Pop 89: Happy Waves arrive in the midst of a life turned upside down

By Madonna Hamel

Good morning, world. It’s been awhile since we talked. I believe my last Pop89 column was a continuation of my preparation for Lent. A rumination on how we are all handfuls of ashes and dust, accumulated over the years, at the mercy of memories, families and steadily frailer bodies.

Little did I know how frail until March 2, when on the phone to my sister I started to babble. I was having a seizure. Not that I remember. She had to call Kelowna emerg to call Saskatchewan, who called my village EMR volunteer service, which dispatched three of Val Marie’s finest to the garage hut a few feet away, hauled out the ambulance and made it to my house in minutes, without me knowing, or even now remembering any details, except that I somehow had the wherewithal to let them in my front door.

I was rushed to Swift Current and then helicoptered to Saskatoon, where thankfully they have a world-famous neurological team. While I was being prepped for surgery — the removal of a tumour the size of a handful of golf balls, squishing up against my right parietal lobe — my entire family and my pal Avril in Toronto (owner of Toad Hall across the road from me in Val Marie) were making their way to be with me.

“I know there will be treatments to come… but I will slowly lose awareness of self, so before it all rolls off the table, I write it all down.”

When I woke from surgery, there they were — grinning down at me: Cecile, my big sis from Ottawa; Celeste from Kelowna; Jody and Syl, my roomies these past couple weeks, keeping me fed and loved in Medicine Hat; Michel and her new wife Siona — the Banff Tea Co.; and Dougie.

Dougie, who on the same day I had my seizure four years ago had a stroke. And now we both stare at each other in wonder at what our brains have been up to. Dougie, who understands how times and numbers and days are like marbles tossed on a table; they just keep rolling onto the ground. And if you don’t want to go mad, you go with the roll. Because, eventually, something clicks. Or you develop a strategy. Or you learn to drop the subject because there are far too many variables to keep track of what’s being said.

Those first few days I spent a lot of time sorting out who I was, where I was, when I was and why I was. And if it weren’t for loved ones, for my big Catholic family — who may or may not be practising our childhood religion, except for litanies of knee-jerk rosaries — I know I would be filled with terror and sadness about what does or does not come next for me.

But my family knows, once they get me checked out of more than a few hospital wards and safely ensconced in Medicine Hat, how to fill the empty spaces with know-how. How to be tight-knit, pushy, advice-offering, need-anticipating, entertaining and diverting. How to listen to my rants, jokes and nonsense. How to keep a Scrabble game running on the kitchen table and a coffee pot on the stove and a pair of eyes on me all through the days and nights.

Every morning at 8:10 and every evening at 8:10 my stalwart brother-in-law presents me with my allotted meds while singing, “C’est toujours le temps de les pilules!” And I take them gratefully. I know there’s an anti-seizure in there. And a steroid and a few other things that cannot undo the damage and even the growth of this malignant mass that’s been quietly settling in my head like an uninvited guest, shoving my notes and books, my plans and goals, my memories and impressions aside.

I know there will be treatments to come. They won’t be painful. But I will slowly lose awareness of self, so before it all rolls off the table, I write it all down.

All day and night, in bursts of an hour or two, I am filling notebooks. While still in my bed on the neuro ward at Saskatoon Royal Hospital, Jody, my Medicine Hat “mom,” brought me a bag full of blank composition journals. The first thing I did was pencil in the letters “De” in front of “composition.”

“This week I am thrilled to wake every morning… with a surge of joy and gratitude for the little joys that make life worthwhile.”

I had every intention of preparing myself for the inevitable end. We’re all physically decomposing as we speak, after all. I just wanted to bring that truth to my conscious mind. But I also had every intention of readying myself for a much broader and bigger sojourn, resembling a dance between my soul and an immortal soul-keeper whose shape resembled a very personal God of my own understanding.

Those journals filled quickly. But even more lucky — or graced, as the case may be — I can still write. And read. I am still excited about the many ways I can pursue this experience even as it pursues me. Keeping the brain working — what part of it I still can — not only keeps me engaged with the world, it keeps the overly active imagination from stirring up the worst-case scenarios. Because let’s face it, we all have worst-case scenarios as our material endgame.

Enter my friend Diana with another bag full of journals, pens, paint brushes. And an entire cake. Because apparently steroids make me ravenous. Enter Joseph Naytowhow, Diana’s beau, with a card called “Sherlock Holmes’s Brain,” involving a bookshelf, a mystery and a cranium.

Seeing as they’d just removed my cranium, vacuumed inside my head and replaced my skull with staples and a Stryker gun, I wasn’t up to the task of figuring out how to play the card game. But I made sure Joseph knew that Arthur Conan Doyle was my favourite author as a teen. And the Sherlock Holmes books were the first full-length books I could settle into after the Bobbsey Twins.

When Diana and Joseph arrived again, bearing more paper, pens and brushes, I attempted articulating my concerns about my tremulous spiritual trajectory. As the resident Indigenous knowledge keeper in the law department of the University of Saskatchewan, I knew I could ask him about legal matters that went beyond legislation. But I also knew he would keep the whole thing grounded in reality.

