The Fifth Part of Chapter 13: We Will Remember

Mario’s work was busy, and considering work was a grocery store, Eunice tasked him with purchasing the Halloween candy and cocktail mixes; it was convenient in this way, and Mario did most of the grocery shopping; she simply purchased milk and eggs on occasion when they were out. That he worked at Food Basics, known for its cheap food, provided the additional advantage of a cheap grocery bill.

Unlike Eunice, however, Mario had left the purchase of a costume to the last minute; there was no planning weeks in advance about what he was about to wear; he simply went to Value Village and picked a costume off the rack.


Ryan and Patricia left the funeral home and chose to walk down McLeod Street with Clarissa and her parents, while Clarissa’s brother, sister and their spouses left for their homes in Mississauga and Kitchener.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Ryan,” said Margaret.

“I think the sorrow should be left for the living; I’m so sorry, Clarie,” said Hyram.

“Thank you for coming to this sad chapter of our lives,” said Patricia. “I still can’t believe it was a heart attack; one shouldn’t get them that young.”

“I know; the only other person younger than me who had a heart attack was some writer we published five years ago; that got a load of free publicity for us, not that we wanted it of course,”

The rest of the walk to Clarissa’s house, which took ten minutes, passed in silence from the five of them. When they entered the brick house on McLeod Street, they could see that Clarissa had set up a sort of shrine on top of a small shelf, complete with fresh flowers. It seemed to Patricia that nothing else had been touched since October 15th, the day James collapsed in the front hallway and died. She noted a few things about the living room: there was a novel, Agatha Christie’s Third Girl, on the coffee table.

“Good night, Clarissa,” said Ryan. “We had better head home and cook dinner, now,”

Margaret thought that it was a very nice house, but was tactful and said nothing about it; such would imply that she was covetous of the house, which would leave an extremely bad impression with the Millers, so she looked around in silence.

“Well, we had better get going too, if we want to get home at any sort of reasonable time; I think we’ll have dinner on the highway somewhere,”

“Let’s take the Seven home,” said Hyram. “There are no bridges that way,”

“Hyram thinks the Highway 401 bridges annoying by their endless repetition; he finds them monotonous, I believe,”

“Yeah; once you’ve seen one bridge on that highway, you’ve seen them all,”


When the elder Millers arrived home, Patricia said to Ryan, “I think we should put the honeymoon photos of James and Clarissa in frames, like we did with the wedding photos, and take them off the mantel,” she glanced at the pictures in question, and James’s smiling face nearly made her cry again. However, she forgot about this soon after she said that, and started thinking about dinner; while memories were important, having dinner was paramount.

Over dinner, Ryan wanted to get his mind off sad thoughts, so he talked about work. “Helena Perari’s supposed to be visiting our studio on Monday. I have an hour-long interview with her,”

“That should be interesting,”

“She has a huge morality complex,” said Ryan.

“Virtually the whole country knows,”

This much was true, as Ryan remembered: the last time she visited, she vented about the American President’s broken promises, relentlessly ranting about lies, endless untruths and assorted falsehoods. Such a moralistic and unkind disposition was not likely to result in returned calls, and thus Ryan assumed that her veneer of journalistic professionalism was kept up very well and carefully; she simply felt safe to drop those pretences in front of other journalists; there was only one infamous incident when her mask was broken. That was in 2006 in an interview with the President of the Canadian Auto Workers Union that turned out, after ten minutes, to be disastrous.

“We’ll be talking about her journalistic career; she’s planning a memoir,”

“One in which she’ll air all of her dirty laundry, I expect,”

“I’m guessing there’s a pretty big part of herself; I feel there’s just so much she doesn’t make public, and she has a very public persona. The mask of politeness she puts on for interviews is very well known; she thinks it’s a dishonesty; she told me as much,”

“I’ll bet that’s eating her up,”

“She told me a lot of other things on Friday,”The remainder of dinner was spent discussing Helena Perari, who had a reputation as a feared pundit, demanding honesty. She was also known for hard, though polite interviews, and scathing columns.

