My Brother Bob

Bob playing croquet

LONDON, ONTARIO – I apologize for my silence these last few months. It’s been a summer like no other. The youngest of my three older brothers has died and I’ve been floundering a bit as I try to re-set my bearings. For as long as I’ve been drawing breath, Bob has been reassuringly close to hand; a constant touchstone and marker of who I am and the people I come from and the place in this world where I belong. In our childhood, we usually shared a bedroom. For most of our adulthood, we’ve shared a postal code (four out of six digits); living a block and a half apart in this perfect riverside neighbourhood that we might never have twigged to if Bob hadn’t bought a house here first and rented us an apartment on his main floor for the first four years of our marriage. And though they didn’t live here at the same time, it was also a neighbourhood in which both of our parents – but particularly our mom - had roots; reflecting Bob’s lifelong knack for keeping his loved ones in his loop. It’s a challenge to come up with an adequate analogy for the scale of my disorientation in losing so constant a beacon in my life. In moments of existential panic, I ping between ‘banishment’ and ‘amputation’ as the truer simile for my devastation in being cut off from such a primal fount of shared memory and insight and meaning.

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Though we could easily go a month or two between proper visits, Bob was always securely tucked away in the back pocket of my mind. He was there whenever I needed his help - and vice-versa - though mostly what I remember is me leaning on him. Every time we picked up our conversation again, Bob was as easy to re-engage with as that favourite mutt who optimistically drops a tennis ball at your feet. And there could indeed be an element of playing ‘fetch’ if our chat should venture into the realm of our earliest domestic history. We loved to mooch around in some of our more obscure and neglected shafts of memory; digging up fugitive details from days of yore and dragging them into the present light. What a victory it seemed against the tyranny of temporality whenever we summoned up another lost incident or encounter or almost-forgotten gesture. The names and allusions retrieved in our sessions might mean little to others; might even exasperate them a little like a cheap party trick or an act of self-indulgence: “Get a room, you two.” Yet I distinctly recall a few nights when, well past their bedtimes, I couldn’t help noticing our kids listening in; easing themselves into their own dream states while imbibing fragmentary reports from the scarcely imaginable infancy of their elders.

All four of the Goodden boys were graced with pretty well-stocked memory banks but Bob shared our father’s gift for passing his knowledge along without judgements or airs or editorial embellishments. Though Bob did indeed have his own aesthetic sense and philosophical bent, he was refreshingly unburdened by any overt artistic or intellectual pretensions and was therefore the least egotistic, the least declarative, of the brothers. Wonderfully self-contained, you never caught Bob foisting his latest obsessions and views on others. That quietly forthright sensibility made him our most reliable keeper of family and London lore. I’m also starting to wonder if he wasn’t our primary agent in keeping the brothers connected over the decades and into our dotage. He was certainly the one who gave the others least cause to shake their heads and mutter, “There he goes again.” Next fall, the three remnants of our original quadrant are hoping to reconvene for another reunion which Bob will certainly attend in spirit and where I expect our most constant observation is going to be, “Bob would’ve had something to say about that.”   

Bob had no illusions about the perfectibility of mankind. He knew what ornery, self-sabotaging goofballs we all can be and was capable of breathtaking frankness in appraising himself and others. But he rarely wielded such insights in a thoughtless or unforgiving way. Bob perceived the human tragedy, all right. But no matter how bleak a situation might seem, Bob couldn’t help finding those redeeming strands of comedy and beauty that ripple their way through everything whether it’s convenient to acknowledge them at any particular moment or not. When we were kids, this complexity of vision made it dangerous to sit beside Bob on occasions that called for heightened levels of solemnity. In one of my all-time favourite discussions about ten years ago, Bob argued that if you had to designate a hero in James Joyce’s melancholy masterpiece, The Dead (or John Huston’s remarkably faithful film adaptation of the same) . . . if there was a single character in that tale who most consistently dedicated himself to the alleviation of other people’s suffering . . . then that mantle would best be conferred upon the sloping shoulders of the heartbreakingly funny drunkard, Freddy Malins, who strives so desperately not to disappoint others and yet perpetually, unerringly does.