I knew that Cree law was also sacred law, creation stories and treaty relationships. Natural law, relationship with the natural world. Deliberative law, talking circles, feasts, council meetings and debates.

From my hospital bed I told Joseph I felt pretty certain people had died the night before. I felt spirits pass through me. He told me to reassure them they were OK and to keep moving. For every sticky situation there’s a prayer — whether you’re Cree, Catholic, Buddhist or Sufi. There are words to say when you feel tongue-tied or spirit-haunted. Find them and repeat them. Even if it feels rote. Eventually something loosens and flows.

The morning of my big ambulance trip I was doing some divine reading — lectio divina. That’s where you read from sacred writings until you hit on words that strike a chord. Then you stop, reflect, take note, pray around it. I was reading Richard Rohr’s book The Divine Dance, the meaning of the Holy Spirit. In it he says, “In the beginning was the Word.” Which is the same thing as saying, “In the beginning was the relationship.”

Which I take to mean words have to land somewhere. There has to be a relationship between you and the word, the speaker, the holy spirit messenger, the homing pigeon, the whisperer. It’s all about relationships.

Before my incident Joseph, Diana and I were getting ready for another World Storytelling Day performance in Val Marie. Last year I’d created a “newscast” called Slow-Breaking News From the Subtle World, wherein I relayed the latest news regarding weather, animals, insects and all the small, subtle yet essential details that make our lives worth living.

This week I am thrilled to wake every morning, or from an afternoon nap, with a surge of joy and gratitude for the little joys that make life worthwhile.

I call them Happy Waves.

Happy Wave No. 1: Just waking up. That’s cause enough for joy. The happy waves are not tsunamis or Surf’s Up waves. They are ripples, shimmers, glittering on the surface of an oceanic source of joy. So, even though I was still in Saskatoon Hospital, I kind of liked my set-up: a bed the size I’m used to, my nun’s bed at home, donated to me by my friend Mette, who runs the Convent B&B, a table with books and pens, and a cold Tim Hortons latte at the ready. And, of course, these beautiful people called family and friends, some of whom I swear got Māori tattoos since last I saw them.

I had to learn not to be troubled by the hallucinations. To let curiosity rule over fear. It’s easier to do that when your hallucinations get a laugh. My sister Jody notes them in a little scribbler to read back to me later.

Happy Wave No. 2: Chopin. Jody finds a set of Nocturnes at the library. After supper she does her stretches and I drift off to sleep on the couch, surrounded by a moat of books, pens and journals. I need this: the drift of the music that tickled down the hallway at night when we were children. I can still hear Mom playing Chopin, struggling with the tricky bits, but then softly, slowly relinquishing into the flow of evening giving over to night-time. When not playing Chopin, we play Mozart, Mom’s other hero.

That I can even fall asleep is a gift. Because every once in a while I startle myself with mental calculations: Let’s see. I went into emerge on the 2nd of March. They did surgery on the 5th. The pathology report came back on the 23rd. I won’t have a consult till April 9. Who knows when the actual treatment will begin. What am I thinking I’m achieving by counting every second of every day? The reporter in me says: just the facts, ma’am. But the mystic says: It will be what it will be.

If this is actually as surprising and splendid and beautiful a journey as I suspect it is, then drifting off to sleep in the middle of the day is the making of another happy wave. I don’t need to be hyper-vigilant for the rest of my life. I’ve already spent so much precious energy protecting myself and others from monstrosities and perceived slights. I don’t want to be a bad ass. I don’t “got this.” And that, at least for now, feels OK. Even more so, it feels right. Because whoever made Mole, Ratty, Badger, the sunlight pouring through the window, the light emanating from the heart of a bouquet of tulips sent by a friend, is killing me with a light eternal: buoyant, illuminated and light-hearted. I’m laughing in all the wrong places. And that can only be good.

Happy Wave No. 3: I wake to see sunlight pouring through the hospital window land on a copy of The Wind in the Willows, a book that has followed me since 2018, when both Avril and Page insisted I have a copy to get me through another ICU incident. I got blood poisoning while gardening. Within minutes, both Avril and I watched as a red line crept up my arm. She sped me up to Shaunavon emerge, where they pumped me with antibiotics. Somehow I got my own copy of The Wind in the Willows and through it came to understand that I am Ratty, Page is Badger, and Avril is Toad. And Mole is every kind-hearted soul I’ve ever known.

Happy Wave No. 4: I have a copy of that book beside me right now, open to a moment where Mole and Ratty have returned from a fraught wander in the Wild Wood and he says: “I feel as if I had been through something very exciting and rather terrible, and it was just over, and yet nothing particular had happened.”

“Or something very surprising and splendid and beautiful,” murmured Rat, leaning back and closing his eyes.

That’s been these last three weeks. Only three weeks and my world turned upside down. Inside out. Yet still: so surprising, so splendid, so beautiful.