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The Fourth Part of Chapter 13: We Will Remember

The wake was a plodding, dull affair; an air of gloom hung over the room, reflecting the cold drizzle that fell outside, and the first frost the previous night. Inside the room, to reflect further on the gloom without, it was quiet, and Belinda and Eunice were talking to each other in hushed voices.

“She’s keeping the baby? Good on her. More power to the woman, I say,” said Belinda, glass of wine in hand.

“I do not like the notion of single motherhood in this situation. She’s not escaping from an abuser, you know.”

“I guess that’s true. Hey, do you think she’ll go looking for other men?”

“Belinda! This is the funeral, and Clarissa’s in mourning! You could show a little respect.”

“Oops, sorry, must be the wine,”

“You have only had one sip,”

“What can I say? I’m a cheap drunk.”

“I wonder what it was. The reverend didn’t say.”

“I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s an overdose on some sort of drugs. What do you think, sir?”

“Sir” was a man named Alberto, and he informed her as much. Alberto knew James from his previous job as Scotiabank, and arranged to come to the funeral when Jonathan told him the bad news; he, like everyone else, had initially reacted with shock.

“I don’t know, but I believe one of the Ten Commandments says ‘thou shalt not bear false witness.’”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that gossip is evil,”

“We’re not gossiping; we’re speculating. What that commandment says is that telling someone that you heard such-and-such from a friend of a friend is evil. And we’re not doing that. Why is it any of your business anyways?”

Alberto thought, what a bitch.

Eunice thought that Belinda was funny when she was tipsy, but this was making her feel uncomfortable.

“You know what, Belinda? I think you are getting rather…”

“What? You know, I heard from Jacqueline’s friend Cindy that Laura said that she heard from James’s boss Maurice that he was fired, and was shook up about it. She said he was a regular pill-popper. See, I wasn’t just speculating about the drugs,” As Belinda had little actual information to go on, the preceding statement was a flight into conjecture and fancy; Laura did not, in fact know Maurice, but Eunice knew little enough about her, aside from where she lived, that she did not catch this. Belinda was indifferent about the story’s veracity, because it made a good story, and it was in all probability better than the mundane truth that he was laid off, and not addicted to painkillers.

“That is definitely gossip, and I shall pretend not to hear you,”

“Good. I’ll pretend we didn’t just meet, Alberto,” responded Belinda.

How does one remain so bitchy this far into life, wondered Alberto. She looks to be at least forty-four. She’s probably divorced; what man would want to spend all of his days with that? Furthermore, what she said seemed puzzling; during his years of work at Scotiabank, he had never known James to be a pill-popper, although he knew several other people who were, given that the job carried some degree of stress, which had been exacerbated by the financial crisis and credit crunch two years previously. Perhaps James had become a pill-popper after having worked for Maurice for a while.

He seems standoffish, thought Belinda. He’s probably an accountant, or does something else boring with his life. Maybe he collects stamps. That David Vanetti, on the other hand, was quite the man. Tall, handsome, dark, a beautiful smile, he was all she could ask for in a man. Too bad she was drunk when they were last together at his garden party; it was also too bad that he was married. Stop that, Bela, she thought. Think of single men, like…Kevin! Now there’s a man to get into bed with.

“Maybe Clarissa would like some wine,”

“She’s pregnant, Belinda. She isn’t supposed to drink.”

“Oh, right.”

