a short note on mortality;
Lately I’ve been thinking, once more, about mortality. Two nights ago, I received an email from poet Robert Hogg, who lives about an hour away, in South Mountain, informing me that his cancer had returned, and that he was entering palliative care. All of this, as a response to my email about an upcoming event. He won’t be able to make it out. He wanted to let us know. “Tonight they tell us on TV which was really your home for nearly / forty years that you died in your sleep last night eighty-six years old,” he wrote, in the poem “Roy Rogers – a jazz elegy” from his chapbook from Lamentations (above/ground press, 2016). Robert Hogg has entered palliative care. I remember, in 2018, hearing from Natalee Caple on a Sunday night that our dear friend, Toronto writer Priscila Uppal had entered palliative care, also for cancer. By Wednesday morning, she had already passed. What are we to do with this kind of information? As Hogg’s poem continues:
and still hopeful still riding to that eventual horizon that forever recedes
like it does in the fade ins and fade outs of the movies Roy are you fading
now or are you sailing into some cowboy heaven the memory of Dale and Trigger
firmly planted in the brim of your ethereal Stetson that never falls off no matter
how precipitous the plunge over the cliff the leap to freedom across the chasm
whole Grand Canyons opening and closing beneath you as you hurtle on your
Palomino Pegasus to the other side
Bob has been a constant across six decades of writing and literary activity, the bulk of it there from their organic farm just south of the city, or his office at Carleton University, at events around the city, or beyond the bounds of what social media might offer. He’s been here, but so often and easily overlooked, despite his years of activity. He’s been quietly, constantly around and supportive, supporting, like a cheery-eyed Eeyore, somehow. I’m attempting to write this down to perhaps solidify the knowledge; to force myself to pay attention to the fact that this poet, this good man that I have known more than thirty years, might soon be no longer with us.
There has been such a sequence of losses across the past two-plus years, from the abstract to the deeply personal, something I’m reminded of, yet again, when rereading the pieces in my essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), a book composed across the first one hundred days of original lockdown. I wrote on the loss of Joe Blades, in April 2020, nearly a month after his own father died; I wrote on the slow and eventual loss of my own father, mere days after hearing about Joe, and some sixteen months after my father was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was fine until he wasn’t, and even then. And throughout, he retained himself and his dignity, his stoic and seemingly and perpetually distracted self, even as his capabilities reduced. He couldn’t walk or sit up or feed himself but he was himself, fully. Until that morning he simply didn’t wake up.
That particular collection composed as a silence, perhaps; as an open wound. At what point might do we leave this pandemic, and emerge with these losses intact: Joe Blades, RM Vaughan, Douglas Barbour. Peter van Toorn. David Donnell. My father, or my cousins Gary, Wayne. These absences will be truly felt, possibly, and repeatedly, all at once. This past spring alone: Toronto writer Brian Fawcett, who had been ill for some time; Stephen Heighton, out of nowhere. Ottawa comic artist Greg Kerr, and on his birthday, no less. Newfoundland writer Stan Dragland, during a hike. Do these losses accumulate, even as the world re-opens? Do these losses increase due to our inabilities to mourn in those ways in which we’ve become accustomed?
Perhaps this, in the end, is why one writes: to articulate, document, share. Last night, I sent Hogg a short note. I know others have, also. I hope at least some might have reached him.