When we were all a lot younger, Bob’s non-assertiveness could sometimes make him seem a little opaque, a little lacking in commitment. I know it stung him when Ted once captioned a blurry photo of him: “Bob typically out of focus.” But what I don’t think Ted or I appreciated at the time, was that Bob’s comparative lack of preoccupation with his own brilliant and marvelous self, meant that he was present to other people in a way that we were not and couldn’t hope to be. Among the many memories that have been tumbling around my brain these past few months, is an autumn evening twenty-two years ago when our dad was too sick to make it out to his best friend’s funeral, and Bob and I were dispatched to represent him at the visitation. I nodded and discreetly expressed my regrets to these now-ancient figures who’d been hovering on the borders of our lives forever. But it was Bob who actually and literally ‘paid his respects’ to these old family friends – these ‘everyday Mernies’ as the brothers dubbed normies in the lingo they developed as kids – and he did so with an ease of rapport that a more willfully complicated lout like me couldn’t muster. Particularly over the last decade when so many people have been corralled into postures of brittle ideological belligerence, I have come to regard Bob’s capacity to live and let live – never withholding his respect because someone might not agree with his every sentiment or opinion - as perhaps his greatest quality and a serious blessing to all who loved him.

A couple weeks after Bob died, I teared up watching an old Rick Beato video in which he recalled his brother’s relentless campaign when they were kids to make him see how much was going on in Gordon Lightfoot’s song arrangements.  “How could you miss that? You’re not paying attention. Now bloody well listen.” That video reminded me how exuberantly overbearing young brothers get to be with one another . . . about music and everything else . . . with absolutely no harm done. At that age, you just don’t need all that much personal space. And unless somebody behaves like a complete prick and manages to kill off the relationship for good - which I have seen happen in some very sad cases - all that full-access tussling and persuading nets you an invaluable no-nonsense ally who cannot be brushed aside and retains to the end a proprietorial stake in your attention and care. How many of my most grateful memories of Bob are about those times when he cared enough to set me right.
 
Bob had a genius for hauling me down off my high horse if that was required . . . or pulling me back up onto my feet when I was a bit of a mess . . . and he always reminded me  - more often by example than words - that the view’s a lot better and the air’s a lot cleaner if you can try to get out of your head from time to time and see what else is going on in the world; particularly the natural world where things aren’t so routinely fucked up by hypocrisy and envy and pride. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I’ve been tweaking and reworking this essay for so long is because of the precarious pleasure which the writing affords me of continuing to commune with some semblance of my now-departed brother. If there’s been any consolation in this tear-drenched season as I’ve grudgingly come to accept that I will never again be with Bob in any of our customary ways, it has been my dawning recognition that so long as he continues to reside in my memory and imagination, I do not have to lose him altogether.

Let me set down here as a sort of introduction and overview, the obituary that I helped my sister-in-law and niece compose:
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GOODDEN Robert Morgan (Bob)
Following a seven-month battle with esophageal cancer which he waged with his own stoic courage and the compassionate oversight of Victoria Hospital’s ‘Team Bob’ and palliative care unit, Bob died at home on May 29th in his 76th year with Laura Florence, his partner of 43 years (and wife of two days) and daughter, Jessie Florence, by his side. A Londoner all his life, through his twenties Bob frequently worked with his friends Jim McKillop and Keith Bendall on house painting crews; sometimes travelling out to Alberta and the Northwest Territories on contract jobs. On the side he steadily pursued his passion for gardening and landscaping; formally studying agriculture in Guelph and eventually landing his dream job as groundskeeper at Mount Pleasant Cemetery where he became indispensable and won wide recognition as an authority on the forests of the Carolinian region of which London is the northernmost point. By the age of 30, Bob bought his home on Mount Pleasant Ave. (his commute to work was not a long one) where he would live for the rest of his life and created a backyard garden that was an oasis of beauty, variety and ingenious design. There was nothing Bob couldn’t make grow. 

Born on December 20th, 1948, Bob was the third of Jack and Verna Goodden’s four sons. In addition to Laura and Jessie and her partner, Kane Hill, Bob’s passing is mourned by his three brothers and their wives – Dave and Elizabeth (Australia), Ted and Cornelia Hoogland (British Columbia) and Herman and Kirtley Jarvis (just around the corner in London West). Bob is also terribly missed by six nieces and nephews - Kate, Emily, Oberon, Hugh, Sky and Bonnie - five of whom grew up within blocks of Bob, Laura and Jessie’s house and remember with special fondness the backyard Labour Day barbecues that Bob and Laura hosted each year; grand multigenerational reunions with croquet in the afternoons (with lots of cheating) and conversation that burbled away late into the night. Of the many friends Bob leaves behind, special mention must be made of Dave Dell (who first met Bob in grade two) and Jim McKillop (who’s been through the healthcare mill himself) and supported Bob unstintingly through these final weeks and months. Later this month his family and friends will gather in Bob’s garden to pay him tribute and see him on his way. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Salthaven.

