the light of life, the light my father still marvelled at with his addled brain\u00a0as it reflected off passing windshields onto\u00a0the ceiling of the room\u00a0in which he died, the warm glow of\u00a0the sun returning\u00a0to a\u00a0northern spring after an intractable winter. I must have been\u00a0gesturing\u00a0somehow, open-mouthed and inchoate at the dust\u00a0dancing in the shafts of sun, golden motes suspended in the peacock blue smoke of my mother’s exhalations, and she must have been watching me when she\u00a0whispered conspiratorially \u2013\u2018Die Piraten kommen!<\/em>\u2019\u2013 \u2018the pirates are coming!\u2019 I believe I burst into tears. Perhaps it was some magic that floated in the air that day. Perhaps it was an early warning. I didn’t know exactly what\u00a0‘Piraten’<\/em>\u00a0meant but I\u00a0suspected\u00a0it\u00a0might not be good.\u00a0It was perhaps the first time I\u00a0was made\u00a0aware that in the present there\u00a0could be some portent\u00a0of the future.<\/p>\n When I think back on it, my parents at that time were probably quite\u00a0sensitized to the notion of\u00a0omens – the idea that there might be small\u00a0signals in any given moment that presage cataclysm. They did, after all, as children survive the firebombings of Stuttgart and regaled me from an early age with horrific\u00a0stories of charred corpses laid out on the cobblestones after the air raids, bodies incinerated to the size of bread loaves, and how all this\u00a0ensued after a charismatic man by the name of Adolf Hitler somehow\u00a0got into power and how things seemed so great at first with all the newfound pomp and ceremony, the trains running on time and those proud swastika flags flying everywhere before it all\u00a0fell apart and the true nature of the evil that had been unleashed became\u00a0increasingly\u00a0apparent. If\u00a0there is any truth in\u00a0current theories about inherited trauma, epigenetically transferred,\u00a0it might explain my own lifelong twitchiness despite\u00a0a childhood\u00a0in the safe, stuffy suburbs of Toronto. Perhaps this constitutes some as yet undescribed biological early warning system which sees the children of trauma survivors serve as societal antenna, predisposed toward vigilance\u00a0for signs of emerging disaster. It\u2019s all in the details really, the perceptions we\u00a0experience from moment to moment, the flux of sensations\u00a0we aggregate into\u00a0worlds\u00a0in which we\u00a0find meaning. The thought we\u00a0might inherit\u00a0the trauma\u00a0of our ancestors, despite not having experienced it directly, is unsettling.\u00a0Do\u00a0these shadows of the past predispose\u00a0some of us to be canaries in the coal mine?\u00a0The rustle of leaves might presage a storm, a mean-spirited remark\u2013nascent fascism.<\/p>\n Which brings me to\u00a0a\u00a0tree, an ancient and immense Douglas fir, whose death I observed over the past few years down the road from where I lived for a time on\u00a0a\u00a0rather remote\u00a0island in the twinkling Salish Sea. It is, or rather, was, an old-growth tree, a so-called veteran tree that somehow\u00a0survived\u00a0when the primeval forest all around it was felled and\u00a0boomed off to distant sawmills by two or three generations of settler-colonists. Judging by its height and girth,\u00a0this fir had been growing for well over four\u00a0centuries\u00a0and it\u00a0was alive and\u00a0well when I first\u00a0encountered it in the early 1990s. Knowing it was there, even when I was far away,\u00a0calmed\u00a0me.\u00a0I thought about it often in my\u00a0East Village apartment, the din of sirens and the drunken arguments\u00a0erupting\u00a0outside my window. I imagined it slowly accreting its growth rings as it always had, the only sound the soughing of needles high in\u00a0the crown, the branches there festooned with tufts of greenish-white lichen\u00a0that quivered\u00a0in the slightest breeze, the monumental, corrugated column of its trunk rising vertiginously into the winter mist, the fire-blackened bark of\u00a0the enormous base upholstered here and there with cushions of viridian moss.\u00a0In a tumultuous world,\u00a0there was at least this:\u00a0an ancient\u00a0being\u00a0somehow outlasting the\u00a0depredations of capitalism \u2013 a\u00a0vestige\u00a0of\u00a0a lost\u00a0arboreal sublime, a nonhuman\u00a0subject so\u00a0incongruous\u00a0with\u00a0modernity,\u00a0I\u00a0could only gasp\u00a0at its presence. It stood as\u00a0a defiant exception,\u00a0a marooned\u00a0titan whose colossal kin had long ago\u00a0disappeared\u00a0into the horizon\u00a0– a reminder of what there once\u00a0was, of what once was possible before capitalism subsumed\u00a0everything into board feet and dollar\u00a0figures\u00a0to be scribbled into ledgers.