Andrea, Jacob and I play a lot of games after dinner. We don’t really keep track of who wins what or how many times, but I’ve always wondered if we could create a pseudo-tournament idea by keeping track over the course of a year. We started the year while on vacation, so we didn’t capture EVERYTHING, but we did keep track each week on a calendar near our kitchen table.

I didn’t think it through in advance…while MOST of our games are the three of us, there are also lots of 2-player events where Jacob and I will play some cribbage during the day, or a Scrabble game that is usually just Jacob and Andrea (I don’t do well at word combination games).

Over the first three months of 2025, we played 12 different games:

• Jeopardy — We have a calendar and do the questions each week, trying to beat each other by Sunday…Jacob won 5 weeks, Andrea won 4, I won 3, and Andrea and Jacob tied one game;
• Alleys — Andrea won 10 games but always feels like she never wins, while Jacob and I won 5 each;
• UnoFlip — only 1 game, with my winning;
• Moonshot Euchre — 1 game/win for each of us;
• SuperQuiz Trivia — 1 game that Jacob won;
• Abduction — 1 game that Jacob won;
• Scrabble — 1 game that Jacob won;
• Epic Galaxies — 1 game that I think Andrea won;
• Labyrinth — Not sure who won that one;
• Catan — 1 game that Andrea won;
• Cribbage — We have played a LOT of cribbage in the first three months, combining normal 5-card cribbage (with 3 players); 6-card cribbage (with 2 players); a variation with 8 cards (with 3 players); a variation with 9 cards (with 2 players); and a complicated cribbage board called Crib Wars…I lumped them all together, and as I said, Jacob and I played a lot of games just the two of us, but the end of the quarter has Andrea with 9 wins, Jacob with 24 wins, and me with 16 wins; and,
• Backgammon — Mostly just Jacob and I, with Jacob winning 9 and me winning 11.

The end result was 113 games with Jacob winning 51, my winning 37, Andrea winning 27 (but again she didn’t play most of the cribbage games), and Andrea and Jacob tied one game.

If I count just the games that were predominantly three people playing:

• Jeopardy: A 4, J 5, P 3, tied AJ 1
• Alleys: A 10, J 5, P 5
• UnoFlip: A 0, J 0, P 1
• Trivia: A 0, J 1, P 0
• Abduction: A 0, J 1, P 0
• Epic Galaxies: A 1, J 0, P 0
• Catan: A 1, J 0, P 0
• Total: A 16, J 12, P 9 plus AJ 1

So it looks like Andrea is leading the First Quarter and sits as Queen of Games.

I generally don’t believe in regrets. I firmly believe that life is lived forward, not backward, and while I might learn from the past, I don’t revisit decisions to say, “Oh, it should have been x instead of y”. I try to make decisions with the best information I have at the time, and I live with them. There is no other choice.

Yet a decision we made before Christmas didn’t necessarily weigh risk factors as well as we should have.

Our shared need to relax

I’m just going to say it…2024 sucked.

Work isn’t always a barrel of laughs, but there was extra stuff this year that made it less enjoyable. Nothing egregious, even when it seemed so at the time. Finances are fine, all our basic life elements are covered, etc.

Health was a pain in the butt. Somewhere back in March, I did something to my lower back. I don’t know what, I don’t know how. But suddenly I started getting seizures and spasms that had me literally screaming in pain. Two trips to the ER, Xrays, meds, tons of physio and osteo stuff, and it would get better for a while — only to flare up again. Definitely not fun. By way of scaling it, if that pain was daily, if the seizures never let up, I’d be looking at much more serious decisions about my future come March (1 year in). I have no appetite for that kind of life. But let’s leave it at “sucking” for now.

Jacob’s health has been, well, probably worse although not acute. He’s dealing with chronic pain from what we thought was a concussion but probably wasn’t. Every day he has headaches and dizziness, and while we’ve made progress on the headache front, the dizziness remains unabated. His attendance at school is a crapfest. Every day is a game day decision — can he go? which periods? I’ve been fortunate that work has given me special accommodation to deal with his schedule, but it’s still looney toons some weeks. Plus dozens of appointments for the year, perhaps hundreds now. It feels like a roller coaster we can only survive, we cannot thrive.

Andrea’s health wasn’t great, but not scary bad. More “life”, I guess.

We had three funerals this year, so there’s that. Don, my brother; Andrea’s uncle, Scott; and Andrea’s grandfather, Doug. Just writing that sentence has started the waterworks for me. Each is different, each is painful, each is raw. Not “was”, but “is”. Less acute, but still raw.

So, we wanted a chance to relax. We needed it. And we started thinking, “Hey, how about a trip down South?”.

Not enough nuance to our parameters

Andrea did a bunch of the initial searching. But we were trying to parse some parameters to limit the risk. We were worried about the trip. We wanted to keep the travel process to a manageable level of chaos, partly for Jacob’s stamina and endurance. We wanted a good beach, not too big a resort, nice pool, some activity options. We did NOT want big things like trips to Tulum. It was likely to be a resort trip, not an excursions trip.

