One year ago my mother and I were hunched over a clear plastic bassinet filled with our hearts, in the form of a tiny baby boy. My brother’s son, connected to more tubes and monitors than we could count, fought for his little life and we leant him our strength with every breath.

One year later, his high pitched squeal brightens the island house and his three tiered laughter  reduces us all to giggles. You’d never know how hard won his happy health is, to look at him, and that makes every single family member dote on him all the more.

He’s unquestionably the darling of the family.

We’ve spent all week coaxing him to take a step. We never tire of rolling balls and trucks back and forth, playing peek-a-boo around corners and chair legs, or watching him gleefully stuff strawberries and watermelon into his mouth and chomp away with his two little bottom teeth. It’s a very sweet thing to remember what it’s like to wake up to a baby voice in the next room, and his is extra precious.

It’s been ten months since I’ve been home; too long, by any measure.

This week has been a marathon of visitors coming to pay homage to little Kai, to catch up with Josh and his family as well as with ours. There have been late night talks over empty dessert plates and waning bottles of wine, and long afternoon sails on Dad’s new boat, Skoro; not to mention vicious croquet games and hilarious badminton matches.

• Fish have been caught, photographed, gutted & eaten.
• Machetes have been sharpened and put to use until little men’s hands come to the dinner table red and blistered from their enthusiastic work.
• Boats have been rowed & bicycles ridden.
• Hannah received her first driving lesson from Gramps; it’s an island tradition to learn to drive early. I was about 14, I think.
• We all stood out in the yard last night under ominous skies and laughed at the thunderstorm as it rolled in from the foot of the lake, and then ran for cover as the rain broke over the house in waves.
• We’ve cooked and baked ourselves into oblivion to feed the hungry children, endless parade of guests and those still to come for the concert tomorrow.
• Some of us have napped on warm afternoons.

No matter how far we wander my favourite things remain here:

• The sound of wind in the poplars and birds singing to the dawn, before I open my eyes.
• The smell of my mom’s cooking filling the house.
• The feel of water up to my neck in the claw foot tub where I did my homework as a teen.
• The taste of chive and garlic tips picked fresh from the garden, along with asparagus, rhubarb and salad greens.
• The Monet like gardens painted in splashes of purple, pink, yellow and white as irises, lupine and roses compete for “best of show” while peonies just begin to raise their lazy heads.

That’s to say nothing of the people.

Even as we’ve celebrated life this week with Grammy’s birthday followed closely by Kai’s, the other side of our family celebrated life in a different, more difficult way. We knew when she said good-bye to us so pointedly a few weeks ago that her time was short; she knew it too.

Our hearts went where our bodies could not as the family gathered around her bedside, held her hand and walked her across the bridge of no return. And we all rejoiced at the gift of her life and the ease of her death when Tony’s grandma passed at seven yesterday morning.

Angela was a quirky woman, to say the least.

• She asked me once, in complete sincerity, if my hair was naturally short.
• She once completely forgot that it was Thanksgiving (and that she’d invited the family to dinner) and served Chef Boyardee Ravioli out of a can when they arrived to an empty oven.
• The children will always remember the odd gifts she’d give: bottle caps, paper hats from last year’s new year’s eve party, buttons.
• She couldn’t be counted on to ever remember your name, much less how she knew you and recently we were the object of suspicion as her son traveled all the way to Guatemala to visit, “those people.”

She wasn’t always nice, and although we loved her dearly, sometimes it was in spite of herself.

To the very end I will admire my sister-in-law for her grace under fire, for her willingness to forgive and try again, and for her dedication to relationship building for her children, even when that was often very one sided. If you’re reading this, Michelle, I’m proud of you, and it brought tears to my eyes to know that in the end, you were there and you loved her through.

• She once wore slippers out to dinner and never noticed.
• She never quit calling her son “Weaver” in a sing-songy voice, even when he had grandchildren of his own.

She was a conspiracy theorist.

She was once taken to “jail” over-night for calling 911 one too many times insisting that aliens were landing outside her house. Yes. Really. They’d changed bulbs in the street light and thus the colors refracting through the cut glass transom were different than they’d been the previous twenty years.

• She never learned to drive.
• She adopted two children, though no one in the family ever figured out why.
• She was a nurse in WW2.
• Although I only ever saw it snow white, everyone swears her hair was once chocolate brown, but it should have been blond.
• She loved her kids and her grandkids, but especially her great-grandkids, even when she didn’t know how to show it.
• She was a devout Catholic and my father-in-law credits her with single handedly praying our family into the church.

We’ll miss her.

I’ve been humming a Jack Johnson song in the back of my mind today, you probably know it, “If I could.” It’s the second verse really, that fits like an old shoe:

Down the middle drops one more

grain of sand

They say that

new life makes losing life easier to understand

Words are kind

they helped ease the mind

of this, my old friend

And though you gotta go

we’ll keep a piece of your soul

What goes out

What goes in