The significance of siblings

Posted on January 4, 2010 by doradueck

Events such as the death of an elderly parent, which my siblings and I experienced this week, bring the original configuration of a family into sharper focus. We were eight children, a relatively large family even for its time. We were also the children of a minister who served various churches, none of them in communities where our grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins lived. It has always seemed to me that for all the disadvantages created both by the size of our family and its isolation from our relatives, there were advantages as well, including a strong enjoyment of one another — squabbles notwithstanding — and reliance upon each other for memories around the year’s special days, when families are the key unit of celebration.

It’s been a long time since the last child left home to form her own household, and even longer since the first left to form his. Over the decades we’ve become our own extended families, with five of the eight of us now grandparents. Shaped by divergent career paths, the people we married, and our scattering to reside in four Canadian provinces and one U.S. state, we’ve become much more diverse than we were in our family of origin. We’ve remained relatively close, certainly very cordial, but we’re together occasionally rather than frequently, and certainly much less than siblings who remain in the same place geographically. We have our own “space”; we have our own lives.

The past week, though, in planning and participating in our father’s funeral, it was the “originals” who met via telephone conference call to make decisions about the arrangements. In the storytelling and slide-viewing that happened once we’d gathered here in Winnipeg, it was, inevitably, the original bunch of us that again came to the fore. Without intending to (and here our spouses are the best witness), we probably slipped back into earlier roles, banter, “insider” references. This deceased man was most particularly ours and, for a while, we went back to this knowledge with whatever joys and wariness it might entail, as children of the household he had formed.

Truly, the sibling bond is an interesting one. It’s complex, but somehow simple too. Virginia Adams, in “The Sibling Bond: A Lifelong Love/Hate Dialectic,” an article I saved in my files from the June 1981 Psychology Today, says the link between brothers and sisters “is in some ways the most unusual of family relationships…the longest lasting…and the most egalitarian.”

In the church
In the same file, I found a 2004 Sojourners article by S. Scott Bartchy called “Secret siblings.” Bartchy describes Jesus’ “radical new vision” of believers as family and goes on to say that popular English translations of Paul’s letters have in many cases mistranslated the Greek word for brothers and sisters by using non-family terms. This has diminished the impact of what is proposed as a way of being in the church.

Sibling relationships, as Adams reminds, are indeed unusual, long-lasting, and egalitarian. Implied in them is fairness, equality, the honor of the family, love and support in spite of diversity. When my church — the Mennonite Brethren — was debating women in ministry leadership, it seemed to me that the arguments against it sometimes inserted notions about marriage into the discussion, as if every woman in the congregation was the “wife” of every man. Yes, Paul also compares marriage and the church in Ephesians 5:22 ff, but the church entire is meant vis a vis Christ, with both the marriage relationship and the relationship between church and Christ illuminating the other. But to be siblings of Jesus in the church, well, that’s another perspective all together.

The past week has reminded me how formative, powerful, and life-giving the sibling bond is, and can continue to be. Freshly appreciative of its significance, I want to also probe its meaning for the church. Our identity there as “sisters and brothers” is familiar enough. But, I’m wondering, have we really grasped its many implications?

Grief and gratitude

Posted on December 31, 2009 by doradueck

On Monday this week, my father died.

That’s the easy sentence to write. Now what do I say?

I can say that in some deaths, grief so out-powers gratitude of any kind, the latter cannot be found until much later. In this one, there’s also grief, but gratitude rises more quickly to the surface — because my dad was a good man, because he lived a long life (88 years and 8 months), and because his last years were ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease (and I use the word “ravage” intentionally with all the meaning it holds: “to work havoc upon, to do ruinous damage”) and so we’d already been grieving slowly and subtly and I trust it won’t be surprising to hear that we’re relieved the suffering of that illness is over.

I’m also grateful I could be at his side when he died. Although Dad had been declining physically as well as mentally, that decline had accelerated in the past weeks. When we left for our Christmas holiday travel, I said good-bye as if I’d not see him alive again. By Christmas Day, he was expected to die before the day was out, but when we returned on the 26th, he was still breathing. He lived a further two days. The staff at the care facility marvelled: such a palpable shutting down, no responsiveness, and yet his heart kept beating. We who knew him were less surprised. Not only had he always been strong and athletic, but this persistence was symptomatic of his temperament. He had a stubborn determination about him; he was not a quitter. Whatever he’d committed to, whether it was his commitment to Jesus Christ at age 14 or his commitment to our mother more than 62 years ago, it lasted by virtue of diligent going-on with it, one hour after the other.