Looking through all the travel options that Andrea had found, the trips were inconsistent…one would have a great flight down, and then coming back, overnight in Toronto or Montreal. Or leave really early and take 12-14 hours to get to the destination airport. Until I looked at the Air Transat packages that she had found. All of their flights were direct from Ottawa to the destination airport, no transfers or routings. They had Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Andrea’s been to Jamaica, we’ve all been to Mexico; the DR is relatively simple, and more attractive to us than Cuba. So we settled early. A 6:00 p.m. departure arriving around 10:00 p.m. at night, 4 hour flight down; coming back, it left really late (almost midnight), but again, a quick 4-hour hop back. Hah!

We got cancellation insurance, option to bail for any reason, which seemed good just in case we weren’t up to going. Between Jacob’s dizziness and my back, we weren’t sure everything would be going smoothly. A few days before going, I began to wonder if we had made the right choice. Jacob was behind on school, and had worked really hard the week before Christmas to get caught up. Which he did. But if we stayed home for a week, instead of going away, he could get a jump on the stuff he had to do in January before he got to his summative exams and final project deadlines. I was wondering if a staycation might not have been a better weighting of “value-added”. Yet we all really wanted the break, to go somewhere and get our heads out of our existing lives. We stuck to the plan.

The flight down, a 4-hour hop, was a bit misleading. It left later than scheduled, no big problem. There’s a one-hour time-difference to DR from Ottawa, so we actually were getting in an hour later, although that goes out in the wash. The deplaning and luggage process took forever — customs was easy, but everything else took almost 90 minutes. We then found our bus to the resort, which was supposed to be about an hour, and was actually closer to 90 minutes. The last 30m of the trip was listening to, I think, Placido Domingo singing opera which seemed like torture honestly. Once we were at the resort, maybe 20 of us checking in, it took forever. And I was completely spent. I couldn’t deal with people. My patience was at zero at this point. It literally took them 25 minutes to check the three of us ONCE WE GOT TO THE DESK. We were last of 20 or so. It was about 3:30 when we got to sleep. Not awesome.

For the week, we had a good beach albeit with very limited visibility in the bay. And Jacob’s dizziness? Exacerbated by being in the ocean. We had hoped to spend a good portion of the week reading and swimming at the beach, and Jacob couldn’t do it. Equally, I had trouble getting in and out of the ocean as there was a drop-off close to where we started (there were other options farther over with more gradual entry, apparently). And yet, I still have problems with my shins with repeated wounds. Which I did something to about a week before leaving, and it was still weeping. I could go in the ocean, but I couldn’t / shouldn’t go in the pool. We made compromises, but our swimming plans for the week were heavily messed up. We didn’t plan for many excursions, thought we could do some stuff on the property but there really wasn’t anything to see or do. There was a small plaza across the road we went to a couple of times for specific things. It wasn’t a bad resort, we just planned on more relaxing and found that it was too quiet for us. We needed a bit more oomph. The daily activities looked like bad summer camp, and the nighttime shows were laughable. The food at the main and secondary restaurants was okay, not bad, but not particularly scintillating. It was fine, with decent desserts. There were also three a la carte restaurants — Italian, French and Mediterranean. We liked the Italian the best; the French was okay, we didn’t feel a need to go back, while the Mediterranean was heavily seafood-oriented yet not amazing. If we were at home, we would go to the Italian one, occasionally, although there are better ones out there; we probably would not go to either of the other two more than once to try it.

In short, we were bored. We had booked for 9 days, but after 4 days, we looked into the cost to switch to just 7 days and to go home early…it was exorbitant to change, the flights were full, etc. so we left it as is.

New Year’s Eve was Tuesday night (we arrived on Friday), and we enjoyed the night. Dinner was late, we went back to the room and played games, and then they did fireworks at midnight. By some fluke in avoiding a dancing crowd across the street that was too loud for Jacob, we ended up walking a bit down the road for a better view, and it was like we were all alone having our own private fireworks show for 20-25 minutes. It was really great. Not so great when something hot landed on Jacob and Andrea, but they weren’t hurt, just surprised. We wandered down to a gazebo on a pier after midnight and said goodbye to 2024. I embraced a small ritual I had read about of taking a stone, imbuing it with all your negative thoughts from the past year, and just chucking it in the ocean. I hadn’t realized how stressed I was about the year until we did it…I felt a large release, and was even a bit emotional hugging Jacob and Andrea.

The real problem though is that I got the flu on Tuesday / Wednesday. Tuesday afternoon, I had a scratchy throat and was starting to feel a bit off; full cold-like symptoms on Wednesday. Spent a bit of extra time just at the room trying to sleep it off. Andrea started getting sick on Thursday, Jacob on Friday. By Sunday, Andrea was so sick that we had to go talk to the doctor on the resort, who recommended shipping her off to Punta Cana by cab to get them to do xrays and stuff. Her lungs had extra stuff sounding in it, and with Andrea’s medical history, we agreed it was a good idea.

Of course, that was our last day. And checkout from the room was supposed to be noon. I tried to get them to extend, and they gave me the runaround. I was completely caught…I had to checkout, but we wanted to leave Jacob at the resort even though he was feeling like crap now, and Andrea needed to go to the private hospital, get looked at, and get back so we could take our evening flight. It was a complete mess. The hotel was useless. In the end, I had to send Andrea off on her own, and I stayed with Jacob. I got nasty with the hotel staff as they were completely f***ing useless, and then later said, “Oh, we extended you in the room”, 2 hours after I had already checked out. They didn’t bother to tell me. F***ing asshat. So Jacob and I spent the day in the big open-air lobby, charging our phones, repacking bags, and Jacob running to the bathroom to vomit while I tried to connect with Andrea who was at the hospital in Punta Cana (90 minutes away) with a dying phone. She made it back, we got a prescription filled, found a way to pay the cab driver, packed our stuff, got on a shuttle bus and went to the airport. Jacob was really not well and travelling was horrendous for both him and Andrea. Flights were delayed, and we didn’t get home until almost 4 in the morning, which was 5:00 DR time. Not a good combo in the end.

