Joni vs KD

When I think of Joni Mitchell and KD Lang, I think of the song The Valley and imagine the two of them separated by altitude and attitude - 'I live in the valley, you live in the hills'.  Who lives where is unimportant, except Joni lived in a canyon so maybe she should be the valley dweller: although possibly her ethereal warbling is more suited to being up on high.  When we went to see KD Lang, she took off her shoes and sang rooted to the ground, earth-connected.  Well, who cares; the point is they are very different and we both had our favourites. And The Valley was written by Jane Siberry, so neither of them.

Karin loved KD Lang.  She loved her more than I love Joni Mitchell because she loved the person as well as the music, their shared initials were surely beyond coincidence.  She loved KD's raw honesty about herself, her rabble-rousing self-confidence, sexual identity, veganism, even her hair style.  And her singing - a sound that seemed to grow from the earth like a forest, and made of a natural purity that rejected any artifice.   Lyrics that told deep stories about real people; people who sat and loved each other, properly.
New CD's were brought into this house as soon as they were released and played over and over, then added to the rotation of all the other KD CD's.  Any singers similar to KD Lang were instantly dismissed as unpalatable (an exception was made for Bonnie Raitt): and as for Joni Mitchell, well she just put her dirty laundry on display and sang with a voice that could break glass. Oh well.

The Canadian heritage of both these singers (not to mention Jane Siberry) give a hint of the icing on the cake - a connection that began and ended with our family self-definition as neo-Canadians: new settlers in a country that is still trying to understand the impact of the previous incomers.  The timing of KD Lang when she entered our consciousness at the turn of the millenium - a new age for us - was perfect as we headed toward Toronto.   So KD Lang's songs became incorporated into Karin's character, like adding a herb to soup; and by default into our family identity.

A few months before Karin died we discovered a KD Lang song we didn't know: Barefoot.  Its lupine chorus, reflective words and guitar accompaniment beautifully matched the sheer bleak cold of the film it was used as the soundtrack for.  We sent off for the film; what with that track, and KD Lang playing one of the main characters it just had to be watched.  I may be wrong but I think it was the last film Karin saw; with a glass of wine and the curtains drawn we were taken to an arctic place where no life existed outside a parker jacket.
The film felt like a film-school piece with oblique sideways glances and long atmospheric shots, but no matter - we had bought into the whole thing.  The triangulation of music, actor, country, generated a whole that reinforced what was in our mind - KD Lang is very cool.  She is very cool because she talks the language of the earth; there is an honest purity to her music and life that pushes up against other disingenuous characters in the media.  Karin liked that - no affectation.

(image taken from http://www.cinema.de/bilder/salmonberries,1296734.html)

Beady Belle

The circle game

I remember walking around the hospital when Elly was born - empty corridors, with just the occasional cleaner freshening the place up during the lull of night, ready for the messy hordes the following day.  The floor shone in the low level security lighting and the warmth of the day finally gave way to a gentle dark stickiness. We were satellites; operating independently of the rest of humanity and in a world, an existence, of our own.  The occasional intrusion of another family, evidenced by a panicky moaning from behind one of those wooden varnished doors, or someone wandering around to find the toilets or leaving the building for a cigarette, seemed to me to be wrong - how dare they be in our hospital?  The staff were surely just for us - they had led us to believe that anything we wanted could be given to us.  Shared gazes focused inward onto one spot.

The same went for the oncology ward and the hospice.  Sucked into being individuals and leaving society behind, it was dislocating to find someone else there living out the same experience.  I would meet another relative hovering by the kettle or trying to work the remote for the family room tv, and wonder how they have blundered into our universe. One woman in the hospice talked to me most days.  I went there every day for just over two weeks - my incarceration was completed on 11th July, but hers kept going.  Her uncle had hung on for 23 weeks and she went in every single day, wandering round the corridors and getting to know others passing through.  When she had seen I wasn't there, she told me she knew what had happened and wished me all the best in the rest of my life.  And with that and a quick hug from a fellow sufferer she released me back into a world of cars, shops, people, noise and connections.

