Tony needed a top-up for his Nissan Leaf during a meeting across the way this afternoon. How great is that he can fill up at our place!

This is going to drive Catherine’s ghost bonkers, but I think I might be coming around on microwave ovens.

I’ve never owned a microwave.

Sure, I’ve used one three or four times: a couple of times in the hospital, maybe a couple of times in a hotel room.

But I’ve always been deeply suspicious of them: fire, I have always said, is an element I can get behind.

A mysterious metal box that cooks food, but not containers? That’s voodoo.

Catherine never shared my deep suspicions: she kept a microwave in her studio, and would have eagerly added one to our kitchen had my veto not made this impossible.

On Sunday, though, I had supper with my physicist friends, the two people on Prince Edward Island perhaps best able to explain how microwave ovens work, and why I do not need to suspect them.

Microwave ovens, it seems, just make water vibrate, and when it vibrates, it heats up. And because food has water in it, the water heats up the food around it. That is all.

I’m reconsidering my position.

Stephen Fearing and The Sentimentals, As the Crow Flies.

I saw Fearing live at George’s Roadhouse in Sackville on October 18, 2014. Catherine had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few weeks previous; it was confirmed to have spread to her bones, and thus be incurable metastatic breast cancer, two days after I returned from Sackville.

That week I started an email newsletter to update Catherine’s friends and family; here’s what I wrote in my first message:

Apologies for moving so quickly from handcrafted individual emails to a mailing list, but I was beginning to lose track of who I’d told what about Catherine and her progress, and this seems like a way of doing so that’s sustainable, but without the publicness of a blog, which would make Catherine uncomfortable. Catherine has, however, bless this alternative.

I’m writing mostly because I need to write to process things – that’s what my blog is for, and with that off the table, I still need a way of processing things. So I apologize in advance if what and how I write sounds overly technocratic or emotionless; that’s how I’m used to writing, and I’m pretty sure if I just started crying I wouldn’t be able to get the details down as I want to.

I’m also writing to save Catherine the need to re-explain the ins and outs of her cancer to each of you every time you meet; that can be exhausting for her.

I’ll do my best to keep you all updated over the days and weeks to come; I won’t take it personally if you decide to unsubscribe (there should be a link to allow you to do that down at the bottom), as I can only imagine that getting frequent missives about the minutiae of breast cancer can be a trigger for some, and an annoyance to others. I won’t take unsubscribing personally, I promise.

For those of you that I’m emailing the first time, here’s what’s happened so far.

Catherine was experiencing some pain in her right breast, which prompted her to visit our family doctor, Peter Hooley. Dr. Hooley ordered a mammogram of both breasts, the results of the mammogram were concerning enough to prompt a follow-up mammogram and then a “core biopsy” – taking selected pieces of breast tissue so that they can be examined under a microscope for signs of cancer.

The results of the mammograms and biopsy showed evidence of cancer in Catherine’s right breast, and this resulted in a referral to Dr. Fleming, a General Surgeon, to talk about surgical options.

We first met with Dr. Fleming on September 25. His assessment at that point was that Catherine had treatable cancer in her right breast, but the left breast looked clear, and his recommendation, which Catherine accepted, was to move forward with a lumpectomy for the right-breast tumour: basically a targeted “cookie cutter” to cleanly remove the cancerous tissue in that breast.

The lumpectomy was scheduled for this Wednesday, October 22 and in the interim Dr. Fleming ordered a range of additional tests, all designed to determine whether or not the cancer had spread to other parts of Catherine’s body.

Breast cancer, we learned, isn’t all that much of a problem all by itself, localized to the breasts: it’s when it spreads – they call this “metastasizes” or “advances” – that it becomes a larger concern that can no longer be treated with a simple lumpectomy.

Over the past week, Catherine’s had a bone scan (a radioactive dye injection, 3 hour wait, and then a scan of the bones; cancer cells show up differently than regular cells in the scan), an MRI of both breasts (basically, a look at the breasts with more detail than the mammogram allowed), a lung/chest X-ray, a breast ultrasound, and a lot of blood work.

Her MRI was, according to Dr. Fleming, the test he was most dependent on to determine whether to proceed as planned: it happened just this past Friday, and within 20 minutes of leaving the hospital, Dr. Fleming was on the phone to Catherine with some initial findings.