Post-holiday recovery

On the Sunday for the return trip, I was vertical and probably in the best shape of all of us. I had some meds, I jacked the cold stuff even with decongestant which I’m not supposed to take, and focused on what we needed to check in, get us to the gate, etc. The flights were delayed as I said, and he was sick a couple of times at the airport. Andrea was focusing on breathing. My problem was more diarrhea, and I had Imodium on speeddial, but it was still messing me up.

We had planned that all three of us would take the Monday off when we got back as we knew we’d get in late at night / early in the morning. I missed almost the whole week of work. I was off the first couple of days, easily, and then slowly back online a bit by the end of the week, but not fully working. It was a full extra week after the trip to get back to something resembling functionality.

Andrea ended up back in the ER, twice actually, and it turned out the first doctor was right. She DID have stuff going on with her lungs — full pneumonia. She missed work for all of the first week, most of the second, and now two weeks afterwards, she is still fighting a persistent cough.

Jacob? Well, our decisions might have f***ed him for school. Our whole schtick for the last year has been getting him back to school more regularly and for longer periods of time. And after catching up before Christmas, he just missed almost all of the last two weeks. He has had a full-on flu case for two weeks. He managed a couple of classes this week, but he’s still fighting a bad cough. And because he has small lungs, it’s hard for him to clear phlegm and stuff. He’s doing everything he can to finish his semester but it is a rough go.

Not regret, but…

In the end, I suspect I picked up something on the plane on the way down. It took a few days to take hold, and then once it did, I infected Andrea and Jacob. Andrea was sleeping next to me, Jacob was in the same room, the physical path of contamination/contagion looked like a straight line in the hotel room.

And to be honest, that risk was nowhere on my radar. Sure, travelling on a plane is always a risk. COVID, flu, colds, whatever. But we’re fully vaccinated, and if I had thought of it at all, it would likely have been a relatively minor annoyance. I did not envision that it could knock all three of us on our butts for 2-3 weeks.

Is what I feel regret? If I had thought about it, we would have discussed it and rated it pretty low-risk…medium probability perhaps, it’s easy to get sick on a plane, but with relatively low impact. Sick for a few days, move on.

It’s easy to conflate a bunch of stuff together. A less-than-exciting trip; bad logistics at times; terrible experience at the end; and we got really sick. But if we hadn’t got sick, it would have been a shoulder shrug. New Year’s Eve was great, one of the better ones that I have had in recent memory perhaps. I liked getting away, I liked our ritual. I can lament some features of the trip, but I wouldn’t have even come close to “regretting it”, more just it didn’t work out as well as our previous trip to Mexico. We didn’t get the parameters right for balance perhaps. One of the benefits of our driving trips is we had stuff inherently built into each day; the DR was more emotionally flat. Except for getting sick, it would have been more disappointing than bad.

And if we had stayed home, we likely would have gone out for dinner a couple of times on our staycation, or to some museums, etc. And we could have just as easily gotten sick sitting next to people in an IMAX movie.

I’ll write in future about our actual trip, and the activities we did. In the end, I don’t think it was a bad holiday decision, just one that didn’t work out as well. And perhaps we didn’t adequately consider the risks of the impact for Jacob for school if he gets really sick and misses more time. Sigh.

Ultimately, Everyone’s fine. The news of our deaths was (slightly) exaggerated. But we sure don’t feel rested or like we had a good break.

My big brother Don passed away this week. He was 68 70 (edit!), living alone in Peterborough with advanced diabetes.

When I heard the news from my sister on Tuesday night, I felt bad that I didn’t immediately feel terrible. To be blunt, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. I have even felt, in some ways, like I had already said goodbye to him. I knew what the future would hold for him, and it wasn’t pretty to look at, even if some of it was his choice of how to live. I cried, I was a bit emotional, but it seemed like a relief too. No more worrying about him.

On Wednesday morning, I was a basket case. As I wrote the first draft of this, I was wailing like a banshee. The previous night, I even thought briefly that I’d just work the next few days, I’d be okay, as I’ve been through loss before and I know how to handle it. But by the morning, I thought, “That’s stupid. Give yourself time and space to grieve, if you need it or not, you moron.” So first thing in the morning, I was chatting with my boss’ boss via video call to let her know that I would be off for a few days, and I suddenly couldn’t talk. It was immediately raw, painful and overwhelming. I simply could not talk about it. As others heard the news through the day, they said, “Hey, I’ll call you later?”, and I’m like, “Noooooo, I am not up to talking.” With anyone really, except Jacob and Andrea perhaps, or Carolee, Chris, Liz. Or my siblings.

Since Wednesday morning, I have written and re-written this post a few times. It’s hard to find the right balance of thoughts, order or even structure…I’m likely to be the only one to blog about him, but I don’t hold any specific “rights” to his story. I am not the definitive voice on his life in any way. Nor do I know all of it, anyway.