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Esophageal cancer being one of the meanest and swiftest of the big ‘C’s, Bob’s death came only seven months and five days after receiving his diagnosis on October 24th. That date is easy to recall because it happened to be my wife’s seventieth birthday; the grim bulletin casting a sobering pall on that celebration. Then, doubling down on the natal/fatal coincidence, Bob died smack-dab on my seventy-second birthday; the news reaching me about four hours before I was due to make a presentation commemorating the 150th birthday of my main man, G.K. Chesterton. Being in a state of almost-disbelieving shock probably helped me get through that lecture. When we got home from that talk, Kirtley, having discreetly eliminated the word ‘happy’ from the top of my birthday cake, presented me with this year’s big gift; a secretly commissioned portrait of Grace the wonder-mutt (whose passing was commemorated here in February) by London artist Beth Stewart. In terms of disrupting the foundation of the universe as I’ve known it all my life, I am not for one second equating the loss of a brother with a pooch. But I do admit that it was in the unwrapping of that beautiful picture of yet another loved one’s face – “What a lot of death,” I reportedly whispered - that my mourning properly got underway.
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Gender-wise, I suppose our childhood home was a bit unbalanced. But what great lopsided fun it was to grow up in such a headlong herd of unmitigated maleness. We’re told that Verna broke down in tears when Dr. McAlpine confirmed that she was pregnant with Bob who was born only fourteen months after Ted who, in turn, was only seventeen months younger than Dave. (I arrived three and a half years after Bob which gave Mom a chance to catch her breath and meant that I got to bask in her attention in a way that none of my brothers ever could.) With a shudder Mom often recalled a particularly ditzy summer afternoon in 1949 when her family of five was halfway down to Port Stanley before they realized that they’d left Bobby in his pram on the front porch. Never one to succumb to worry if he didn’t have to, Bob was blissfully snoozing away when his keepers frantically doubled back to reclaim him.

Bob, age 10, commandeers boat at Port Stanley

On Connington Street where I was born and lived to the age of five, my brothers all shared a bedroom in the attic; a big half-finished room which I scarcely remember. When Mom’s dad, Russell McQuiggan, lived with us for a spell, he also had a cot up there and he and the brothers would employ the same pot for any late-night calls of nature. There was a distinct - though usually permeable - division between the older trio and me and particularly in our younger years, that gap between our ages felt almost generational. But so long as I didn’t become a nuisance or slow them down, I was able to insinuate myself into some of their activities. Sitting in with them when they created miniature cityscapes in the sandbox (or, if it was raining, on a tabletop indoors) I marveled at the scale and detail of their creation and the wondrous dexterity of their fingers. There was one cottage vacation where they pretty well tuned me out of their games and I got sulky because there weren’t any other brats my age to hang out with. But I don’t think I’m idealizing my infancy when I say that I didn’t feel excluded very often and mostly didn’t mind having that bit of distance and leeway between us. 

Bob achieved two significant distinctions during those Connington years. By the age of eight, he had already landed his first paying job; and a most unusual job it was. Bob was the only person I ever knew who had a doughnut route. Once a week some guy would bring around a huge tray of heavenly-smelling doughnuts to the house which Bob would then peddle up and down the street in packages of six. Our father was a salesman for Canada Packers and tried to pass on a few pointers on how to move product but you couldn’t say that Bob took that advice to heart. Our brother Dave recalled that one of Bob’s most faithful customers told him that she didn’t actually like doughnuts very much but couldn’t resist this sweet-faced kid who looked so happy when he knocked at her door each week with no sense of salesmanship whatsoever; guilelessly pointing out to her once that the three doughnuts in the top row retained a lot more of their glaze than the bottom ones which were kind of crummy.

Bob also became known - indeed, legendary - as the owner/operator of an apparently indestructible head. In his section of a family history which I coerced everybody into helping me write, Bob recalled the afternoon when he set his hair on fire while hanging around a city crew who were cooking up a vat of bubbling tar to apply to the roadway. With his dome smoldering away, Bob was all for running home until a neighbor, Freddie Hayward, forcefully intervened; “slapping the fire out,” Bob wrote. “Otherwise I would have burned up.”

