A Cat With 9 Lives

This month my family and I are heading up north to the South Magnetawan river to spend a week reliving our fondest childhood memories and celebrating the life of our late brother, Paul, who passed away in February, six weeks after we lost our mother. We will rent a boat at the marina once we get there. I always thought my brother would have loved working at the marina. He loved up north. Paul, commonly known as ‘Dib’ lived a simple yet hard life. He chain-smoked cigarettes and drank beer every day of his life. We called him the cat with nine lives. He never answered the door or the phone and rarely called anyone. If he did pick up it was a code call from our mother. He probably sensed our sheer horror at his slow demise and mostly just wanted to be left alone. Alcohol controlled his life for as far back as I can remember. It hurt Mom to say it out loud, so we rarely did but it was always the elephant in the room. That’s the part that hurts the most. That he was broken, and no one could fix him. I finally understood the mental illness part of addiction when I was summoned by my sister who did most of the caretaking to go up and clean his apartment. He was coming home from the hospital after being there for 3 months. They removed the tracheotomy reluctantly and arranged home care and oncology visits to assess him. He was relieved and he made it work. He never slept in his bed. Maybe it felt less lonely on the couch. As I cleaned the grime and the inch-thick dust around his apartment, I noticed that he had kept very few things. He couldn’t care less what his surroundings looked like. He was doing the only thing he knew how to do to survive. His whole life was set up in that little room on the 14th floor which he referred to as hotel California. He taught me that our dreams for others are sometimes bigger than the dreams they have for themselves. The love I had for my brother far outweighed any grievance I ever had for him. I’ll always remember him not as a disappointment, but as someone who desperately tried to be normal but couldn’t quite get there. He could make a cat laugh with his wit which was my favourite thing about him. All we have now are the lasting memories and his final words. ‘I love you. I always have and I always will.’ He found a little piece of heaven fishing along the shores of the Magnetawan river where my sisters and father and I will lay our big brother to rest in peace. He taught me that when you see a log sticking out of the water, you pull up slowly, cut the motor and drop your line.