<\/p>\n But\u00a0the old fir died and it did so rapidly. Unlike my parents,\u00a0it wasn’t necessarily nearing the end of its\u00a0natural life. For\u00a0Douglas fir,\u00a0a lifespan of 600 -800 years is not uncommon<\/a>\u00a0and there are records of up to 1400-year-old trees elsewhere on the coast. The signs\u00a0of its demise were subtle at first \u2013a slight browning of\u00a0the needle tips after an uncharacteristically hot and witheringly dry summer. Though somewhat in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island, the island’s climate was considered maritime, generally characterized by a couple of fairly dry months in summer followed by 10 months of bucketing rain. The\u00a0vegetation was classed as\u00a0a temperate rainforest\u00a0with all of the\u00a0verdant mosses, glistening ferns\u00a0and outsized fungi one might expect in\u00a0such\u00a0fecund conditions. Coastal Douglas fir is exquisitely adapted to this habitat and some\u00a0of them number among the tallest and oldest trees in the world, comparable in size to the storied redwoods of California. Though the more accessible\u00a0trees\u00a0had long ago been plundered\u00a0from the island, (which incidentally is\u00a0named Cortes Island\u00a0after\u00a0one of the worst colonial plunderers of all time),\u00a0there still remains\u00a0a\u00a0relic population of massive\u00a0specimens<\/a>\u00a0that protrude\u00a0here and there\u00a0from the scraggly second-growth, looking like lignified\u00a0watchtowers, the storm-wracked\u00a0crowns often splintered and bent\u00a0into\u00a0expressionistic candelabras\u00a0that\u00a0are\u00a0the favoured perches for\u00a0bald\u00a0eagles surveying\u00a0the vastness of their\u00a0airy domains.<\/p>\n Old-growth Douglas fir on Cortes Island<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The fir down the road was a particularly magnificent example.\u00a0A strange lumpy growth, Agarikon fungus, hung like a\u00a0Venus of Willendorf\u00a0under a massive transverse limb.\u00a0Agarikon\u00a0is regarded as ‘shaman’s bread’ by\u00a0some First Nations. It often\u00a0is curiously anthropomorphic and was esteemed for its ability to cure a range of diseases.\u00a0The fungus had become an object of attention recently, when the celebrity mycologist, Paul Stamets sent a climber up the old tree to\u00a0retrieve a sample.\u00a0In his lab,\u00a0Stamets extracted novel compounds potentially effective against\u00a0such deadly human pathogens as anthrax and tuberculosis. Agarikon is symbiotic with old-growth Douglas fir and thus its\u00a0survival is threatened\u00a0as the ancient trees are exterminated.\u00a0Less than 1% of the original old-growth fir forest remains along the eastern side of Vancouver Island, where\u00a0it once dominated the landscape. The scant few veteran trees that survive are thus incredibly precious, not only as living\u00a0reminders\u00a0of a prelapsarian past but as an indispensable habitat for\u00a0organisms such as Agarikon and many\u00a0more\u00a0yet to be catalogued. The very biggest trees\u00a0support a\u00a0rare arboreal soil<\/a> constituting\u00a0a unique ecosystem, a kind of microcosm populated\u00a0by microorganisms and invertebrates unknown on the ground. We\u00a0may be running out of time to\u00a0find out whether one of\u00a0these might\u00a0contain, for example, some\u00a0novel antibiotic or a cancer remedy. The last old\u00a0firs are disappearing too fast.<\/span><\/p>\n Agarikon\u00a0on fir some years before the decline<\/p><\/div>\n The following summer was again unprecedentedly hot with temperatures almost daily breaking long-standing records and accompanied by a pitiless drought. The halcyon days of July and August I had been\u00a0so used to,\u00a0the cerulean\u00a0dome of the sky,\u00a0the gentle ocean\u00a0breezes, were now occluded in\u00a0apocalyptic orange\u00a0with the noonday sun\u00a0brooding over the silhouetted\u00a0evergreens like a\u00a0bloody eye or\u00a0some celestial stoplight the planet had switched on to tell us all it had finally had enough. My throat\u00a0rasped and my eyes\u00a0seeped as I walked\u00a0past the local campground\u00a0listening to the muffled coughing of\u00a0holidaymakers cowering in their zipped-up tents.