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I have a tendency lately. My elderly parents (Mom is 93 and Dad is staggering his way toward 97) moved to my city to be closer to us as they aged. Which was entirely out of character. For decades they have lived pretty isolated lives; we were never big on celebrating holidays or milestones. No Sunday dinners, particularly. We would try to visit once or twice a year. For the last 25 years, they lived in the Yukon. In 2018, they moved to Saskatoon -- and I didn't realize the level of responsibility that arrived in the moving van with them. Elizabeth Hay's story about her own parents has startling similarities to my own experience, and I would often find myself jabbing my husband as we lay reading in bed at night: "Listen, let me read you this part! Doesn't this sound exactly the same!" It was reassuring that I…
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton.
Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I've said in another review that I'm showing a bit of a tendency with some of the books I'm choosing this year. The three I've chosen for The Shepherd are all about aging parents. They Left Us Everything has particular significance for me since the title is literal. The parents left their children to deal with a mammoth task: that of emptying a house with 23 rooms filled with STUFF. While my parents are still alive (Mom is 93 and Dad is closing in on 97) and they moved to my city to be closer to us "as we age," they too had a house in the Yukon stuffed with...stuff. It has been so with every house they've owned, but for each of their eight or nine moves prior to this last one, it was their task to do the move. Often, things were just abandoned in the houses they…
A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories.
After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, twenty-three rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought: How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags.
