I’ve been thinking about the word “plangent” lately, a word with mourning tolling inside it like a bell. The weather has been perfect lately in Toronto, one breezy summer day following another, the sky a high light blue, the air warm and dry. But it’s mid-August and our short Canadian summer will end before long. I’m writing this out in the garden, laptop in my lap for once, unwilling to spend another fine day inside, not when there won’t be many more this year. 

The plants know it. Many are leggy and their flowers are fading, the echinacea—purple cone flowers—as bleached out as the sky. Their orange pollen is almost depleted, few bees buzzing around them to fatten their legs. A plane just flew over. Cicadas saw away in the trees and the wind chimes sparkle out their song. Plangent. The depth of endings. I am both happy out here and crying a little inside.

My mother-in-law, Mary Knox, died two weeks ago on August 2. My uncle, Douglas Bruce, died on July 8. They had lived long lives. Mary’s was astonishingly long; longer than almost everybody’s in the history of the world. She was 100 years old, and Douglas was 88. Both started to decline late last fall. Douglas suffered a stroke while Mary grew increasingly anemic from causes she was too frail for the doctors to investigate rigorously. Old age, really. Both were pregnant with their deaths for about nine months, although both had been remarkably well before then, which leaves very little to say. They lived full lives. Around us, in our poor old warring, climate-challenged world, many will not.

Mary was the genealogist in my husband’s family, and for years I’ve had a six-foot-tall bookcase full of her research binders in my office, some of which I called on to write a novel, Mad Richard. Douglas was the genealogist on my side, and he has left me his research files in his will. They’ve left me the past, which is what our queridos muertos, our dear dead ones always leave us. In this case, rather a lot of it. I have plans to deal with it over the next few years, although there’s so much work involved that it’s one of the things that make me feel a little lost out here in the garden. 

Lost, lost, lost, the bells toll plangently. 

I’ve written about Mary before here and here. Douglas was my mother’s younger brother, my favorite uncle. He was a late child whose father died when he was still quite young, and my grandmother tended to leave him with relatives. He lived with my parents in North Vancouver after they married so he could finish high school there. One of my favorite stories about my father involves him giving my uncle a warm overcoat his first winter with them. It took my uncle a while to understand that it was my father’s only winter coat, but my father told him it was no matter. He had a car and could drive wherever he needed to go.

My uncle paid it forward, and I stayed with him and my aunt for a while when I got a summer job in Toronto after my first year at university. Douglas was an accountant who worked his way up the corporate ladder to a vice-presidency in what eventually became Deloitte’s. Afterward, he retired early to work for an aid program in Barbados, where he said he learned more about bananas than he had ever wanted to know. He invited me and my husband there, too, with our son. Guess what? We went. Beaches.

My aunt was dear to me, too. She’d been diagnosed cancer before they moved to Barbados and lived with it there for eight years, eventually coming back to Canada so she could die at home, close to their two adult sons. Several years later, my uncle married another lovely woman, a widow he and my aunt had known earlier in their lives. “I’ve been happy in two marriages,” he told me once. “I’m a very lucky man.”

The wind is picking up, the clouds slipping in wisps across the sky. My cat jumps onto a chair and up on the picnic table. A spent blossom falls from the Rose of Sharon. I have to go inside soon for my first online meeting with an emerging writer in Florida. We’ve been paired under a mentorship program I’ve signed up for again this year, #StartWith8, which was set up in the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement. I also have to answer an email from a writer/director from last year’s cohort who has asked me to give her notes on a new cut of her short film. Pay it forward. There’s a future out there as well as the past. 

At the moment, the past feels louder. Rest in peace, Mary and Douglas. You’re not with us on a perfect day, but I know that you must have had many in your long lives, and that the bell will toll for all of us soon enough.