His relationship with me was different from his relationships with others…I can’t really speak to his role as father, friend, son. Nor even as slightly older brother or younger brother. He was the second of six kids, and first-born son. But for me, he was my “big brother”. That seems a bit odd…after all, I have multiple brothers and brothers-in-law, most of them older, but Don was the one I saw as the big brother. Bill is my “big little brother”, my playmate as a kid. Mike is my mental twinsie — he’s 10y older than me but we found out about 25 years ago that we had similar views and interests about work, etc. Raised very differently, very different lives, and yet we could finish each other’s sentences sometimes. My brother-in-law Bob is my protective surrogate Dad or uncle, married to my oldest sibling, Sharon, my surrogate almost-mother or aunt as 16y older. Ken, my sister Marie’s husband, was the fun brother, around for fun and games on weekends. And my newest brother-in-law, Dean, is the calm brother. But Don? He was always my big brother.

When my parents died, I did their eulogies, which were both highly personal and on behalf of the family. So it wasn’t just my view of them, it was a bit more cooperative, even if they were my words and structure. For my father, I tried to picture what a good day would look like for him, a day he might want to relive in some form of afterlife if one exists. To me, it would have been 24th of May weekend, setting up the trailer for the summer, a season of opportunity for family and friends and relaxation. For my mother, I wrote about family memories, but a good day would likely have been more about everyone home for Christmas dinner. Lots of chaos going on, lots of stress, but there would be expanding families, laughter, games, more laughter, a little drama. Life. And, hopefully, a baby to hold. I found those images comforting, to imagine them in a “better place”. Hopefully finding ways to play euchre with Pat and Yvette, perhaps, or hanging out with Aunt June and Uncle Jack.

For Don, I don’t know what that good or perfect day would be. Carolee, Liz or Chris might be able to answer that, but I can’t, not reliably. I imagine it would have something to do with younger healthier versions of the family, the cottage, BBQ, campfire, boating or dirt biking, maybe some time with neighbours, and building something from skid wood. And the stereo running all day long.

Instead, all I can do is remember his stories.

Go West, young man

I don’t have many memories of Don living at home in my early years. I know from stories that he chafed under the rule of my old school father, the young father I never knew rather than the mellower 3.0 version I had later at home (with version 1.0 being the young man who got married and version 2.0 being the father of the first four kids). I don’t know what it was like to be the first-born son. Most of my memories are all second- and third-hand…there’s a photo of the six kids at the cottage gathered around a bicycle, another photo of Don on crutches, but they don’t resonate directly with me. I can remember going on canoe rides with him, but mostly I remember the stories of Mom losing her sh** when she saw him standing outside a Mac’s Milk drinking a coke despite having been recently diagnosed with diabetes. Or of him searching the house every year to find Xmas presents, until my parents figured out they could hide them in the drop ceiling where he’d never find them.

Oddly enough, I was also in a car accident with him. I think that must have been around 4, I think. He was driving out to one of the schools on the edge of the city, Thomas A. Stewart Secondary school, aka TASS, and he took his eyes off the road to look in the parking lot for a friend’s car to see if he was there (his friend might have been a drug dealer, as I think about it now), and someone stopped to turn in ahead of him. Still, Don didn’t see the car stop. He ran into the back of him, and as this was in the lovely era of no seatbelts, I apparently bounced off the dash. That seems like something I should remember, the aftermath even, did I go to the hospital? (Probably not). Was I bleeding? Did I lose any teeth? I have nada. Just that I was told it happened. Maybe it gave me amnesia for all my short-term memories of him at home. 🙂

I saw a Canadian comedian recently who commented that Canadian boomers are easily identified as they all had at least one family member who moved out West in the ’70s to look for work. In our family, that was Don, and it was one of his favourite stories, usually shared in four parts.

Part 1 was life in Peterborough with no work to be had. To get EI, the rules were the same as they are now — recent job loss, you had to be available for work, and you had to be actively looking for work. But there was no work in Peterborough in the ’70s, generally speaking. So everyone would do the same thing…they would go over to a factory like Quaker Oats on Monday and ask if they could apply for anything/leave a resume; the answer was no, always, but they would give you a little card stamped with that day’s date saying you were in, so you could take one and show it to the EI office. And the guys in his immediate circle would take turns…someone would go to Quaker Oats and get five cards. Then someone else would go to Fisher Gauge, get five cards, and someone else to Outboard Marine, GE, etc. They’d all get together and swap extra cards, done.

Part 2 would be about the drive out west. He would always marvel about the mountains in Northern Ontario (since he’d never seen higher mountains up to that point). Driving along, there would be 4-5 cars all relatively together, each occasionally taking over the lead for 30 minutes and then slowing down with someone else taking the lead. There wasn’t a lot of cruise control in the ’70s, so this was all manual. Then they would all peel off around lunchtime and have lunch at different places, but after lunch, somewhere in the next hour, they’d likely all end up bunched up together again. Little caravans heading west to seek opportunity.

Part 3 would be about his first day of work. His friends out West, whom he was crashing with, hooked him up with a delivery job, and the driver took him around the route on Day 1. At the end of the day, he told Don that he should be ready to do the job by himself on Day 2. Don thought he was crazy because he didn’t know the city and hadn’t been able to memorize the route; he said it was nuts, no way, and he quit. When he was trying to explain the craziness to his roommates, they laughed at him. It was Calgary, the Tower was in the centre, there were four quadrants for directions, and all the streets were numbered in a grid. Nobody had told him that, though; nor had he realized it just driving around. No wonder the driver thought he was nuts to turn down the job.