My dad as a young man, with Curly

Our last vigil at my father’s side was as much listening as watching. When life is so reduced, one only notices what’s left. In this case, it was his breathing. The day before his death, Dad would stop breathing for up to 30 or 40 seconds at a time, then resume a further round of it. The day of his death, another pattern ensued, with very few pauses but the breathing faster and shallower and noisier. While we waited and listened, my mother and whoever else was there passed the time talking, singing, reading. We often stroked Dad’s forehead or held a hand. Sometimes I found myself glancing from the black and white photograph on the wall, of my father as a lean young man, holding his dog Curly, to the shrunken body, mouth slack, eyes half open but seeing nothing. In his last hour, his extremities already cool and purplish, the eyes now open completely though still not seeing us (though “seeing” the unseen eternal, as per 2 Corinthians 4:18, perhaps), his breaths became very quiet and scarcely deeper than his throat. Then, each one quieter and shallower, they stopped.

William Kurelek’s joy

Posted on December 18, 2009 by doradueck

This week, in the local used books establishment, I found a real treasure: Kurelek’s Canada (Pagurian Press, 1978), which is no longer in print. It contains more than 30 reproductions in colour, as well as some in black and white, of the paintings of William Kurelek (1927-1977), and also his writing about them. And all this for only a dollar!

I’ve liked Kurelek’s work ever since I first encountered it, through A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973) and A Prairie Boy’s Summer (1975), and then his wonderful A Northern Nativity, which pictures the holy family in a variety of ethnic and geographic settings — from a fisherman’s hut to an Amish Mennonite buggy to a boxcar to a soup kitchen. For many years, until they became just too faded, we had four framed calendar prints of some of the prairie scenes hanging on one of our walls.

Kurelek had an unhappy childhood in many ways and a complex relationship with his father — both hating and worshipping him, he said later. He was the oldest of seven children of a hardworking prairie couple (Alberta and Manitoba), his parents of Ukrainian immigrant origin. He was painfully shy, sensitive, artistic, but inept at those mechanical and physical things that might have earned his parents’ praise. So powerful was his desire to do art, however, that he risked their disapproval to study it.

In 1957, Kurelek risked his parents’ disfavour once again by converting to the Roman Catholic church (his family had been nominally Orthodox). His mother, he writes, was “particularly vocal in expressing her view that religion killed joy.” Yet the theme of Kurelek’s Canada is joy, he says in his foreword, “my view of joy, both remembered and observed, in this my native land.”

Kurelek was also a “message painter,” doing a series of 160 paintings on the Passion of Christ, for example, housed at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery, but there’s no didacticism in these paintings of ordinary people in the various parts of this country doing such ordinary things. They stir joy in me too, over the colours, over his sense of the land, its diversity and yet the way its parts cross-reference each other: the land in Manitoba “so flat it is like being on an ocean” and then the ocean off Nova Scotia giving him “the same feeling as the prairie in winter when the landscape is an endless series of wind-sculpted snowdrifts…”

Kurelek’s sensitivity to this country’s landscapes and history, and his sensitivity to the pleasures and dreaminess of being young, have always resonated with me. It’s as if his memories are my memories too, no matter how different the details.

"Skating on Spring Run-Off," pages 98-99

But in studying and enjoying my “new” book this week, I find this artist is giving me something else. He’s giving me memories of my father. What do I mean? Well, it occurred to me that the specific references in so many of these works belong to Kurelek’s generation, which of course, is my father’s generation as well. That’s obvious enough, but I never thought of this before, because I didn’t need to, I suppose, just delighting in them for my own reasons. Now, however, my dad (88) has Alzheimer’s disease and is so very gone from us already, and in the last weeks declining even further.

I took the Kurelek book along when I went over to see him yesterday afternoon. He was in bed, mostly sleeping. When he opened his eyes, I showed him “Skating on Spring Run-Off.” He looked at it but he didn’t seem to see it.

I see it though. I see his being, his memory, there. He was a boy of the farm, a boy of hard work, close to his horses and dogs, a boy sensitive to the land and the seasons, an athletic boy too, amazingly athletic actually, and here he is again, skating where the ice is found, “skim[ming] over the prairie surface with breath-taking ease,” feeling as the artist also remembered it when he painted the scene, “as though you have wings on your heels.”

Has this ever happened to you, a familiar story or beloved artist’s work suddenly meaning something else for you altogether?