Then in a rhapsodic passage about all the great forts that the brothers used to build, he recalled a rickety backyard structure with an igloo-like entrance that you had to crawl through. Coming out of the fort, Bob couldn’t see that Terry Ellis was standing just off to the side, recklessly swinging an adze around which, sure enough, split open Bob’s just-emerging head. Again, Bob’s first instinct when injured was to run into the house, but Terry, perhaps fearing a charge for attempted murder, insisted: “I wasn’t supposed to tell my Mom.” But Bob didn’t have to tell Mom anything. She was looking out the kitchen window, thinking, “That kid shouldn’t really be swinging that . . .” when she saw the whole thing happen; grabbing onto the counter to keep from fainting.

Bob recalls his recuperation: “I remember getting stitches in the centre of my head at the hairline and before the stitches were removed, Old Man Loughheed was driving his ugly Studebaker down the street and caught a stone under his wheel. The stone flew at me and hit me exactly on the stitches. More blood followed. Another thing I remember quite well is lying on the dining room table and Dad removing all the stitches. Connington St. was tops in my book.”

Through childhood and adolescence those older three launched a lot of enterprises that I certainly knew about; if not quite from the inside. One of their most intriguing projects was a secret language comprising perhaps a hundred terms; taking their lexicological inspirations from in-jokes and misheard words and the Bizarro World stories in Superman comics about deformed clones who got everything ass-backwards. I mentioned ‘everyday Mernie’ earlier; their term for an unexceptional adult. That term was prompted by one of the barbers in our neighbourhood shop; a handsome enough gent with the innately comic name of ‘Mernie Twitchell’. (To this day, of course, the brothers can recite the names of all three of those long-buried barbers.) I’ve been after the brothers for decades to compile an authoritative dictionary of Goodden-speak before it joins Sumerian, Etruscan and Ancient Iberian in the dustbin of lost languages. Do I need to point out to Dave and Ted that this need has now become more urgent than ever? Or to remind Ted that certain obligations naturally ensue when you share a birthday with Dr. Samuel Johnson; the first and greatest of the English lexicographers?

Because of that closeness in their ages, most of my brothers’ friends were common to all three. In contrast to that rather unusual arrangement, my friends never tried visiting with my brothers if I wasn’t home when they dropped by . . . not if they knew what was good for them. In a recent note my childhood chum, Jay Jackson, wrote with dignified restraint: “I have strong memories of your brothers who were bigger and I was always nervous what they were going to do with us."  Jay was one of my friends who got ‘flavour-sealed’; a term which my brothers picked up from advertisements for a variety of grocery products which had been subjected to a patented vacuum-packing process that supposedly preserved freshness. In that dictionary which scholars of the world are crying out for, ‘flavour-sealing’ would be defined as: “v. stuffing a voluntary victim under the basement stairs and piling in sleeping bags, blankets, cushions and pillows until a muffled cry of claustrophobic terror is discerned and one quivering, red-faced brat is released”. 

After we moved from Connington Street and until I carved out my own living space in the basement of Wortley Road at the age of fifteen, Bob and I were usually roommates which brought us into much closer communion with each other. Bob was always an early adopter of new technologies. At his behest we both had Rocket Radio crystal sets and every Sunday night, we’d tuck down in our bunks and listen to Unshackled; a half-hour drama series that was beamed out of Chicago by the Pacific Garden Mission. Each of us with one little earphone plugged into the outer aperture of a hearing canal, we’d be lulled into sleep by these hackneyed tales that we found deliciously spooky - the breaks between scenes punctuated with cornball Wurlitzer organ refrains - about lowlifes and criminals saved from Perdition by the redeeming love of Christ.  

By about 1962 Bob had saved up to buy a top-of-the-line transistor radio and played it constantly; tuning us in to the early broadcasts of London DJ, Dick (‘the Tall One’) Williams at just that invigorating point in pop music history when all the sappy American crooners were being pushed off the charts by the first wave of the British Invasion. Our mutual musical immersion at an impressionable age established a lasting shared interest between us; at least where contemporary music was concerned. And for the rest of our lives, we regularly gave each other records for birthdays and Christmas and always wanted to know what the other one was listening to.