Part 4 was more about the nightlife in Calgary and how many places maintained discipline in a modern-day version of the Wild West. Many men would come in from the oilfields, flush with money and looking to party. So they would, and usually that would mean getting drunk, and if you put enough drunk men together on a Saturday night, someone would start a fight. At which time, according to Don, the bouncers would surround the two fighters and let them beat on each other. Then one would go down, and the bouncers would take the winner out back and beat the crap out of them for fighting in the club. Either way, you would lose. His friends told him that if you got in a fight, the best thing to do was take a punch and drop to the ground. It was apparently quite effective in some clubs.

Of course, such stories would then segue over to tales of bars on Simcoe Street in Peterborough, where they had reciprocal agreements for bouncers to go help out if a big fight broke out at another bar (since it wasn’t uncommon for the fighting spirit to spread). Don remembered one time there was a fight across the street at one of the hotel bars, and the bouncers were heading over, but before they went, the bartender called them back and gave them all little billy clubs to take so they wouldn’t get hurt while helping out at another bar.

Back in Peterborough

While I didn’t remember Don leaving, I do remember him coming BACK from out West, because I remember him being at home this time. I don’t mean that I have a strong sense of him being around, mind you, more just which bedroom was his. And don’t tell Mom, but he had dirty magazines in there. Shhhh. I know that he got a diploma in something business-related at Sir Sandford Fleming, and he started working at the hospital at some point.

But my memory does a time jump to his wedding to Carolee. The reception was at a hotel ballroom on Lansdowne Street in Peterborough. I was maybe 10 or so, I think. I remember somebody pranking him by filling their car with hay and filling the air vents with confetti. They were moving into a townhouse on Sydenham and somebody also went in and removed all the labels from all the cans. I had never heard of wedding pranks before, and while I thought it sounded funny at first, it seemed annoying afterwards. I mostly remember being fascinated that someone was moving into a new house, as I had only ever lived in our old home on Dublin Street. I helped vacuum out the car at some point, moved in some boxes, I don’t know if I was much help. But I at least felt like I was helping my big brother and not being a nuisance. I was old enough to actually do something. We also went to the Royal Burger on Lansdowne, which was a local drive-through and former car hop, which was pretty cool.

My memory jumps again, and they moved out of Sydenham into a house in the north end closer to both sets of parents (I don’t know if that was intentional or just worked out that way). But he was about seven blocks from where I lived. I have four very strong memories of visiting Don at that house throughout my teen years.

The first is putting in the pool. None of us knew anything about pools, and Don filled it up to about 8-12 inches of water before trying to adjust the liner. Except you’re supposed to do that with only a few inches of water. It was really challenging kneeling down in the cold water, pulling at the liner with our fingertips to get it to adjust. We did about 30% in a full afternoon of three of us adjusting it by millimetres, and our hands and arms were screaming all night and into the next day. But he talked to some people, found out it shouldn’t be that hard, drained the pool to a few inches, and he did the rest of the liner adjustments on his own in about 30 minutes. Doh!

Second, we used to have a blast in that pool in the summers. Often, it would be Bill, Don, and I playing with beachballs. Soooo many beachballs. We would hit it back and forth, but because we sucked at sports of any type, the ball would quickly get knocked out of the pool. So you would have to get out and go get it. That got tedious, so we bought more balls. And more balls. I think at one point, there were about 20 in the pool? So we could play for a while before having to replenish the supply.

Third, Don had early VCRs, first Betamax and then VHS. And there was a video store less than a block away, so some summers or Saturdays, we’d rent 4-5 movies and binge.Time Bandits. On Any Sunday II. Mad Max/Road Warrior. The Warriors. Early 1980s stuff.

But my fourth and strongest memory is visiting in my teens, hanging out in the basement while Don did laundry and stuff, and playing 3 or 4 games of Triple Yahtzee during the night. It was an oasis when things weren’t that enjoyable at home, although I didn’t have the sense at the time that I was escaping. I was just spending time with my big brother.

Enter the cottage

Somewhere in my teens, Don bought a cabin. He called it a cottage, but I always think of cottages as being on the water, and his wasn’t. His goal was to find something within an hour’s driving distance of Peterborough; with some space around it so you weren’t packed in like sardines; and options to go dirt biking in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter. Carolee’s family already had a cottage farther north, another 45 minutes or so, with access to a beach, but Don wanted his own refuge and control for adjusting the building, etc.

I remember going up on weekends, listening to the stereo all weekend, having BBQs and bonfires, or often building a shed or an outhouse or adding to the porch, etc. And lots of games of Triple Yahtzee. One of our favourite shared memories of a weekend at the cottage was with Chris as a young boy, maybe 5 or so. We were working on the porch roof, and Chris wanted to help. So Don helped him up the ladder onto the gently sloped roof, ensured he was “above” us on the roof so he couldn’t slide off, and let Chris hammer in some nails. We took a picture of it, this boy up on the roof helping out, and everybody who saw it was like, “WTF? Why is Chris on the roof?”. Cuz that’s how we rolled at the cottage.