Occasional slips like this are okay, thought Eunice, although she was definitely not pleased with the direction of the conversation. She projected this into the future, and pictured a major falling-out between several of her friends. Mario dislikes her anyways, and Laura and Clarissa were none too pleased when she showed up at the Vanetti’s garden party in June and made an ass of herself by stepping into the peonies, their baby Jason’s fingers and the cat’s tail with her stilettos as she stumbled around the yard, drunk on too many spritzers, all the while making lewd gestures at Mr. Vanetti before she left. She was funny, yes, but at the same time, it was not altogether surprising that she had divorced Kale. Having known James since he had moved onto their street five years ago, she had never thought that he would die so young, or for a cause that she would have thought to beset older people; she hadn’t heard of anybody else who had died of heart problems who were younger than fifty, and this meme about pill-popping was just hearsay from people like Belinda; she didn’t personally know anybody who had died of a heart problem other than a few of her mother’s friends, and they were in their seventies and eighties. No doubt, this was a very strange death for being a heart attack, for normally, when someone in dies in their thirties, it was a car crash, or some other accident; it was still a horrible way to die, though. Did she not know him to the extent that she was completely in the dark about his eating habits? This must be his cause of death, she thought.

She also considered it a rather awkward thing to be discussing, but she was wondering whether Clarissa still wanted to go to her Halloween party. She wanted to go as a slutty witch herself, but was now reconsidering that; she was considering giving the witch costume to Belinda, who she was sure, would appreciate it.

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The Third Part of Chapter 13: We Will Remember

In a lounge, behind closed doors, Clarissa, her parents and James’s parents were discussing Ryan’s least favourite topic: inheritances.

“We signed a prenuptial, detailing that should one of us die, the other would inherit all of their possessions,” said Clarissa, showing the aforementioned agreement.

How I hate this, Ryan thought. This at least is going much more smoothly than Katie’s divorce settlement. In that case, there had been no prenuptial signed, and the ex-lovers were arguing over every last small detail, as half of the possessions would go to Katherine, and the other half to Mike. They had several immense fights: the house first and foremost, and then there was the car, and the flat-screen television, purchased back when such things were expensive and flashy items of opulence, rather than a fixture of every third living room; thus, Katherine and Mike both regarded the television with a kind of attachment that they should have reserved for each other, as was noted by Katherine, her parents, and his parents during the whole messy process. The car was another major headache; a BMW purchased for its glamour value rather than practicality, Mike had wanted to sell it, because for him, one car was like any other. Katherine, on the other hand, wanted to keep it, and due to all the bad blood, there was quite a feud between them. Mike ended up selling the car; it was quite fortunate that all this was behind them. There would certainly not be a repeat: the prenuptial agreement was brief––only 250 words––clear and ironclad: Clarissa would be getting the house, and various other things. That it was brief made it a nice agreement, thought he. He was quite glad that she had promised to continue to maintain her friendship with Patricia and himself, which was after all very easy to do considering they only lived a few blocks apart.

“It says you’ll be inheriting the house,” said Katherine. “Jim didn’t pay off his mortgage completely; it was only about half-paid when he died,” She had reviewed the details of James’s finances just before reading the agreement, and was wondering about the issue.

“The bank says the mortgage needs to be paid, and I agreed to continue paying the mortgage on the house; it’s a very nice house,” she said.

Margaret thought: a fine mess he left my daughter in; in February, she was a happy civil servant, and now she’s a pregnant widow assuming someone else’s debt. There was not much to do, though; she needed a place to live, the bank needed its money, hence her decision to continue paying the mortgage, which was like a financial memento to James’s memory in this way.

“Well, I think the agreement is quite clear, and of course this would stand for a will, so there’s not that much to discuss,” said Ryan.

“Agreed,” said Patricia and Margaret, while Hyram nodded, half-distractedly, as he wished to return to Toronto. Thus, the discussion was over in four minutes, and there was no need for a lawyer.

I much prefer something like this to that divorce settlement between Kate and that piece of meat, thought Patricia. Why hadn’t she agreed to a prenuptial like Jim and Clarissa?


Katherine, who was driving home, considered Clarissa with a degree of jealousy; the marriage had ended when the two of them were still in love, rather than in a messy divorce, like her own. This was due to her mistakes as much as to Mike; they talked little after the wedding for a married couple, and intimacy was missing in bed. If only she had signed a prenuptial; if only she had met another man; if only they had continued to love one another, then maybe they would still be together. She then tried to banish the regretful thoughts from her mind, first because she would rather not be reminded of her past and secondly because she needed to concentrate on the road in front of her. She wouldn’t be attending the wake; she had work to attend to, she thought, though she was deluding herself: her job of teaching science was easy, and at this moment, there was relatively little after-hours work. Her thoughts again turned to James, this time when he was studying at the University of Western Ontario, when he had been more distant than before, but still amicable enough and more like the James who had just died.