Bob was the brother I got to tag along with most often on excursions into the outside world. One of the more life-changing of those outings for me was in the afternoon of my seventh or eighth Christmas Eve, when Bob took me to a massive comic-swapping session at Dave Dell’s house; an exchange they held each year to alleviate the agony of insomnia on a night when sleep could be notoriously elusive. Until then my usual comic book fare had been kiddy dreck like Dennis the Menace and Donald Duck but that day I bagged five or six Uncle Scrooges which I loved for the comparative complexity of the characters and narratives. With that stupendous haul almost rivaling the wonders to be unwrapped next morning, I fastened onto two principles I’ve lived by ever since: Always have a plenitude of reading material on hand and you’ll be able to accrue a lot more if you get those books secondhand. 

A case could be made that Bob was the handsomest of the Goodden boys. He was certainly our snappiest dresser. He chose his wardrobe with real care and wore clothes beautifully. You’d see him sporting a common plaid work shirt and think to yourself, “So that’s what those things are supposed to look like.” And if the occasion called for it - or perhaps just permitted it - he knew how to work a military jacket or a western shirt with embroidered arrows smiling over top of the pockets. There were only a couple occasions when Bob’s susceptibility to fashion trends led him astray. I thought his frizzy perm circa 1980 was a preposterous and slightly indecent mistake (inspired, I’m afraid, by TV weatherman, Jay Campbell) and thankfully it was a one-off that he never renewed. And about twenty years after that, I quietly sighed when he succumbed to the tattoo craze with an inky smudge on his right wrist depicting some sort of cellular structure that was subtle enough to ignore. With his more extroverted nature and heightened social awareness, Bob was also the first brother to venture out into the dating scene and took to it like the proverbial duck to water; going steady (in a fairly innocent way) by the time he was in grade ten.

I didn’t really notice Bob’s sartorial flair when I was younger. It was our kids who first alerted me to it; particularly son Hugh to whom Bob would occasionally pass on zippy accoutrements like a string tie. Bob turned out to be a wonderfully attentive uncle; generous with his time and attention and inspired in his giving; often ordering up their gifts from obscure mail order catalogues. Ted and I palmed off all of our kids on Bob when Take-Your-Child-to-Work-Day rolled around on the calendar; knowing our kiddies' vocational prospects weren't likely to expand by watching us brood and scratch our arses as we struggled to hatch ideas for stained glass windows or newspaper columns. But exploring the sinister byways and facilities of the boneyard in the company of their funny uncle . . . that was guaranteed to be a spine-shivering hoot. “This is where folks come to get their final tan,” Bob told Hugh as he showed him the crematorium.

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The brothers Goodden, circa 1964. L to R: Dave, Ted, Bob, Herman

It was Bob the budding gardener and groundskeeper who taught me how to shave. Now maybe it’s an analogy that would have occurred to anyone. But I often recall Bob’s distinctly horticultural tip when I’m grimacing into the mirror and scraping away another day’s growth: “You know how to mow the grass, right? It’s the same principle. You don’t want any tufts between the rows so you’ve got to overlap a little.” Over the course of our adult lives, the shaving industry went a little crazy with the development of multi-blade cartridges and pivoting heads and lubricating strips. About a decade ago when packets of replacement cartridges became absurdly expensive, Bob jumped off that particular merry-go-round and went back to the sort of ‘everyday Mernie’ shaving kit that our dad used all his life: a brush for applying lather and a solid metal safety razor where you slip in a fresh blade every month or two. Bob was so impressed with the superiority of that system that he gave me those same, no-nonsense implements for my 65th birthday along with a little drying stand to hang them on. About a week after he died, Laura gave me Bob’s stash of 97 Astra superior platinum double-edge blades; a windfall that is sure to see me off the globe as well.
 
Perhaps the rottenest trick Bob ever pulled on me – and one of the best lessons he ever taught me – was around Easter of 1970 when I somehow landed a gig to sit in on the drums with a pickup band playing at a party for some nurses-in-training. Bob drove me over to a friend’s house to pick up a couple of cymbals and while I was in the house gathering up my gear, Bob sat in the car and heard the first radio report about one of my schoolmates who’d just been killed in a motorcycle accident. Bob knew this guy had been over to our house several times and got along particularly well with our dad who enjoyed shooting pool with him. Driving home Bob said nothing about the accident but found a way to oh-so-casually ask, “What do you think about old so-and-so.” And being an insecure and caustic little shit – seventeen year-olds can be like that - I rattled off a litany of petty complaints; the only one I remember being his lamentable fondness for The Guess Who; a band who always struck me as gormless second-raters.