We went dirt biking together a number of times, just gentle trips for me, but he did much more active rides with other riders. Don had mostly switched to riding a trike at that point, more so than the dirt bike, but still sometimes both on weekends. He had lots of toys, and I remember a conversation one time with Carolee about how it was hard to deny him fun things when there was a good chance that he wouldn’t be able to do them later in life with his diabetes. I remember thinking this was an important bit of info, even if my teenage brain couldn’t put it into context.

Sometime in there, we went up to Toronto for a motorcycle show. I can’t even put that together in a sentence now without going, “WTF?”. What was **I** doing at a motorcycle show? I went with Don cause he invited me. Great time, lots of glossy brochures and posters of bikes we would never own. Annnnd, as we were leaving, Don left his camera on top of the car as we were driving off, and it bounced down the side of the car and across the pavement. A great day, not so great an ending.

With the kids now in the picture, Chris the carpenter and Lighting Liz, I also remember some great days out at the lake for Breezy Point with them. Sometimes with all the cousins around.

Music was always part of the scene when Don was around. Songs of the ’70s mostly, usually classic rock. Not pop. And I have two very odd small memories about music. One time we were up at the cottage, and I remembered that there was this new song I had meant to tell Don about. It was more pop country, but it had a good beat, and I couldn’t remember the name. Or the artist. Or any of the lyrics. All I could remember was that it was contemporary, and it had some sort of catch-phrase as the main chorus. He said, “Oh, right, ‘Single White Female’ by Chely Wright.” Why, yes, I did mean that song…but how the hell did he pull that out of the dumbass description I had? He was my older brother and he knew how I thought.

Another was that at the end of a long weekend at the cottage, and dealing with the challenge that he couldn’t get his favourite radio stations out of Toronto, he got home, unpacked and started doing laundry. With the radio on, he said that he was very much relieved to be with good music again. After a weekend of pop/top 40 stuff. And his favourite station started into the next song, something different from their normal mix, it was going to be the big hit of the week (which he had heard 30 times that weekend already!). Walk Like An Egyptian by the Bangles. And not just the regular cut, it was the extended edition. I think I can still hear the echoes of his soul crying out in pain. 🙂

Hello darkness, our old friend

But as hinted at in the conversation with Carolee, life started to change for Don with his illness advancing. He had never taken great care of himself, something that never changed in his life even later. He took his insulin, but didn’t eat the most healthy of meals when he was on his own. Drugs of various types in the ’70s and ’80s, probably too much beer on those weekends at the cottage. Not necessarily fatal, by any means, but not conducive to health for a body already compromised.

When he was in his mid-thirties, he jumped in the pool and hit his head somehow (a dive or a flip, I don’t remember now). I wasn’t there, but I heard afterwards because he got a giant floater in his eye. He started having a lot of trouble at work because he struggled to read documents, trying to see past the floater. It was about the size of a quarter in his vision. The doctors said it would be absorbed by his eye eventually, but more floaters started to appear. And after several years struggling along, that was it. He was officially too disabled to work.

I imagine that was a touchstone where his life became less about what he wanted to do and more about what his body would let him do. Even more so when he could no longer drive. It’s not a good combo for a very introverted and independent man, particularly with our predilection for darker thoughts. I’m extrapolating, as he wasn’t the type to share those feelings. But you could see it turning him over time. Darker humour, more pessimistic.

Yet I remember going to Toronto once for treatment on his eyes. It was a brutal winter day. We weren’t too worried about it, though, as we would do our usual thing when going to Toronto. We would get off at Yonge Street, go North until the first subway stop, park in one of the lots and take the Subway to within a block or two of the hospital and foot it the rest of the way. It would be a very short time outside. Uh-huh. Best laid plans and all that. We were NOT dressed for -40 with the windchill, we were not prepared for the subway to be shut down at Bloor and having to walk 6-10 blocks to get there. We were not prepared to kill 3 hours during the day and then go back for a follow-up appointment. We ended up on Yonge Street trying to find scarfs, earmuffs, and better gloves/mitts. It sounds terrible, right? Except it wasn’t. We were just getting around on our own while the rest of the city shut down. We ended up killing the 3 hours on Yonge Street in a restaurant / bar with windows on the second floor overlooking the street. And we had found paper, dice, and pens so we played Triple Yahtzee to pass the time. Then we finished up and caught the subway back to the truck. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. We froze our nuts off, as Don liked to say, but we made the best of it. Two brothers taking on the big city.

I wish that attitude, the one of making the best of it, is what I remember for the rest of Don’s life, but sadly, it isn’t.

The last 15 years of his life were much more of a roller coaster. He met a bunch of new people, but he did it at dialysis. He spoke to groups about his health situation, but he had the opportunity and willingness to do that because he had to undergo multiple organ transplants. I remember being freaked out when I found out he was going to have the transplants, missing a close friend’s wedding because I thought, “This is it. He’s going to go in for surgery and he’ll be gone, I need to be around.” My own version of the fatalistic Sadler gene.

As the darkness descended, it destroyed many of his relationships with others. Divorce, estrangement, and isolation were variations on a theme. Sometimes, even regular conversations would be hard. The Sadler boys share a fatalistic gene, one we got from both our parents, and it often showed up in dark humour or cutting remarks. However, it could also show up in a desire for drama, although that may not be the best description.