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The Second Part of Chapter 13: We Will Remember

The service ended, and James’s family and friends went into another room at the funeral home, where a luncheon with some wine was waiting, serving as the wake; it was one of the features offered by the funeral home.

At the wake, Jonathan and Iris, who had been married for ten years with two children who they left with Jonathan’s sister, were discussing Clarissa while drinking wine.

Jonathan said, “At the service, she would not stop crying; how could she, after all? Her husband, the love of her life, had died, after all.”

“Of what, do you recall?”

“I believe it was heart trouble. Apparently, James had fatty build-up in his carotids, and he died of a heart attack.”

“He hadn’t told her, either. That’s why it came as such a shock.”

“Do you think it’s in bad taste to be serving buttery pastries at his funeral, accompanied by salted herring, considering the way he died?”

“I don’t think so; it’s not like we’re at great risk of ending it now; I think his case was one of incredibly bad luck,”

“I still didn’t want to eat much; it makes me reconsider potato chips,”

Iris said, “Does that mean I get the whole bag you purchased last week?”

“You’re welcome to it,”

“She looked a mess,”

“Poor Andrea.”

“Her name is Clarissa,”

“Right.”

“Indeed,”

“…Uh, what do you mean?”

“Well, we have known James for five years, and you can’t remember his wife’s name?”

“We’ve only seen her once or twice,”

Iris reminded her husband: “They had us over for dinner, remember? Right when they returned from their honeymoon,”

“I remember that. They were so beautiful together. They were finishing each other’s sentences, and we had the most engaging conversation about China’s role in the latest round of the WTO negotiations. I never knew anyone who could make the Doha Round or China’s monetary policy so interesting.”

“I nearly nodded off when they were debating the minutiae of the… what was it? The Yuan. Only an economist would find that engaging.”

“I’m an economist, you know,”

“It also seems a rather…boring and wimpy way to go.”

“Not necessarily. My father died when he was blowing his nose. He breathed in to hard, inhaled and choked on a tissue. You know what happened to my cousin Larry? He was walking in a forest, an old rotten birch snag collapsed at that moment, and the trunk hit his skull. There’s no really good way to go, but my grandfather heard a really good joke one day, and laughed so hard that he choked; he was dead in ten minutes, but he was eighty-seven, and that was 1985. It’s become something of a family legend.”

“Your father was seventy-eight, though, and what happened to Larry was sheer bad luck. James, on the other hand, was thirty-three, and the household was dual income.”

“Not at that time it wasn’t. Forgive me; my name is Maurice. I had laid James off on the day of his death. I can’t help feeling at least a little uncomfortable. What can you do during a poor economy?”

“Tell me about it. My friend’s aunt, Suzanne, had to take a pay cut to keep her job at Home Depot; I guess people aren’t making as many renovations as they used to,”

“Clarissa said that he died when she told him she was pregnant.”

“Fortune can be such a bitch sometimes.”

“Jon!”

“I know, I know. My son Mike had a tough time getting into the job market during the recession
last year. It’s tough; you need a foot in the door, and young people don’t usually have that, they have all this competition from laid-off older workers, and people were just not hiring.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Maurice. How do you feel about losing an employee?”

“Rather uncomfortable at the moment; I admit I laid him off, in consideration of the economy,”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. What does your company do?”