The MRI showed that the cancer in the right breast is “multi-centric.” This means that rather than being a single removable tumour, the cancerous cells are in more than one “quadrant” of the breast (divide the breast into four neighbourhoods; if there’s cancer in more than one neighbourhood it’s “multi-centric”). This is important to learn because it means that a simpler lumpectomy is no longer an option for removing the cancer in that breast: the only option is a mastectomy (complete removal of her right breast).

The MRI also showed what may be a cancer in Catherine’a left breast, although this hasn’t been reviewed to the extent where it’s possible to make decisions about it yet.

And the radiologist reviewing the MRI also suggested that there may be “lymph node involvement” on the right side as well: when breast cancer starts to spread, it goes to the lymph nodes first, and so it raises a flag.

More concerning is that the bone scan showed evidence of what the surgeon called “increased uptake” (of the radioactive dye) in three locations: in Catherine’s hip, in her right femur, and at two locations in her spine.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the cancer has spread to Catherine’s bones: one thing we’re learning quickly is that while we might think of cancer diagnosis as Star Trek-like, it’s really more a synthesis of imperfect, indirect tests. So having bursitis in her hip might cause this “increased uptake” just as much as cancer might. However because of the femur involvement – Catherine’s never had an injury to her femur, so it’s unlikely that the increased uptake would be caused by something else – it’s not a good sign, and it’s these bone scan results that have caused the plan to suddenly change course.

The plan now is that in the next few days Catherine will have an MRI of her bones, which might (or might not) shed more light on whether the cancer has spread there. She will also have a CT scan of her chest, stomach and pelvis, also with a goal to determining whether it’s possible the cancer could have spread there.

Dr. Fleming also recommended that Catherine put off the surgery on Wednesday, for two reasons: first, the additional testing this week will tell him more about the left breast, and whether a double mastectomy would be recommended, and, second, it’s likely that the next best step would be chemotherapy, not surgery, and so he has recommended using the surgical time on Wednesday to outfit Catherine with a “port-a-cath”: this is basically a semi-permanent “shunt” that’s installed under her shoulder blade on the front, with a tube connected directly to a large vein that’s found there.

The port-a-cath allows chemotherapy drugs to be sent in, and blood to be taken out, without the need to find veins in Catherine’s arms or hands, and makes the logistics of chemo go much more easily.

So that’s the tentative plan right now: port-a-cath on Wednesday followed, likely, by the start of chemotherapy as early as next week.

Another thing we learned today is that cancer treatment isn’t really like an orchestra being guided by a conductor, but rather more like a series of soloists each specialized in a certain approach to cancer, with the best one for the current treatment running the case at any given time.

So, in other words, the reason we’ve had two visits with Dr. Fleming is because the plan to this point was surgical, and he’s a surgeon. Now that the plan looks like it might change, it’s likely that Catherine’s case will be transferred to a “medical oncologist” in the PEI Cancer Centre, and that the oncologist will pick up the baton and guide things from here.

Dr. Fleming, however, is still holding the baton for now, and he’s going to spend two hours in the hospital tomorrow morning requesting tests, conferring with the radiologist and the medical oncologist, and he’ll call us tomorrow with the results of his discussions, and an indication of when other tests will happen, and whether or not it makes sense to have the port-a-cath inserted on Wednesday or not.

Assuming that the course change is to chemotherapy, the details would be worked out with the medical oncologist, and a course of treatment developed, with a schedule of chemotherapy appointments over the next 3-4 months. Receiving chemo is incompatible with surgery, so if surgery were to happen it would happen after chemo.

We had a lot of discussion about what this means and whether it’s a good idea to wait on surgery and the basic message we got from Dr. Fleming is “if the cancer has spread to other parts of your body, it’s most important that we deal with that first.”

Dr. Fleming is a superb tactician: he spent 15 minutes with us diagraming the procedure for inserting a port-a-cath. But because he’s a surgeon, not a cancer specialist, he wasn’t particularly good at describing for us what chemotherapy will involve, what the schedule will be, how what the side-effects will be, and so on. We’ll learn about all of that from the medical oncologist.

