Now I sit at his desk

My father, Harold E. Jones died peacefully on Friday at 4:20 in the afternoon. He was a lovely, lovely man - quiet, unassuming, wise, funny, responsible, generous, and always curious about the world.

Now I sit at his desk, afraid that with each object I touch I am erasing him, because if I move something it will no longer be in the place he last put it. But I can't stop myself. Looking through his things is a way of feeling close to him, to breathe in the workings of his mind and his heart.

In the central pile that built up over the recent months when he was feeling unwell I find prescription receipts, the owners manual for his car, direct mail solicitations from Oxfam and the NDP set aside for consideration, and lots of notes about the local food bank board, for which he served as chaired up until last month. (When he delivered his chair's report at the Annual General Meeting in June he got a standing ovation).

By the lamp base there's a pencil sharpener, a fortune cookie he never ate, and an old roll of brown string - Three Bee Gimp Superior Quality, 90 yards, Made in the USA. The paper wrapper on the string claims it is "Ideal for Knitting and Crocheting berets, hats, scarfs, bags, and collars, etc." (Why did he keep these last two objects? Did he have a plan for the string? Was he keeping the fortune cookie out of superstition?)

On the bookshelf he had arranged his dictionaries in chronological order by year of publication (I think it's fair to say he was a little bit OCD). He also taped notes to himself for things I suppose he wanted to remember: A phone number for Monica (who is she?), instructions on how to reset his watch (counterclockwise to change the date, clockwise to change the day), and a sticky note that says "Iraq oil costs $1-3/barrel to extract, Economist, Aug 16,2008, p.47" (Why did he care about that particular fact? I will never know now).

By the phone there's a note dated 18 March 2014 that says "Radiation Therapy North, room 1121, my first appt on Mar 28, 20 treatments, 4 weeks."

He went faithfully to room 1121 every day for a month, and his doctor told him the treatment would probably bring about a remission, but sadly that wasn't so. His PSA levels rose instead of falling, and by the end of June the cancer had spread widely into his bones.

He had always been extremely healthy. He was 89 and had never spent a day in the hospital, never even had a headache. Almost every day he found a reason to walk over to the shops on Bank Street, a forty minute walk there and back, but it would almost always take longer, because so many people knew him and liked him, and he would stop to chat.

I wonder if he went so quickly in part because he had never been sick? After all, it only took five weeks to take him from chairing an Annual General Meeting to lying in his deathbed. I think his body didn't know how to fight an illness once it had set in.