\u00a0The interior of the province was on fire and plumes of\u00a0Stygian smoke\u00a0billowed out\u00a0from the mainland inlets and\u00a0across the Desolation Sound, yes it’s actually called that,\u00a0its waters now warm as urine,\u00a0enshrouding the little island in\u00a0eerie twilight,\u00a0with skeins of\u00a0acrid vapour\u00a0clinging to\u00a0any irregular\u00a0surface for days\u00a0then weeks.<\/p>\n As for the fir down the road, the\u00a0dead\u00a0needles that had\u00a0only begun to be apparent the\u00a0previous summer\u00a0had now spread\u00a0throughout the crown\u00a0as if scorched\u00a0by the poisoned breath of a basilisk. The Agarikon I had always\u00a0admired as I passed beneath it had\u00a0somehow\u00a0just\u00a0disappeared and I imagined its lumpy form\u00a0shinnying\u00a0down\u00a0some moonless night to rejoin its long-lost colleagues in the mycelial underworld to\u00a0maybe just wait\u00a0this one<\/em>\u00a0out,<\/em>\u00a0to return, perhaps, once\u00a0we’d made ourselves extinct to feast on our littered corpses.<\/p>\n Before these summers of smoke, Cortes had\u00a0seemed a blissed-out\u00a0sort of a\u00a0place,\u00a0at times annoyingly so\u00a0when it bordered on the smug and self-congratulatory, a kind of loose compendium of anti-vaxxers, cagey-eyed preppers and Subaru seniors of the bird-watching sort in pastel\u00a0Patagonia\u00a0and sensible hiking boots, with a sprinkling of New Age utopianists, invariably Caucasian but\u00a0with exuberantly died ethnic clothing. The demographic skews heavily toward flowing grey hair and old although there are\u00a0always a few young, mostly itinerant, earth muffins, trying to make a go of it\u00a0stocking shelves at the Food Co-op or doing laundry at the New Age retreat center.\u00a0 I garnered some incredulous looks when I let it be known\u00a0I now needed two puffs\u00a0from my asthma inhaler and a face mask just to make it through my daily run. Ruth, my normally robust wife, came down with chemical pneumonia\u00a0from the incessant and unavoidable smoke that curled around our eaves and seeped into every\u00a0cranny. She spent 3 weeks\u00a0bed-ridden wheezing and coughing and heavily medicated during what should have been a restorative interlude in our hectic yearly schedule.\u00a0But this is paradise! This will all pass! And indeed it was once a paradise, at least for those with the means to enjoy hand-crafted cedar houses nestled among whispering conifers\u00a0with views of\u00a0snow-capped mountains and azure expanses of the warmest tidewaters north of California.\u00a0Humpback whales still cavort charismatically among\u00a0the bellied\u00a0sails of recreational yachters, living\u00a0out their\u00a0baby boomer dreams, we made it man! the more fitness-minded among them earnestly shovelling at the limpid waves\u00a0as they recede\u00a0into the horizon\u00a0of their next\u00a0carefully-curated\u00a0kayak adventure. Yes there are stubborn pockets of rural poverty and the infrastructure is in serious decline, but nobody likes to talk about that for fear of\u00a0a bummer vibe.<\/p>\n summer of smoke<\/p><\/div>\n By the third summer, the old fir I had loved so dearly\u00a0was really and truly dead.\u00a0The\u00a0branches once redolent with fragrant fans of\u00a0blue-green needles now rattled like\u00a0dry bones in the too-warm air\u00a0with the\u00a0lacework of their desiccated twigs\u00a0tinged\u00a0in\u00a0an\u00a0insalubrious orange from\u00a0which\u00a0a few dead cones still hung. Though I was heartbroken, the great tree’s demise seemed to pass mostly unnoticed.\u00a0The\u00a0‘don’t worry be happy\/the universe will provide’<\/em>\u00a0cult of\u00a0magical thinking\u00a0is\u00a0strongly enforced on Cortes Island, a\u00a0kind of unquestioning loyalty to a failed utopia I have come across\u00a0throughout the Pacific Northwest, despite the\u00a0mental health emergencies, suicides by overdose and domestic abuse situations that plague the\u00a0place.\u00a0A brutal murder some years ago was met by\u00a0a wall of silence from islanders,\u00a0who seemed unable\u00a0to\u00a0accommodate this grim event\u00a0into their idealized conceptions of the place, which I imagine\u00a0resembles\u00a0something\u00a0off of\u00a0a Celestial Seasonings tea label,\u00a0populated by Smurfs,\u00a0polka-dotted mushrooms and flaxen-haired children feeding absurdly tame wildlife.