What he also couldn’t tell us anything about is what Catherine’s prognosis is: when cancer spreads from the breast to elsewhere in the body, it is called “metastatic breast cancer” and it’s not considered curable, in the “we’ll go in there and get this out” sense. But it’s not a death sentence either: it’s possible to live with metastatic breast cancer as a “chronic condition.” Not forever, but for many years.

And that’s about all we know.

I may be writing this to you with what seems like a cool head, but my head isn’t really that cool, nor is Catherine’s. It’s likely that the life of our family got turned upside down today in ways we don’t completely understand yet, and it’s hard to have conversations about all of this without bursting into tears simply from the stress and confusion and complexity of it all, and the feeling of being amidst something completely beyond our control.

Many of you have called or emailed in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve appreciated that. If I’ve sounded a little distant and clinical about everything, it’s only because that’s my best refuge to keep from breaking down on the phone or in person.

For the crew that seized the bull by the horns and came over and made the good part of a backyard fence for us this past weekend, thank you: it was the #1 best thing you could have done to make Catherine’s life better this weekend.

Catherine lived for 1,914 more days after I sent that out.

Idahoan Kristie Wolfe built a giant potato house. Shower in a grain silo. You can stay in it.

Bill McKibben in The Guardian, When it comes to climate hypocrisy, Canada’s leaders have reached a new low:

Americans elected Donald Trump, who insisted climate change was a hoax – so it’s no surprise that since taking office he’s been all-in for the fossil fuel industry. There’s no sense despairing; the energy is better spent fighting to remove him from office.

Canada, on the other hand, elected a government that believes the climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the nation’s Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest warming on Earth. Yet the country’s leaders seem likely in the next few weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can’t bring themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.

The playbook has me disabled by grief at this point, three weeks after Catherine died.

And sometimes I am disabled, with my mind scrunched up in thickets.

But there are periods of joy and beauty, both from within and from without. Anonymous muffins and soups dropped at our door (who would have thought I’d grow into a soup-lover; certainly not Catherine). Deep conversations with new and old friends. A new ability to not avert my eyes at places I used to. And a realization that Catherine, while not here, is still here. In ways that help and elevate my spirit, and ways that confound me.

And then there are all the practical things that need doing when somebody dies.

Here’s a list. Not intended as a reference as much as a way of processing everything I’ve been doing so it seems like more than just eating soup.

