(It has taken a while to get to here. This posting started out with the exact opposite title and went down a road that, I eventually realized, had no conclusion. In a previous posting I wrote about living life vertically, being in the moment, and that each choice one makes affects the next choice which affects the next and so on. The more interesting thinking came when I asked myself about when there aren’t choices. I came up with three examples for myself, all of which, surprisingly, have their own rewards.)

From time to time, not frequently, but occasionally, from time to time, I have these memories. The memories are provoked by various external elements. Now, I know what “sense memories” are. Digging up and using sense memory is a part of theatre training. I think of one thing to remind me of another. Hearing Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations for the dance break in “I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy” from “South Pacific” with the soaring trumpet section playing the melody always reminds me of travelling in the old Buick with my parents on our way to Florida and reaching a crest in the highway and looking through the windshield seeing the great expanse before us, a Howard Johnson’s restaurant just ahead on the left there, the road leading on for miles before us and railway tracks behind a fence beside us on the right. That’s a pretty deep and concise sense memory because I remember that music was on the radio when I saw that particular scene. These memories aren’t those. These are something different. These memories come for only a second or two, little waves washing up on a shore, pausing like an intake of breath and retreating, leaving me in awe of what their shape was, in awe of what the feeling was that had just suddenly and completely overwhelmed me. These memories are spontaneous and unbidden, provoked by the most unexpected things, maybe the image of a hand reaching for a door, a series of numbers, a combination of colours or the tilt of someone’s head, a mixture of an aroma and a very precise temperature, all abstract cues for the memory experience to begin. These memories, if that is indeed what they are, evaporate almost as soon as they form and there is nothing I can do to get them back. When they come, it isn’t gradual. They arrive instantaneously, fully-formed, active and all consuming. They are a couple of frames from a reality that I try to grasp, to hold on to because it is so comfortable, warm, mysteriously familiar but, at the same time, not, and just as I think I have it in my grasp to luxuriate in, it is gone. The image or combination of elements that brought the memory to life is irretrievable, try as I might to recreate it. It is a confluence of things that can’t be duplicated, recreated, forced. It is a singularity. One “memory” that has happened more than once and is never prompted by the same thing, is of a very broad skyscraper-lined boulevard in a huge city, devoid of cars, maybe a person or two walking by on the distant sidewalk opposite. It isn’t the visual that is important, but rather the sensation that accompanies what I somehow “see”. I feel at total peace, at ease, comfortable actually, as if this is where I’m supposed to be. These feelings don’t fade-in or evolve but are instantaneous as the memory washes over me. I know it is all going to pass very fast and I try to hang on to it, but it goes as quickly as it came. The oddest thing about these experiences is that I have no recollection of the memory I’m experiencing. They didn’t actually happen to me. I don’t remember them happening in real life. I don’t know if they are subliminal, a purposeful product of my imagination or, weirdest of all, someone else’s memories. And the memories aren’t always of places. They might be just a sense of that comfort I mentioned before, a feeling of arms enfolding me but not literally, an awareness of relief and safety. The fleeting-ness of these sensations leaves me momentarily saddened and desperate to hold on to them, but I have no choice in the matter. They arrive and leave in the twinkling of an eye. I have no control over any aspect of them. They come unprompted and leave the same way. But those few seconds are, simply, a blissful gift.

And then there’s this.