The odd thing of course is that it was all an illusion: people are being born all the time.  The hospital was filled with rooms that held women in the feral act of childbirth - exposing flesh and behaviour that is normally so locked away.  Animal noises, warm pale limbs, bare feet.
Couples will walk out in a steady stream, one by one so they don't see other couples, clutching soft bundles or hard plastic car seats. Women wearing slippers more suited to the bedroom than the street, walking slowly with exhaustion and bed culture; new dads with swollen eyes from lack of sleep and blinking back unaccustomed tears.
 And the hospice - families leaving, not with a newborn baby but a plain carrier bag that may contain a washing kit, more slippers, a photograph: precious little compared to the amount of objects we magpie together over the years and that clutter up the mantle pieces and shelves of our lives.  Every day, families walk out like this and every day the beds are cleaned and remade, ready for the next person.  We did not have a unique experience - it is being played out in multiples in this city right now.  The miracle of birth and death is made mundane by its ubiquity.

I went back to the hospice the day after Karin died to organise some clothes and after an interview with the nurse I went through to thank the doctor for her care.  As I passed the staff many said hello to me, but they had stepped off the path.  They were caring for someone else now - all that focused compassion was redirected.  The doctor hardly recognised me despite us having had some quite intimate conversations in the last few days.
The individual act of dying - or being born - takes place parallel to similar journeys undergone by countless other individuals.  Any sense of Karin's death being unique is dashed in a moment's refection.
Was her death unique?  Are all deaths unique?  What makes us think that our experience is noteworthy?
Three months later I am still reconsidering what happened and what is happening; but six miles from here seventeen families are sitting drinking tea while the low sun streams through the window in dusty shafts.  Laundered cotton sits in smooth piles, blankets gently slip to the floor, someone cuts the grass.

Mindfulness and compassion

Last Sunday I attended a course offering an introduction to mindfulness; Karin was a regular at the organisation's weekend retreats and I rather felt that I wanted to continue our relationship with a group that had contributed strongly to her positive approach.  I don't know whether she had a talent for mindfulness lying dormant that was triggered into action when she became ill or that she was suddenly receptive to these ideas given her circumstances, or more likely a mixture of the two, but she seemed to take this approach and weave it into the fabric of the end of her life in such a way that mindfulness provided a meaningful structure and integrity.

The morning dawned with oxygen-rich mists and pavements increasingly scuffed with brown leaves curled like shells.  The silence of the day provided space that was pegged out by birds making the best use of the absence of people.  I walked to the venue to save fiddling with a bike and arrived warm and alert, well aware that if Karin had been around she would have attended: hugging old friends, pulling out home-made brownies and flooding the room with sparkle in a way only she could.  She sure could work a room.
This didn't help me much, and as we settled for the first session I felt the air silently filling with a melancholy that seemed destined just for me.  The very furniture seemed to include her vocabulary - cushions for meditating on, wicker chairs and blankets for those with cold feet. The introduction of all the people around the room drew out her presence and I was really finding it hard to keep functioning; but like lancing an infection, when I introduced myself and my reason for attending, the pressure was then relieved and the rest of the morning developed into a calm well-suited to the themes of the day.

Short sessions, plenty of talk, tea, cool autumn sun pushing through the window; the day progressed in a relaxed manner, until quite suddenly it was the very last meditation - Metta Bharvana; a loving-kindness meditation.  The irrepressible spirit of Karin finally beat its way through all the closed eyes, herbal teas, bells and cushions.  I suddenly remembered a facebook entry she made about this meditation and from then on struggled to avoid giggling.  I have reproduced it below, but if there is any chance that you may be carrying out this meditation some time in the future please don't read it, as I promise the last line will haunt you and appear just when you hope it won't.  In one facebook comment Karin managed to destroy a 3,000 year old buddhist practice.

Hmmmm. I don't know that I'm really suited to mindfulness. This morning I did my yoga, very nice indeed, peaceful in fact. Then I sat for 20 minutes with the intention of doing a metta bharvana meditation.

Stage 1 - feeling loving kindness towards myself - was okay, tho I found it hard not to be critical of myself. Stages 2 and 3 - feeling loving kindness towards a good friend and feeling the humanity of and loving kindness towards someone I don't know well/have neutral feelings about - went better.