A small digression…My mother, in her last ten years of life, would often stir the pot. She used to do it with my Dad, but I didn’t notice it as much, until he was gone. She would call my sister, for example, and say, “Here’s something, what should I do about it?”. Then she would call me and ask me, and when she got a different answer, she would say, “But Marie says I should do this.” Stirring the pot, trying to get a reaction.

Don’s version was different. And I suffer from it, too. He would look at a situation and say it was bad. If you agreed, or not, he would then say, it’s not just bad, it’s really bad. Then horrible. Then terrible. And that would continue until he declared it the baddest it could ever possibly be, the no good terrible horrible very baddest day in the history of bad days. Did he really think that? Not really. On some level, he knew it wasn’t true. But he wanted to provoke a reaction. So he would paint it dark, and refuse to let it go. I’ve got a variation on that, I know my brother Bill has it (but more “why bother”), Mike probably does too. Don’t know for the sisters, how theirs manifests itself. Some psychologists suggest it is some form of genetic trauma passed down to kids of parents who lived through the Great Depression and WWII. That seems like a leap. Some of us are just depressing asshats at times.

In the last few years, he was living alone at the same house. Chesterfield Avenue, which my son used to joke was “couch street”. Most days, I would picture him alone with no interactions, maybe walking to the Sub shop at lunch. And he would tell me that was generally the case. Except I know he still went to doctor’s appointments. He still went and got groceries. Sometimes with help from neighbours, sometimes with a cab. No email, no internet, just cable TV as a companion. And a cellphone, but he was not a texter.

Every few months, when visiting Peterborough to see the inlaws, I would swing over to see him. I couldn’t hang out there with him, the thought of living all alone in that house was too scary for my own brain. Perhaps too much “but for the grace of my family, go I”, so I always wanted to go out. In recent years, it has usually been to Swiss Chalets. He would tell me what was going on, which was generally not much, and I would fill the space in the conversation with stories of Jacob mostly. When Jacob was younger, Don and I would get together when I was home and hang out at McDonald’s…Don and I would chat and Jacob would read. I regret that life didn’t really lend itself well to Andrea and Jacob getting to know him better. I think Jacob would really have enjoyed spending a night at the cottage playing Triple Yahtzee and doing stuff with him. Maybe even climbing on a roof and hammering some nails. Andrea would have enjoyed his campfires and our BBQ dinners, complete with potatoes cut up in little tinfoil bowls.

One time, maybe six years ago now, Don had medical trouble at home. A wellness check ended up with him in the hospital for several weeks. And a small miracle happened, perhaps even an ironic one at that. While he was in there, they helped him discover better living through pharmacology. Real pharmacology, not the self-medication of his youth. They gave him mood stabilizers and/or anti-depressants, and because he was there for an extended period, they were able to get the dose properly calibrated for him. He’d tried them before, but like many people, he found they either did nothing, made him loopy, or he felt foggy, and he’d discontinued them. As a side note, he was in the hospital for some time, and never told me or the other siblings he was there. He didn’t want pity, he didn’t want help, usually.

Instead, he told me all this over lunch months later at a restaurant that he liked in the South End of Peterborough. A long talk where he did most of the talking for a change. He was a bit stressed with a bunch of other stuff going on, blah blah blah, same old same old as far as he was concerned. And then, this fatalistic man, the one with the gene that kicks the crap out of our mental health at times, said something wondrous. He said, “But I can’t really do anything about that, that’s out of my control, so I’m just trying to focus on this and this.” WTF? Who WAS this guy? It sure as heck wasn’t my brother. Hell, I’m not even sure he was in our family! 🙂 Awareness? Perspective? Optimism? Give ME some of those drugs, holy crap.

A few months later? He stopped taking the meds. I don’t know if it was because they simply ran out and he didn’t renew them before the chemistry wore off. Or he wanted to stop because the dosage was off again. But he stopped. I tried to talk to him a few times about it. To see if he would go back on them, I even talked with him about some harsh truths about our fatalistic side of things. That sometimes that gene causes us to say things darker than they were just to provoke even ourselves, to FEEL something. He wasn’t interested.

That’s a hard thing to know. That somewhere inside him was this other bright passenger. A man with a sense of optimism, perspective, awareness, who couldn’t get out, a seemingly better version of himself perhaps, but we all own our choices. His life, his choices. And while I might have views about what he SHOULD have done, I wasn’t him. Like with my parents before him, I had to accept him where he was, not where I might hope or wish him to be.

And so all I could do was visit. Maybe take him for groceries. Share a meal and talk. I last saw him at Christmas. He was in pretty rough shape physically. His balance was going, he was having trouble walking too far. And mentally? He was done. He said he was sitting at home waiting to die. That wasn’t an attempt at provocation or his dark passenger, he was just done. And he didn’t want that to change. He didn’t want help, he just wanted acceptance. So we shared a meal and I told him I loved him. And I mentally braced myself for the eventual news that came Tuesday.

Picturing a better time or place

As I said at the top, I don’t know that I can picture Don’s happy place. I have inklings, but not a definitive answer. What I can do is tell you about my best day with my big brother. I was happy to have him as an usher at my wedding, but with all the hullabaloo for the day, I am choosing something more singular, just the two of us.