I cannot begin to imagine what my Mom experienced the last years of her life. Her slow descent into the chaos of dementia was, for me, knowingly, an extended farewell and, from this vantage point, I cherish every moment of it. I think I cherished it all even as it was happening. She looked across at me from her chaise beside the hotel pool in Hawaii one vacation morning and said, “I know I repeat things”. And it began. That was ten years before she passed. For me, at times, the journey was fraught with impatience, frustration, irritability. But for her, it was a straight road, unknowingly losing the essential mental connections along the way and intuitively finding another path to travel if only out of self-preservation. The saving grace was that she didn’t remember that she didn’t remember. Oh so slowly the newer-minted neurons stopped firing. But deep below the surface there were ingrained behaviours that, right to the end, never disappeared, too firmly embedded in her essence not to bubble up and give observers a sense of normalcy. For all her years she had schooled herself to be dignified, elegant, polite, affable, engaging, to greet people with a smile, and even as the “now” disappeared, always at her core were those traits that belied what was in fact happening. There was no retreating from the physical truth, that, eventually, the disintegration would take its total toll and stop her life. Medication helped to slow the progression and gave me a much too small portion of the Gift of Time. But I knew there was no controlling agent that would halt that inexorable march to the end. So I accepted the lack of choice … for both of us … and reveled in it. Initially, when I moved to Victoria, we lived in side-by-side condos until that became unviable and I moved her into a care residence, chosen by her while still aware and based on comfort, beautiful décor and potential friends. Over time that awareness diminished and with the help of the wonderful caretakers, she was guided through each day. When she decided that she wanted to move back to Toronto and get an apartment, I was thankful that she forgot things. I would tell her that I would look into making those arrangements knowing full well that the next day she wouldn’t remember that she wanted to move. For the moment, I was giving her the satisfaction of the move and we went on to other things. Looking through old photo albums spurred memories, although most of the reminding was done by me, and I could see how happy whatever memories she was having made her. This went on for four years, each day a new adventure and challenge for both of us. As things wound down and she became less and less mobile, usually spending the days napping in the common living room, then in her own room on the couch and, eventually, in the hospital bed brought in to help the care staff, my choices within the lack of choice got fewer and fewer. She stopped speaking and kept her eyes closed most of the time. But every now and then would open them and acknowledge my presence with a small smile. I would sing to her … “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you” … and tell her of what happened during my day and in the world, holding her hand. There was nothing sad about any of this although a mental image may indicate otherwise. It was just fact borne out of the inevitable for all of us. The privilege of being a part of that inevitability was, for me, beyond measure. One day, finally, after six years, I forced myself to say out loud what I had been actively thinking for weeks. I had resisted it, having only seen it on television, not knowing how it would feel speaking those words. “Mom, it’s alright if you want to let go”. There was no response but I think she heard me. Actually, I know she heard me. Over the next month, from time to time, I would say it again. One afternoon, as I was leaving, I leaned over her, kissed her forehead, and whispered it one more time. There was a small movement of her head and she said, coherently, as if the last years had all been a joke, clearly, quietly, almost belligerently, “I’m trying. I’m trying”. Those were the last words she spoke. She passed two weeks later. Because of the time we spent together, its quality, its duration, I have no regrets about her passing. Inside that lack of choice, we left nothing unspoken. We grew ever closer. We experienced each other’s humanness. And the purity of our Mother-Son bond, one that had expanded over our lives, left nothing to be desired. And that was the Blessing.

And this.

There are moments that are life-altering. Then there are moments that are life-defining. The first changes things from one something to another something. The second changes nothing but fundamentally clarifies and identifies at the same time. The second comes immediately. It confirms and provides, without analysis or assessment or theorizing, the Fact of who you are. Perhaps it comes with lightening and a sonic boom, an “a-ha moment”. Perhaps it comes quietly and gently with no fanfare or preamble. Mine was the second kind. It was choice-less. It was a realization. It presented no alternatives and happened inside a moment. It was the late spring of 1966. My twenty year old life, while not confused, was, in hindsight (and for want of a better word), undefined. I was in the Theatre Department at Sir George Williams University in Montreal and had just been hired to spend the summer performing at Acadia Summer Playhouse in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. I was happy and excited about that. Was this how I was to spend my life … in the Theatre? But that wasn’t an urgent question. That would play out in time. There were a few other things niggling at me, little threads that weren’t important, but would eventually need some explanation as to why they were even in my mind. But that didn’t matter just then. It was a beautiful day. I was walking down Stanley Street, just walking (and this is still and forever all so incredibly clear), and was passing a below-street-level bistro called L’Enfer (ironically, French for “Hell”) on my left and the thought came into my head, fully formed and complete, “I’m gay!” Nothing more. Just those two words. I didn’t consider the implications, the complications, the profundity of that newly-minted thought. There was no emotional upheaval or confusion about it. It was simply, purely, instantaneously and for all time, I’m gay. That was it. And I kept walking, but now with an identity that somehow, miraculously, had been given me and which I laid over myself, not with any out loud proclamation or attention-getting or even any adjustment, but just a total unquestioning acceptance that this was who I was and always would be. My identity as a human being had been, after those twenty years, established in the world. It was the Me I was supposed to be, fundamentally and without choice. I don’t think it always happens that way. In fact, I know it doesn’t. One’s Personhood is sometimes too slowly revealed and agonized over for long periods of time. Some people are backed into corners and cowed into being someone they’re not. They happen too often, those influences. “It gets better” is a phrase that has become a mantra for gay youth, one that is sometimes very difficult to buy into because of the pain being experienced in the moment. Going back to my realization, I must say that, up to that point in time, I had been “active”, if you get my drift, and had discovered myself in that regard. But “it” never had a name. I think I was lucky. There were no influences on me, no pressures, and somewhere, viscerally, deep inside, I gave myself permission to acknowledge the fact. It’s easier to arrive at the destination when you’re not being directed, or, indeed, forced down a path this is not your own. I wish it was that easy for everyone. I really do. That moment of passage for me, without upheaval or chaos, that walking through the door, that “coming out” was not a choice. It was my Truth.

And so I drift on now, waiting for the next vision, accepting our inevitabilities and never being totally defined by that long ago discovery of myself, but rather still identifying all those threads that must be put into place to complete the fabric of the Me I am still to become. The journey continues.