Then came Stage 4 - loving kindness towards someone I dislike or feel is an enemy. Oh dear. 

I just wanted to kill that person. Stab stab stab. Oh dear. Didn't make it to the end. Oh deary deary me.

Just remember, the spirit of Monkey was.... irrepressible

 

Who we are

I just found this picture in my hard drive.  I was trying to remember when it was - Karin still had hair and those beaten-down slippers that slowly slumped to earth as the fabric lost its integrity.  It was in our summer house and I could trace this back to the exact time; but I don't want to - what is the point?  Here is a moment: when the moment occured isn't relevant; it's not as if I am methodically constructing an archive like meticulously prepared specimens pinned into a glass cabinet with hand-written labels, dates places.

I can see it in her eyes, but I don't know if you can.  You might just see a woman, relaxed and thoughtful.  I, however, can see the world being sorted out, the interconnectedness between people, the act of sitting in your own life.  I can see that because that was in her mind - that took up her mind.

In tidying up her work stuff this morning I found an old CV.  Was that who she was?  Or was it a constructed other-ego that was made for a purpose.  The public, the private, the solitary, the unconscious, all combine to create a distilled overview of the person.

I knew the fierceness of loving one, just one person.  The all-consuming richness that gave strength to existence; and of course I knew the feeling of receiving the same back.

Karin

Karin and I were a couple for over thirty years – we started going out the first night we met. We have owned three houses, three children and hundreds of cats.  I was always into cycling and running and Karin was always into books – over time our interests blended, like a Venn diagram where the circles are moving together.

Oddly, Karin always claimed that after she left school she convinced herself that she wasn’t sporty: bad mistake marrying me then.  As she got older her physical vocabulary came back, starting with karate in Canada then progressing to running on the road, followed closely by my favourite hobby; off-road running.  We also bought her a nice road bike that she could use to go to work on as well as recreational rides.  She was pretty strong; I have a very clear memory of her riding in a duathlon and riding round grinning and laughing the whole way to fourth place in the cycling section. 

The last two years have seen us sharing the burden of cancer. Karin was the one who had to endure tests and scans followed by chemo and radio-therapy.  She vomited, had seizures, and lost the feeling in her legs. Her headaches lasted months, not hours, and her hair was scorched off her scalp, but she very rarely complained.  No, she planned holidays, parties, visits, she identified what she wanted to make the little life she had left as pleasurable as possible.  She wrote and published a novel and filled countless books with ideas. She planned and had special moments with our children to provide meaningful complete memories for them. She insisted, insisted, that I buy a titanium bike (a real chore for me). People became very important, to the point at which Karin’s strength was only in evidence when friends or family were around – often when they left she just collapsed into exhausted sleep. 

What did I do? Cooking, cleaning, counting the medication out, being company, working, writing this blog, staying in touch with people, and latterly, organising everything.  I also went running – Karin told me to.  She said it was important I had some ‘me’ time and it would help me unravel my head.  And I was her partner.  Not as a passive state but active, like two people pressing their foreheads together. We sat and just existed.  We went to the supermarket and actually enjoyed it, we talked, drank prosecco together. We sat in bed until far too late in the morning and drank tea made by the Teasmaid. She liked toast in bed, one with marmalade and one with jam or occasionally marmite. I loved it; I could care for her and we would connect deeply.

When I went running I always had to have my phone on me just in case she had a problem.  Now when I go out I have to check my reflex and leave the phone at home – no-one will phone me.

Karin’s energy ran out three weeks before she died.  She knew how close she was to the end but still spent her time making sure everyone was ok.  She still sent me out running, although I was scared to go for very long.  I took my running kit to the hospice but never felt confident enough to change and get out, despite being very close to Blaise estate.  The staff in the hospice looked after her while I tried to sit and understand the changes that had occurred in us.  They recognised the journey both of us were on and provided the care and guidance we needed.

We all get pestered constantly for contributions to this or that charity, but it is only when you need the support of one you really know their value.  I knew what hospices did but I didn’t know what that felt like.  I had no idea that a nurse would see me sitting on my own and come and chat with me for 30 minutes. I didn’t know that the care extends beyond the death of the patient, or that relatives who live a long way away can access counselling skills from other hospices; this means our children can still be supported even when they are away at university.