“Well then,” Bob said at the conclusion of my uncharitable rant; “you probably won’t be too cut up to hear that he just died.” I can’t say that Bob’s trick cured me for all time of small-mindedness. But it did leave a richly deserved mark and maybe I reined in some of the worst of that tendency going forward. Bob to his credit never gloated about it; never mentioned it again. I recalled it to him a few times in the ensuing years with admiration for how well he’d played it; causing him to lower his eyes and grin sardonically.

In my eighteenth summer, I took my first big road trip with Bob and Randy Fisher; traveling out to the East Coast in a dilapidated Morris Minor which we named Blackball X10; not an easy car to get parts for when things broke down every other day. As the resident non-driver, it was my job to read maps and navigate and to fire up our recalcitrant little heap after every stop by pushing it for fifty or so yards until the pistons sputtered into life, then artfully diving into the front seat of the rolling vehicle. One of my favourite nights on that trip we were camping out on a bluff overlooking the Bay of Fundy when a fog of stupefying thickness rolled in. Always a sucker for eclipses and blizzards and unnaturally pronounced natural phenomena, Bob insisted we head out into the billowing murk with flashlights and we marveled at a fog so dense that you could actually project a shadow of your hand onto the strangely constituted air.

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Dave, Bob (wearing a trademark plaid shirt), Ted and Herman at 384 Wortley Rd., 1988

On a night in July of 1977, Bob fished me out of something like depression; or as close to it as I ever got. Kirtley and I were going through the last of our world-shattering breakups. I had hitchhiked out to Vancouver and back over the preceding month, trying to push her out of my head so I could make some sort of fresh start. I no sooner got home than I saw her again – fleetingly – which instantly wiped out whatever distance I’d been able to establish and then she headed out to the west coast for a few weeks herself, leaving me feeling more desolate than ever. We’d actually get married that December but I had no idea then that things would start turning around for the better in about another month. I wasn’t due back at my dishwashing job for another whole week and it was at that low ebb that I suddenly found myself in possession of a great big and utterly empty slab of time. I’d let my parents know I was back in town and that was about it. There was nowhere I had to be or wanted to be so I went nowhere and called no one and devoted what energy and ambition I had to the reorganization of my book and record collections and the fitful composition of gloomy, self-conscious drivel that was destined to go nowhere but my garbage pail.

I was keeping vampire’s hours – retiring at dawn and getting up in the late afternoon - and was drifting into my fourth consecutive day of rattling around my slum apartment with no one but my dog for company. (She at least seemed happy to have me back.) It was early evening when Bob turned up out of the blue and announced that we were going for a drive in the country. He had a set of chairs he’d refinished for the parents of a friend who lived down Watford way and said he wanted some company. So me and Myrtle piled into his pickup truck and off we went. I was so out of it, I found I was actually struggling for the first half hour or so to remaster the art of conversation. It was never Bob’s style to be directly interrogative so sometimes we just drove along in easy silence that would eventually give way to a comment or query that felt incidental enough that I could play along. And in this gentle, cumulative way, Bob sort of massaged me back into the land of the living.

I’ll always remember that moment when I realized what Bob had done for me. Chairs duly delivered, we were on the way back and, dog on my lap with ears a-flapping, I was staring out the passenger window at a gold-streaked horizon as the air, drenched with the scent of cooling hay, buffeted my face. Everything wasn’t all magically better but I did have to admit that it was a rather beautiful world that I lived in and I did seem to have a brother who cared enough to do me the favour of taking me out of myself. Realizing how dangerously unmoored from all human connection I’d become over the last seventy-two hours, I thanked Bob for the change of scenery.

“The folks were getting concerned,” he said. “I told them not to sweat it and reminded them that you are their happiest child.”

“Happier than you?” I asked.

“Yeh,” he chuckled. “I’m a miserable beast.” 

The last time the brothers were all together in Australia, March 2014.

