May 28. The Black Posse Rides. Or: home is where you hang the shotgun.

Wracked with nerves all day, but finally get to Parksville about 6. The cool car deck of the ferry is calm eough, the ambient music I have cued up relaxing enough, that I get a precious 30 minutes of sleep, before I'm jolted awake by the forgotten and unfortunate presence of Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood. Angry music, good for venting, not for resting.

I had forgotten how purely physical the experience of grief is, how lodged in the body. Even in the mind, it feels physical, like ice skating. Keep your thoughts moving forward, narrow, lightly - stop, press down, or think of anything in detail, and the ice cracks and pain comes welling up, overwhelming. I had forgotten the details of grief, so constant and unrelenting those first weeks of 1998, I must have blocked them out. But part of me now watches detatched, taking what notes it can.

My mind is clear, lucid, but helpless to fight biology. I try to read Robert Kirkman's Invincible, but cannot manage more than a few pages at a time. Arriving home, Mom is as tired as I am, welcomes me in and we talk, moving over ground familiar and worn. So many times we've had to pull through sadness together. Dinner is beef stew and screwdrivers with decent OJ, me hoping to take the edge off long enough to eventually sleep, and mom joins in as well, mourning things that will never be. It quickly becomes apparent that I am too restess, pacing like a caged animal. She talks and I cannot focus as she speaks of untold times before she met dad, of stringers-along and days in Jamaica. She offers what help she can, but is hamstrung by being a youngest member of the greatest generation, the complicated relational algebra of generations X and Y is a foreign country to her, let alone the vector calculus that its more adventuresome members get up to.

Your father won't understand the lesbian thing, she says, best not to mention it. You know he's never quite wrapped his head around his sister.

Ah yes, poor unhappy, haunted aunt N. The baleful ghost of my grandfather, who smashed and drank his way through his wife and four children for decades before cancer finally took the old bastard down, gloats.

I wish you had had the chance to meet him, my dad said once.
So do I, I thought, thinking dark things, but not for the reasons you might think.

Dad phones later, from Peace River, his birthday today, they marked the occasion as any workplace might and he is cheerful about that, concerned for me. We'll talk when he passes through, I assure him. Hard to do things over the phone. I'd thought they might be more angry for me, and there is some of that, but more sadness. There are no black hats here, however clumsily this has unfolded. Well, maybe mourning hats.

It was ten years ago, I say. She nods.

I remember that old and empty place, ten years ago, I remember wailing, wracked, in the middle of the night, Mom holding me as she used to.

I don't want to forget her, I said
You never will, said Mom, you never will.

The old pain comes, now, wells up and I am hardly in the conversation any more.

Try to develop new hobbies, mom says. The ones you have require you to be calm, and you won't be for a long time. No.

Certainly not tonight. Sleep is elusive as ever. In the morning I will write the angriest thing I have ever concieved. But not angry with her. Never with her.