1. Picked up a sheaf of official copies of Catherine’s death certificate from the Hillsboro Funeral Co-op. Almost everyone in officialdom calls for this at some point.
2. Picked up a sheaf of “certified true” copies of Catherine’s will from our lawyer. I had a copy in our safe deposit box, but it wasn’t “certified true.” We last updated our wills in June of last year, when Catherine’s death seemed like known-but-still-far-off thing. I’m happy we screwed up our courage to do so, if only because our new lawyer comes from the “plain language” school of will-drafting, so there are blessed few “thous” and “thereuntos” to be found in the language.
3. Closed Catherine’s accounts at Metro Credit Union, and inherited her RRSPs. I remember when we named each other as beneficiaries of our RRSPs, many years ago, and what a minor and insignificant thing that seemed. A box to be checked, a line to be initialed. “That’ll never happen!”
4. Started a claim for the life insurance on our home equity line of credit at TD Bank. Another box we checked back in 2000 when we established the line of credit to help renovate 100 Prince Street. I’d forgotten that we even had insurance until, fortuitously, TD raised the rates the week Catherine died, and sent us a letter to inform us. I called, and, sure enough, we checked the right box and paid the right premiums. I had to get our family doctor to fill out a form attesting to Catherine’s cause of death, but otherwise the paperwork was simple, and the staff at TD helpful. So a huge debt, relatively speaking, may get wiped away. Still holding my breath on this.
5. Started a claim for Catherine’s life insurance proper. Another instance where, when we took out a policy in 2007, our thoughts were that we were being responsible parents, not that we’d ever actually have to make a claim. If only because our somewhat-reasonable monthly premiums would escalate into the stratosphere in the next decade, and we’d likely have dropped the policy. Catherine’s policy was initially with AIG (which you’ll remember from the financial crisis of the last decade); their business got sold to Bank of Montreal, so that’s what I’m dealing with, with the help of the friendly folks at Connolly Group. Just had to fill in a few forms for this, and am awaiting next steps.
6. Submitted the paperwork for Catherine’s Canada Pension Plan death benefit (a one-time lump sum) and my “survivor’s pension,” which, strangely, it seems like I will start to receive right away, not when I retire. Not enough to live on, by any stretch, but also not nothing.
7. Cancelled Catherine’s Provincial Health Card.
8. Paid the bill for Catherine’s cremation. By Interac e-transfer.
9. Turned Catherine’s Facebook account into a “memorialized” one, at Oliver’s suggestion.
10. Requested an archive of Catherine’s photos from Instagram and, a few days later, received it. My plan is to turn it into a static archive, then retire her Instagram account.
11. Returned the bed Catherine had been using to its rightful owners (thank you!), and carted her mattress to the dump.
12. Started to make handmade paper out of the condolence cards and letters we received, and the flowers that were at her celebration of life.
13. Sent copies of Catherine’s Death Certificate to family members who flew here to be with us, so they can claim a bereavement refund from Air Canada. Heretofore I’d thought this was a myth, but it’s true, and appreciated.
14. Cleaned out Catherine’s purse. That might have been the hardest, most intimate thing I’ve done since she died.
15. Rearranged the living room a little. Found a $100 Lee Valley Tools gift certificate from 2000 hidden in the bookshelf (I’ll bet they’ll honour it!). Finally cleaned up the pile of books on my side-table as I’d been planning to for months.
16. Had coffee or lunch dates with a good collection of open-hearted friends. Talked about Catherine a lot. Learned some things. Lots of things, actually. Including a lot about how people process, or don’t process, death. And how help can come from unexpected places.
17. Accepted an invitation to come and cook together on Sunday with good friends.
18. Arranged a date for a biannual gathering with friends that Catherine and I did together for the last 5 years. This year I’ll go with Oliver.
19. Started to think about new homes for Catherine’s spinning wheels and other equipment, as well as her significant cache of fabric and fibre. I have time here, so I’m not in a rush. In the meantime I get a chance to sit in Catherine’s studio. Which is nice.
20. Realized that, despite feeling relatively centred most of the time, I need to avoid movies about happy families doing happy things in their happy lives for a while.
21. Slowly learning how to sleep through the night again. I do pretty well on the head-end, not so much on the morning side.
22. Unsubscribed Catherine from a lot of email newsletters.
23. Switched Catherine’s cell phone plan from a $40/month one to a $15/month one. Not quite ready to give up her number yet, just in case I need to close accounts that have SMS verification.
24. Put a voicemail message on our “home phone number” (really just a redirect to Catherine’s mobile) giving people my cell number. Ultimately I think I’ll do away with this number. As far as I know the only place it still has any utility is as the key to unlock loyalty program points at Murphy’s Parkdale Pharmacy.
25. Starting to get used to writing “my” instead of “our.”
26. As if by magic, recalled the unlock code for Catherine’s iPad; I had to enter a trance-like state to accomplish this.

More than anything else, though, I’ve been father to Oliver. He has been enormously helpful, including insistence that, when people ask “how are you?”, I tell the truth (he forced me to retroactively retract my “as well as can be expected”-style replies from a couple of people). And an insistence that we keep on doing what we do.

I’ve also learned that our vocabulary for describing grief is primitive, and that most people, most of the time, however well-intentioned, fall back on well-worn tropes (“it’s a journey,” “it’s a process,” “it’s not a straight line”). Kind of like describing a strawberry as “fruity tasting.” Accurate, but in no way a helpful description of its splendours.

(Photo Catherine took in Vigeland Sculpture Park, Oslo, in the fall of 2016)

The Poem Story from Sarah Millican. What a brilliant comedic mind.

In 2000, after I bought my very first fountain pen, my friend Catherine Hennessey gifted me a bottle of Quink.

We moved into town that summer, something I recall because, in part, I distinctly remember my abject fear of a Quink-spill during the move.

The bottle is beautiful. And, 20 years on, it remains unspilt.

I gingerly transferred it from the cupboard above our refrigerator, where I came across it yesterday, over to the office this morning. I have it safely ensconced in the middle of a shelf.

There is a lifetime supply of Quink in that bottle.