I don’t intend to get into any detailed recounting of my brother’s medical ordeal here. I’m no authority on such matters and am so fed up with the monopolizing dominance that cancer assumed in all of our lives this year that I’m not inclined to give it any more quarter than it has already taken. And where’s the justice – or even the sense - when the only one of the brothers who spent the better part of his working life outdoors is the first one to be taken down by this crappy disease? A doer by nature and an innately kindhearted soul who couldn’t resist any friend’s request for help, Bob’s instinct in his own times of trouble was to ride out any ordeals on his own; hoping not to become a cause of concern or dread for anybody. He certainly hated talking about his medical travails; small wonder when you consider the cheerless round of tube feeding and treatments and surgeries that his life was reduced to in those final months. In precious moments when he wasn’t being prodded and monitored by medics – and if he felt up to seeing visitors at all – he wanted to set this all-consuming illness aside for a few minutes and not have to contend with the disappointment of loved ones who - even if they didn’t insist on talking about his illness – couldn’t disguise their dismay that his prospects didn’t seem to be improving.

I longed to draw closer in Bob’s time of peril but I could feel what it cost his dwindling energy whenever I visited and hated that, try as I might, I was apparently unable to suppress my anxiety at the dreadful process that was underway. Maybe it’s a guy thing, or a brother thing or a particularly Goodden sort of thing. But I completely understood his reticence and accepted that I would only see him in person when he felt up to making an appearance at larger family gatherings and would otherwise communicate via email when he would send along his occasional updates to our fraternal chain letter. Following chemo and radiation treatments, things started looking up for a few weeks in March when Bob was able to put away the feeding tubes and travelled with Laura to Florida to visit Blue Jays training camp. But all those improvements were wiped away with his major surgery at the end of that month. By early May his cancer was deemed to be stage four and had spread to his liver, lungs and brain. There were treatments that might – or might not - ameliorate the worst of his symptoms for a while but there was no longer any hope for a cure. “There is no timeline,” Bob wrote to our chain letter on May 11th, “But we feel there is time.” 

Ten days before the end in the late afternoon, I lucked into a more spontaneous visit when I was helping our daughter unload some groceries at her apartment over top of Bob and Laura’s and was invited to sit with Bob in his garden for what would turn out to be our last hour and a half together. As I took my place beside him – the first time I’d set eyes on him in nearly two months - he scarcely seemed to occupy his clothes. I would estimate that his body weight was down by a third. He didn’t get up to greet me or even shift in his chair as he was still hooked up to an oxygen tank from a bout of pneumonia that was slow to depart and had further sapped his constitution. It was a strain for him to speak more than a cluster of words at a time and these were emitted in a higher than usual register because one of his surgeons had accidentally nicked a vocal cord. The over-all impression that he was collapsing in on himself was heart-rending to behold.

Bob wasn’t despairing. And he wasn’t angry. Most of all he seemed exhausted. He could no longer sustain that spirited fight against highly-stacked odds which he’d waged through the first six months of his ordeal. For a few minutes here and there we touched on subjects other than his illness. About six weeks earlier, Bob had expressed his intention to make it out for some part of my birthday celebration. We knew that wasn’t going to happen now. He asked if my upcoming talk on Chesterton was going to be substantially different than the lecture I’d delivered at St. Peter’s Seminary in 2019, and I recalled how touched I was when he turned out on that wildly blizzardy evening five Februarys ago to hear an address that wasn’t exactly up his alley.  But these side discussions couldn’t hold us for long and we’d slide back into the deflation of the present moment. With a whole new note of fatalism that I had no standing to challenge, Bob spoke of an overriding fatigue that could never be assuaged; his inability to attend to anything he read or watched or listened to; how long it had been since he’d known the respite of a good night’s sleep or the satisfaction of a well-prepared meal.

Even though I’d been kept up to date with all the bulletins about his deteriorating situation - and now saw first-hand how ruinously depleted he was - I didn’t fully or consciously grasp that with this gift of sudden access, Bob was tacitly letting me know that he was just about done; that he knew he wouldn’t be bouncing back from this. All I can say in defense of my thickness is that I was new to this tragic business of losing a brother. Unlike taking leave of our parents who’d both made it to a good age, there was no compensating sense of inevitability here; no larger understanding that this was the way things were supposed to be.

