Grief

So - why Yellowknife?

In a city where most people "come-from-away," there are two generally asked questions: how long have you been here? and: what brought you to Yellowknife? To be sure, like Calgary during the last four or so decades, more and more people are born here and consider it home. In Yellowknife, too, there are increasing numbers of multiple generations of families, grandparents who came a lifetime ago and stayed, and now have children and grandchildren living in the city. But many of us are still new, and hence the question: what brought you to Yellowknife?

For me it was grief.

In what has lately become one of my favorite novels, Terry Fallis' The High Road (its prequel The Best Laid Plans an equal favorite), the main character Angus McLintock writes in his diary to his late wife Marin:

     I cannot yet decide, but you were such a fixture in my old life, that I perhaps needed a

     new life to overcome my loss. So what has motivated me? Is it a desire to serve or 

     an attempt to distract me from the heavy burden of grief I still shoulder? It is a new and

     intriguing question for me. Yet it is quite possible that the reason matters little. What I

     know is that not everything I do in the new life ... reminds me of you.

It's a more eloquent articulation of what I tell people, which in a nutshell is this: My husband passed away in 2010, leaving such a large hole in my life that I needed something different. Yellowknife is different. Generally people nod knowingly at that point. Then I add: my sister lives here and I wanted to be in the same city for at least a year; and also, I had seen on the web that there's a really vibrant fibre-arts community here. Again, people nod understandingly, appreciatively. Parts of the story are surely not unique to just me.

Having embarked on this new life, now entering its second year, I do regularly reflect on the relationship between it and grief. Angus rightly observes that the advantage of "the new life" is that not everything in it reminds one of the loss one has incurred. I have been lucky, here in Yellowknife, to have filled my new life with many new activities and adventures and some wonderful people. It's been a "good different."

But - but but but. In a later entry Angus tells Marin that he foolhardily typed her name into Google and hit Images, the results unexpectedly releasing "a tsunami of heartache and longing." Again he's right - the new life doesn't erase all heartache and longing, and sometimes it still does come as a tsunami. 

Ah well. The universe is unravelling as it should, Alan used to say. I miss him.