Please consider making a donation to the St Peter’s Hospice.  I want to give back the care we all received during Karin’s time there so that someone else can have it.  Everybody deserves a dignified death.

Click on the link below to go to my fund raising page;

 http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/displaySomeoneSpecialPage.action?pageUrl=KarinDixonWilkins

In Memory of Karin Dixon Wilkins

Last week I cycled through the top field at Ashton Court in the evening. They had left the grass long for the flowers to complete their cycle and the field was lank and rich with life.  Orchids were standing alongside moon daisies; flies and moths hovered above, and the air was full of swallows etching the sky; their peeping calls bouncing back from the silent woods.

How do you buy a wedding ring for a singular person?  For Karin’s ring we trawled the usual sterile chain shops but found only two possibilities; an overly expensive vintage ring in an antique shop or having one made, which we ordered. The resulting ring was perfect and defined Karin accurately – quirky, unique and classy in a way was unique; a sine wave; gold with a twist.  

I lost it at Ashton Court festival in that same top field, after having offered to put it in my wallet for safety.  I must have dropped it in the grass amid the conspicuous rejection of plain living, the wine hidden in kids’ juice bottles, sweet illicit whiffs of cannabis, colours, eclectic images, sounds, tastes.  Those bright colours sat well on her. 

But now, the clatter of people had gone and the predominant sound was the gentle hum of nature. Over the years the field has changed; trees that I remember leaning over the path in the past have since dropped large branches that feed fungi and creatures.  The field has the same shapes, same indents and bulges but now there is a small new path that mountain bikers use to thread along the top. The bottom path that led out of the field is gone, buried under nettles and brambles. Karin’s ring is in the field somewhere, sat against the bedrock, maybe for millennia, maybe for eternity.

Two years ago we stayed in the Alps.  We packed loads of water to counteract the heat, a cold pizza folded in half for food, and a map, and set off jogging up a steep path that was toothed with rocks.  Plenty of walkers stepped aside to let us past – some made encouraging comments in French which only Karin understood; she was good at languages.  In fact she was good at all communication and thrived on contact with others.  I sometimes felt guilty at taking her up into wild places away from people and subjecting her to the physical discomfort of steepness and wind, but she would do these things for me.

After two hours of running we hit a plateau followed by a final climb to a cliff face that offered a startling view of Mont Blanc.  We felt we could reach out and touch it; its implacable face blinding in the sun.  People cluttered the spot and Karin was taken by what they were up to.  One family had a full picnic, complete with a jar of jam and a baguette.  Another man was reading Le Monde; neither seemed appropriate up a mountain but she thought this was excellent – people thumbing their nose at what you are ‘supposed to do’.

As the afternoon came to an end we started running back down the path.  It’s harder running downhill, the gradient burns your thighs and the temptation to speed up is controlled by fear of roots that could trip you up. The high plateau and Mont Blanc were left behind, still there but out of sight. 

That run was when the landscape entered Karin’s soul. We had travelled into the land and gained some understanding of how we fit in the world. The consistent cycle of days, rocks, impermanence, the annual cycle of orchids, the sun setting. We are mortal, even mountains are mortal. The only way to understand the different speeds of change is by sinking gradually into the land, the great breathing of bedrock.  Since that holiday Karin changed dramatically; her terminal diagnosis pushed her into thinking about how she fitted in her life and how her life fitted into time. Karin’s approach to her own mortality has given us a new template, one that understands that in a thousand or a million years none of us will be here; what we have right now is what we have. This is a gift from her to you.

Karin was scared of running up mountains; she hated heights and was cautious of going somewhere that was potentially dangerous.  What leads a person to give in to the desires and interests of their partner, despite being terrified? Only I know how much she struggled up there; I could read the body language as the ascent and descent both brought their challenges. Karin was prepared to face her ghosts head on and her reward was a final two years that were rich and meaningful.

I bought her a new ring.  The jeweller that made the first one still had the original design but despite a couple of attempts just couldn’t recreate it.  We bought their best effort; a lovely ring but not the same.  There is no trace of the original, no photos, nothing.  Except it sits somewhere in that field – it has gone but is still present.