“Economic consulting. Last year in particular was an interesting time for business; there was so much stress, a lot of complicated assignments and projects, and fifteen of our customers went out of business. We’re just trying to recover that market now, and create new opportunities. So much of the recession has been about structural change; the manufacturing sector is shrinking, while others, such as the service sector, retail, education and all that, are growing, which creates some trouble with employment. I think I relied a bit much on the business of manufacturers, such as car part makers like that car seat upholsterer, Inxton Incorporated; had they stayed in business, I think our firm may have been able to turn a profit this year. It’s a funny thing, incidentally; their bankruptcy freed up a timeslot at a banquet hall at the perfect time for the bereaved and the deceased to wed.”

“Interesting,”

“Anyways, Inxton left a large hole in our customer base; with corporate clients, the base is small to begin with, and their going out of business forced us to cut staff; I hated doing it, I delayed it by nearly two months, and it was so tough doing it; the axe man is one description I would prefer not to use for myself, but right now, it seems all too fitting.”

Laura was standing near the three discussing the economy, which to her only added to the glum atmosphere; it wasn’t that economists meant badly, but it was simply so unimaginative to represent everything with graphs and then not helpfully explain them. The unhappy atmosphere––maybe it had something to do with the light––did nothing to improve what she was eating, which was a profiterole; for one who died of a heart attack, it seemed at least a bit lacking in taste to be serving something so rich and loaded with trans-fats at his funeral. She only realised this after she had eaten most of the pastry, and the thought turned her perception of the taste of the whipped cream filling from one of intense pleasure to something plain and mushy in her mouth.

Kevin, who was sitting in an armchair at the other end of the room, near a north-facing window, looked outside at the drizzle. Like everyone else, he was feeling sad; he, like everyone else, was in mourning; this event really ought not to have happened, and the mourners all looked, appropriately enough, unhappy. For himself, he would have preferred to spend the Saturday at the gym rather than at the funeral home, but it was nice catching up with Henrietta, who was talking to Cindy, who only showed perfunctory interest.

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The First Part of Chapter 13: We Will Remember

The funeral, arranged quickly by Clarissa, Ryan and Patricia, occurred on the Saturday after his death, and it was very well attended by his former colleagues, neighbours, and friends; his entire social circle joined in on the mourning of the loss, and the parking lot of the funeral home on McLeod street was crowded that day; cars spilled onto McLeod Street on the south and Gladstone Street on the north. Clarissa, being James’s widow, delivered her eulogy. “When I met James, he was a happy man, and we quickly fell in love. He touched me in a way that no other man, save my father, did. The relationship progressed very quickly; just two months after we met, I moved in with him, and by June, we were engaged. I cannot emphasize enough the depth of the bond we shared, our love for each other, our friendship, or what James meant to me when he lived, over the past eight months. He showed me warmth, caring, and excitement during that time.” She turned and faced the casket. “James, I will always love you.” At this point, Clarissa choked up and sat down in the front pew, crying.

After her eulogy, Patricia, who sat opposite Clarissa, rose and delivered her speech. “When Jimmy was a little boy, he was curious; a bit too curious, if you ask me. I,” she Paused, stammering. “I will attempt to keep this brief. Ryan and I watched Jimmy grow, and were proud of our son’s achievements; his marks in high school, his degrees in economics, all of that; through the whole process, his inquiring mind would not be quenched. I shall always remember Jimmy as my little boy, even after his horrible, tragic and unfortunate death,” and then she sat down, and left much unsaid, as suited the occasion. After that, Ryan rose, gave a few brief remarks after his wife’s fashion, and then sat down again, after which the reverend took over.
Ryan was sitting beside Patricia, both of whom were silently weeping. We have no son, thought Ryan. He should be burying me! His thoughts turned to James’s childhood, captured in a moment but not encapsulated entirely by a framed picture on the coffin. The picture showed an eight-year old James playing in a sandbox with Katherine, who sat on Patricia’s left side. How full of meaning was his life then, thought he. He remembered James back then as a rambunctious child, always pestering their dog or Kathy, running around the house, and trying weird experiments seeing what happens to things when they were set on fire. That particular habit caused him much consternation generally, and particularly when he did it with a necktie. It had been early-onset heart disease, which came as quite a shock to him, Patricia, and Clarissa. Ryan had just gone in for his annual, and he had high blood pressure and the doctor had told him that cholesterol was a concern, as was salt. His mind was elsewhere as the reverend delivered the homily, which had now turned to best wishes from all of his friends, and had dwelt substantially on the depth of the tragedy of young death. Clarissa had told him that when she called Maurice to inform him of James’s death just an hour before, Maurice responded that James had been laid off on the same day; these events were undoubtedly connected, and Ryan could not help bearing at least some ill feeling toward Maurice, who was also at the funeral, and seated near the back of the crowded chapel. Ryan attempted to console himself by thinking of others who were in a similar situation of having to bury a child: people in war zones, military parents, but nobody came to mind who was about to bury a child who had died of a heart condition usually thought to afflict older people. He didn’t think James had any particularly unhealthy habits, either.