The year was 1991. I was 23 and had just finished Trent. In September, I would be heading out West myself, but flying to BC to go to law school, not to Calgary looking for work. What I wanted was a proper stereo. Not a boombox. Not a bookshelf system (which weren’t that great at the time), but a true modular system that I could build on and upgrade over the years. Like the type Don had. We had a stereo at the house, generally older models of Don’s machines as he upgraded and gave his old ones. We had an 8-track player in the front room of our house well into the ’80s which was an old stereo of his.

A local store, Gibson’s TV and Stereo, was going out of business and having some pretty good deals. On Don’s recommendation, Bill and I grabbed the last two receivers that they had, both Pioneer models (mine with a remote, Bill’s without), with ample power out each side, 100 watts a side.

That was the base. We picked those up on a Thursday night, and on Saturday morning, Don and I went hunting.

We were at Kawartha TV and Stereo first thing in the morning when they opened, 8:00 a.m., mostly to see what they had and at what price. I had the receiver, but I still needed a CD player, cassette deck (dual, preferred), potentially a turntable still (but probably not, it was time to switch over to tapes and CDs completely), and a set of small decent speakers.

I wasn’t that well-versed in options, but Don held my hand figuratively and helped weed the wheat from the chaff. Kawartha had a good little Scott dual cassette deck on offer, but nothing appealing for the rest.

We left Peterborough and headed for the electronics meccas of Oshawa and Toronto. In Oshawa, just over an hour away, there were a bunch of plazas with small electronics wholesalers and they advertised in the local paper constantly with their great sales. The first two places were a bust, nothing really decent for the prices, and no speakers under $200 which was going to hurt my budget. We saw nothing worthwhile in the cassette deck realm that would beat Kawartha TV and Stereo, no good speakers, and almost all the CD systems were multiple CD carousels or racks or compact cartridges. The benefit of the multiple systems was that you could press play and have five or six CDs worth of music play straight. I ruled out a turntable requirement, as I said above, but the extra cost for a multi-CD player was hard to justify. I couldn’t imagine listening to music for more than an hour straight, to be honest.

So we passed on the first few offers, skipped a few other places, and headed for Toronto. Yonge Street had a bunch of similar-type electronics stores, and yet we found almost nothing good. It was a bit depressing. We had seen one CD player, a Kenwood model, earlier on that was plausible, but we finally found a better version in the back of a store on Yonge. It was a music store, and I picked up a couple of CDs (Meatloff’s Bat Out of Hell, for instance) too which gave me 4-5 for the day. Don had already gifted me two so that I would have music to try in each system we listened to — Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours CD and the Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits from 1974-1978. Two of the best albums ever, according to Don, and I can’t disagree. Much of my musical tastes started with his albums at home, although I never really jived with Deep Purple selections.

We grabbed a quick burger and fries for lunch, hiked our one box to the truck, and headed back home. We stopped at another place in Oshawa, as I was still missing speakers. It looked like a bust for a while. Nothing sounded like it had much bass, it was all tinny sounding. And expensive for that…again, most in the $200-$300 range. There were some good ones with bass in the $400-500 range, but that was way too much. I had already spent $250 on the receiver, the CD player was $125 I think, the tape deck was running me another $100, so I was pushing $500ish, with taxes in, etc. So I wasn’t looking to push $800-$900 or more to get higher-end speakers.

And Don was frustrated, both for himself and his recommendations, and for me that we couldn’t find what he thought was going to be easy peasy. He kept saying that there should be speakers of a certain type, likely around $100 or so, that would do me well. Except nobody seemed to carry that style anymore. We hit one last store on the way out of Oshawa, and after trying some for around $200 again and being disappointed, I spotted a pair that looked like what Don was describing. I asked to listen to them, and the salesman was really reluctant to bother. They wouldn’t be what I wanted, he said. When Don saw what I was pointing at, his eyes lit up. Yes, we want to hear THOSE Scott ones. That is exactly what he was looking for. And he wasn’t wrong. They sounded perfect for the price. A bit over $100, I think they were $125-200 or so.

We stopped at Kawartha TV and Stereo on the way back and snagged the Scott dual cassette deck. And while I was there, Don noted there was a good little stereo stand for sale, complete with glass door. It was a DIY assembly unit, long before IKEA was around in the area, and on sale for just over $100. An easy addition.

All in? Just under $800, the perfect stereo for the budget. Everything I wanted, Don found. And I got to spend a day with my big brother running around. Taking on the bigger cities and shady salesmen, and hunting for our prey.

I still have the stereo, even though I haven’t listened to it in years. Everything still works great. The speakers got slightly damaged at one point, so Don replaced them with a garage-sale special set of Scott speakers. My wife was joking that when they go to empty the house, they may find dozens of speakers in the garage, as everytime he saw them at a garage sale, if they were cheap, he’d buy them. Even if he had to spend $10 to get the whole stereo with them.

I keep thinking I’ll get rid of my system, but I am reluctant to do that…much of that because Don helped me find them and assemble the components. They are souvenirs of a really good very fun day, that not even HE could deny. He had fun that day, too.

I don’t normally edit my posts after I get to the final version, but I forgot something about Don. His favourite saying. If you can classify people as “doers” or “thinkers”, Don would be a doer. He always wanted to be active. When it was time to go, it was time to go. And he’d tell you…”Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er”. It’s a phrase from 16th Century England, apparently, but Don used it for years. No idea why, but I find myself thinking it regularly.

I love you bro and I will miss you. Thanks for being a great big brother and a good friend. Pitter patter.