<\/p>\n For now,\u00a0the\u00a0imposing\u00a0column of the fir’s great trunk\u00a0still towers\u00a0over\u00a0the T-junction near my former home, but beneath\u00a0its thick bark, the sap\u00a0vessels no longer\u00a0defy gravity\u00a0to\u00a0convey\u00a0their\u00a0nourishment\u00a0to the needles\u00a0high\u00a0up in\u00a0the crown, where the buzzing chloroplasts magically\u00a0plucked photons\u00a0from the sunbeams\u00a0and\u00a0enchanted\u00a0the\u00a0monumental\u00a0scaffold of wood and bark that\u00a0supported them\u00a0into a living, breathing colossus.\u00a0For hundreds of years,\u00a0the fir endured, wracked\u00a0by howling southeasters, wrenched by sodden\u00a0oceanic snows, baked\u00a0under the hyper-illuminating\u00a0sunshine\u00a0of\u00a0dog day summers\u00a0when the\u00a0ground fires tore\u00a0around\u00a0its feet,\u00a0each new generation\u00a0of woodpeckers incessantly chiselling, the gnashing mandibles\u00a0of\u00a0numberless wood-boring insects, persistent and unforgiving, the endless\u00a0fallout of microbes each seeking purchase\u00a0to infest and spread rot\u00a0– it\u00a0endured all of this until a new\u00a0variable\u00a0was\u00a0added into\u00a0its equation for survival. This variable was borne a world away in\u00a0Great Britain where the economic innovation of capitalism\u00a0married\u00a0the brand new idea of fossil-fuel-powered machinery,\u00a0a union that was to unleash long-sequestered gases that began to heat up the atmosphere, a process\u00a0that\u00a0progressively\u00a0accelerated and is now raging uncontrollably.\u00a0I won’t bore anyone with the details \u2013the record temperatures, the extremes of all kinds of weather\u2013we are all aware of the grim and continuously unfolding litany of climate change, but at some moment, just a few years ago, that very old Douglas fir beside the country road on a little green island far out in the Salish Sea just couldn’t take it anymore and began to die. Others like it are dying too, all over the island and up and down the Pacific Coast, as are\u00a0the giants in other parts of the world, the baobabs, the sequoias,\u00a0even in hard-fought-for protected\u00a0areas that\u00a0assuaged\u00a0us into thinking that\u00a0at least these<\/em>\u00a0would somehow be safe. But they’re not<\/em> safe, with the biggest and\u00a0most venerable\u00a0trees succumbing increasingly to a kind of aneurism <\/a>elicited by the stress from the unprecedented\u00a0extremes they (and we) are now\u00a0experiencing, conditions that go far beyond what their\u00a0genetically determined\u00a0strategies for survival have equipped\u00a0them to endure.<\/p>\n Perhaps someday no\u00a0one will miss these old-growth\u00a0Douglas firs\u00a0that for so long made the coast\u00a0of the Salish Sea a place unique\u00a0to\u00a0the world. In\u00a0a generation or two,\u00a0the big trees will likely all be gone\u00a0as global heating continues apace, vanished into oblivion\u00a0like\u00a0the passenger pigeon, the Steller’s sea cow\u00a0and the\u00a0California grizzly bear before them. Though\u00a0future generations might marvel at\u00a0their images\u00a0on\u00a0the page\u00a0or on\u00a0the screen, or\u00a0count the rings\u00a0of\u00a0a\u00a0salvaged\u00a0cross-section hanging in\u00a0some museum, we will have lost\u00a0the opportunity\u00a0to experience\u00a0the grandeur\u00a0of\u00a0these living, breathing beings\u00a0whose\u00a0lifespans once far exceeded our own, whose\u00a0survival into the deep horizons of time once gave us the opportunity to contemplate the ephemerality of our existence.\u00a0\u00a0But I\u00a0have stood\u00a0beneath\u00a0them, some of the\u00a0last of them, when they were still lush and green,\u00a0traced my eyes up along\u00a0their\u00a0towering\u00a0trunks, and listened to\u00a0the poetry of their whispering boughs. And for\u00a0as long as I\u00a0might\u00a0continue to live, I will cherish their memory.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve never seen a tree before. It\u2019s pretty! It\u2019s dead\u2026 Blade Runner 2049 Death is a complicated business and how one might feel about a particular death has a lot to do with how understandable it was,\u00a0how inevitable. The loss of a loved one, near and dear, opens up a hole and the memories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,9,14,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate","category-forests","category-trees","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2193"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2378,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions\/2378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n