He was rather fond of poutine, thought Maurice. He ate that nearly every morning, and it was surprising that he had managed to keep the weight off. One the one hand, I’d ask how it’s done, not getting fat, that is, but on the other hand, he’s dead. I must make a note to avoid that in my diet, or at least avoid eating only that. I don’t think I ever saw him eat anything else, and his servings were always of a moderate size. What does his wife feed him? He wondered idly, and recalled the rich butter cream cake at the wedding. That cake might be a clue; one simply doesn’t eat that sort of rich food all the time without repercussions.

Courtney was sitting beside Maurice. She had no ill feelings from last Friday; it was the economy, after all, and nothing personal. Being at James’s funeral was sad for her, first of all, but also weird; this sort of thing should be happening when she would be an octogenarian, not now. She had noted on the numerous lunches they had together the volume of poutine he consumed; it seemed he ate nothing else. It seemed to her that he had become quite a connoisseur, which in retrospect should have been a red flag. What had triggered the heart attack, though? She knew from the timing that the layoff had something to do with it. Maybe he had received some particularly shocking news? Were they about to lose their house? Marital troubles aren’t too likely, she thought; Clarissa attended a work function just in September, they were just married for two months last Friday, and she had seen them passionately kissing when they thought they were alone.

Katherine’s thoughts were not on James as he was recently, but James as a child. As a child, he liked playing soccer and any other kind of sport that he could, and would often get her to join him with the boys. She enjoyed those carefree times of endless running in sunny field near their childhood home in Guelph. This was not to say that she had always reciprocated this playful attitude; she, being a year younger than her brother, was going through a stuck-up and bitchy phase at around the same time as his like of sports peaked, which was in grade nine; his like of sports quickly dropped off after that. Looking back on this period made her realise how much she missed James, and that particular phase in his development. His interest in sports had ended when he was bullied in gym class in grade nine, and after that, he abandoned exercise and did not look back. Hence, by the time he graduated university, he was slightly overweight, and his waistline grew incrementally each year until he died just a few days previously. She wondered how he would have turned out had he sustained his like of sports; he would have been a bit more healthy, and probably still alive; on the other hand, he wouldn’t have become as intellectual, she thought as she reflected on the athletic men she knew who somehow didn’t measure up in terms of education and brainpower.

Patricia, while she was crying, was reminiscing silently about James’s life: little James who would run around, playing tag with his sister, the gregarious, teenaged James whose favourite activities of the time consisted of eating potato chips and going to parties, who then turned bookish during his university days while having a parade of girlfriends; his whole life seemed so right, so wholesome, and it seemed unjust that he should have to die so young, at just thirty-three, without seeing any children, and without burying his parents first. I shouldn’t have to be doing this, she thought; I shouldn’t be grieving for my son; would that our places had switched, and the day postponed by twenty years or so, she thought; there I was thinking my kids would be around forever, foolishly. She then looked out the window at the bruised grey sky; it had been threatening rain for the past two days, but had not delivered, and the air was getting chilly, as all the pleasant smells of summer, of the flowers, the fruit, died and gave way to the sweet scent of decaying maple leaves.

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