But in our very last minutes together, we did go a couple of places we’d never gone before. Before getting up to go, I placed my hand on his knee (Goodden boys don’t do that) and (equally verboten) assured him of my prayers which Bob acknowledged with a gentle smile and a nod of his head. Again evincing his likeness with our father, Bob had no animosity to religion and would attend occasional church services, particularly at Christmas and Easter, but he didn’t like talking about it. And I will always cherish the fact that the final words Bob spoke to me in this world were the same three words that constituted our father’s customary parting salutation - “Bye for now” – with their consoling implication that no farewell is final. However resistant I was to fully grasping the fatal nettle while in Bob’s presence, by the time I reached the end of his laneway and turned for home, I was in tears. On some deeper level I knew what was up and so did the natural world. About an hour later as we sat down to late supper in the back garden, one of the four lowermost branches that ring the trunk of our Norway maple cracked and fell away.

Aside from Laura and Jessie, the person who was best able to overcome Bob’s reserve was his close friend of sixty-some years, Jim McKillop. Having spent a lot of time these past couple decades maneuvering through the healthcare system with chronic back problems, Jim had a good sense of what Bob was up against and was able to provide counsel and strategies without the need for a lot of explanation. As Bob endured the shrinking prospects of his final weeks and months, conversation with Jim wasn’t so daunting, so loaded, as it would have been with me or our brothers on the other side of the country and the globe. The night of Bob’s death, partaking of whiskey for the first time in eight years, Jim called around to all three brothers; passing along Bob’s final messages to each of us and doing his best to answer all of our questions. Without resenting Jim in any way, I envied his account of a moment towards the very end when he was able to sit with Bob in silence, holding his newly bony hand as they cried. Jim’s telephonic marathon that night was a service of heroic mercy. It was well past midnight by the time I hung up the phone; feeling like a wrung-out dishrag but so grateful that Jim had spoken with each one of us before any of those precious details started to evaporate.

Bob at the Spring Festival in the Croxton Common circa 1973

During our last visit in his garden on that Sunday afternoon, Bob and I got talking about the spectacular solar eclipse from the month before; particularly enthusing about the way in which the gradual occluding of the sun’s light not-so-subtly deranged the shadows of overhanging foliage on lawns and sidewalks. This reminded me of one of my very favourite memories of Bob from at least thirty summers ago and I shared it with him before saying our last goodbye. We had headed out late at night with our dogs to an elevated section of riverbank along the west fork of the Thames to watch a total lunar eclipse. At the event’s climactic moment, Bob was standing about twenty feet in front of me and just as the last slender arc of reflected lunar light was overtaken by the dark, I swear I saw him lean out to the side on tiptoes as if stretching to see around the disc of blanketing shadow that our planet was casting on the moon. (Yes, we’d both had a few beverages.) It was funny, all right – and in a truly lunatic way - but even that night I was struck by something perfect in his goofy little gesture. Bob has always been this almost contemporary elder who not only knows the rich particulars of my beginning but has also seen around a lot of the corners that I’m coming up to and would pass along tips to help me navigate what lies in store. As of my seventy-second birthday, I feel as if I looked up from some momentary distraction to find that Bob has slipped around the rim of that dark moon for good; leaving me here to construe by other means whatever further messages he may yet send my way.
                                                                      *
Two Aprils ago, I impulsively sent out a rather unusual sort of note to our fraternal chain-mail:

Dear Bros –
I thought you might enjoy a short dream I had this afternoon that left me feeling quite marvellous when I was woken up for supper:

It’s dusk on a rainy night and I’m walking with Bob and Ted in downtown Toronto. We’re in about our fifties, I’d say, and while I want to nip into a magazine shop to see if they have some back issues of The Oldie, I know I’ll have to check back for that later as we’re expected elsewhere and are running a little late. Further down the block, we make our way down some stairs that lead from the sidewalk to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant where there’s going to be some kind of small-scale soiree.

When we enter the main dining area, intimately lit and not terribly large - sort of like the old London Café on Dundas Street - I’m delighted to find our parents are already here, sitting at a table and talking with each other; looking well and happy and with brains that are both intact. I look around to see if Dave is here, wondering if he’ll be able to make it. I’m not really thinking of Australia but it’s somehow understood that he has a lot further to come. And then Dave comes in through the door, dressed in a trench coat and a businessman’s fedora. “Good evening, doctors,” he says rather grandly to us all, shaking the rain off this outerwear as he hangs it all up on a peg on the wall.

Verna laughs good-heartedly and asks, “What does he mean; calling us all doctors?”

And I tell her, “I believe he has just designated us as doctors of life.”   
             
Love, H

Within a few short minutes, Bob was the first to zap back a response; as somehow I knew he would be. “All together and intact,” he wrote. “Marvellous.”